Artist of the Floating Left Bank

This is from a Trial paper from Cranbrook.

“First of all,” he said, “if you can learn a simple trick, Scout, you’ll get along a lot better with all kinds of folks. You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view.” Atticus Finch, To Kill a Mockingbird.

Use this advice as a stimulus for a piece of persuasive, discursive, or imaginative writing that expresses your perspective about a significant concern or idea that you have engaged with in ONE of your prescribed texts from Module A, B, or C.

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Isn’t Masuji Ono a rotter? Not even a big rotter, just a petty, self-serving little man who has mastered the loopholes of his culture enough to build himself up when he wants to and shirk responsibility when he must.

Even if there had been no war, Ono would have been much the same person. We all know one – a humble-braggart, a whisperer and insinuator, someone who carves out a platform for themselves by stepping over the bodies. A teflon character, to whom nothing and no one sticks permanently. His daughters and their generation are ashamed of him and men like him. In general, he reminds us of Hannah Arendt’s observation about the surprising banality of evil.

Kazuo Ishiguro’s Artist of the Floating World provokes a very definite and largely similar reaction in readers while remaining quite opaque about the substantive reasonfor that reaction. What interests men, though, is how Ishiguro gestures to the bigger bad things that Japan did during the war. Ono’s (frankly craptastic-sounding propaganda) art supported colonial depredations, torture and imprisonment, mass rape and murder – even attempted genocide.

It seems simple: colonialism is bad. It’s wrong to take people’s homes, livelihoods, to threaten their lives on the basis of some spurious narrative. Colonizers are rotters and those who support them or do nothing to stop them are almost as bad. Isn’t Ono’s unctuous ‘get-ahead’ mentality, his unpleasant blend of underhandedness, force, and conformity, exactly the kind of mindset that led his nation to do terrible things?

In the best tradition of zen, Ishiguro exploits the negative space, the things not said or made explicit, to load the things that are presented with an ominous tension. One ruined individual is down to Ono, but thousands dead, abused, imprisoned, and invaded are never mentioned so clearly. The novel is made heavy – we are made heavy – with this unspoken litany of wickedness.

And it really was wickedness: the suicides of expiation that the novel mentions, the dead son, the confused and resentful son-in-law, the socially hamstrung daughters – they are the (admittedly unsympathetic, but realistic) evidence of a wickedness to which no-one wants to be attached.

We never read in a vacuum. Every day must choose where we stand on issues that come up. Even if we just trot out the same line that we’ve been fed in school – the Japanese were bastards; the Germans were evil; colonialism is a crime – we own that. What interests me, reading Ishiguro’s novel for the third or fourth time, is the assumption that colonialism is history, that it’s a process now so far in the past that it’s taken for granted we believe it’s a) bad and b) past.

The thing is that none of this is true. We can’t take it for granted that it’s past because it’s not. We can’t take it for granted that it’s bad because it’s happening all the time and we do nothing to stop it. Good people that we know – teachers, parents, friends – do nothing to stop it. We are all, in effect, little Masuji Onos. A brutal colonial venture is going on right now. It’s reported daily on news that few high-schoolers are aware of. It involves the same elements that Ono touted: cultural eradication; territory-grabbing; spurious justifications; general thuggery and the cult of strength that we deplore in the Japanese of Ono’s novel.

The defeat of Japan came about because of a concerted effort by nations like the U.S. and Australia to stop them. Now those countries and we, their citizens, sit idle and do nothing. We read novels about previous colonial ventures and safely agree about the past. Reading Ishiguro’s novel in 2023, as people starve and die in Gaza, as he IDF pump the drinking water out of the besieged territory of 590,000 people fighting for their lives, their homes, their culture, reminds us that colonialism is not dead. To claim that it is puts us in a false, a floating, world.