Culture as Industry in Kazuo Ishiguro’s An Artist of the Floating World (1986)

Kazuo Ishiguro’s works generally revolve around the function and meaning of art for individuals in society, and he emphasizes the subjectivity and volatility of fragmented individual memory as a counterpart to collective memory as in the case of Masuji Ono in An Artist of the Floating World (1986). The story is narrated by Ishiguro’s unreliable and resentful narrator Masuji Ono, whom the reader learns was once in the service of the Japanese imperial government with his propagandistic paintings and teachings during the Imperial period. In this essay, I will argue that Ishiguro attempts to show us the deception of an entire nation in which the traumatized collective memory of the post-war period collides with the individual and subjective memory of the self-deceiving Masuji Ono through specific examples from the text. In order to show the fragmented and disturbed public memory, the changes in Japanese society and culture depicted in Ishiguro’s novel are examined and observed using examples from Ono’s grandson Ichiro’s cinematic experiences, which show us the Americanization process in occupied Japan in light of Adorno’s theory of the "culture industry."