An Artist of the Floating World

Kazuo Ishiguro · b. 1954 · England / Japan

Why it matters

An aging Japanese painter circles, without ever quite admitting it, his own career spent making propaganda art for the empire that led his country to ruin. Ishiguro's second novel already has the mature device: a narrator whose evasions are the real story.

At a glance

Gently unreliable narration and indirect, formal speech require reading between the lines.