An Artist of the Floating World

Masuji Ono is an aging painter living in Japan after the Second World War. As he arranges a marriage for his younger daughter, he looks back on his career, his teachers and the political paintings he made when his country was moving toward militarism. Others around him now judge those years very differently. The novel, told in Ono's careful and self-justifying voice, is about reputation, responsibility and how a society and an individual come to terms with the past.