Kazuo Ishiguro finds his inspiration in Jane Austen
or, An Artist of the Floating World as an example of 'the fallacy of imitative form'
Strictly speaking, it’s not in Jane Austen herself, quite, that Kazuo Ishiguro finds his inspiration but one of her characters, Miss Bates, the talkative old lady in Emma whom Emma is rude to on the picnic on Box Hill. Frank Churchill has challenged the picnickers to say something entertaining, either “one thing very clever” or “two things moderately clever” or “three things very dull indeed”. Then …
“Oh! very well,” exclaimed Miss Bates, “then I need not be uneasy.’ ‘Three things very dull indeed.’ That will just do for me, you know. I shall be sure to say three dull things as soon as ever I open my mouth, shan’t I? — (looking around with the most good-humoured dependence on every body’s assent) — Do you not all think I shall?”
Emma could not resist.
“Ah! ma’am, but there may be a difficulty. Pardon me — but you will be limited as to number — only three at once.”
And it is Miss Bates’s dullness that is the inspiration for the dullness of Masuji Ono, the ageing painter who narrates An Artist of the Floating World.
There are differences of course. That remark of Miss Bates’s that Emma mocks isn’t, actually, all that dull at all. Isn’t its self-deprecation, in fact, quite witty? It is certainly nothing like as dull as everything that Masuji Ono has to say. And then, in portraying Masuji Ono, Kazuo Ishiguro has enlarged Miss Bates with something of the egotism of Mr and Mrs Elton from Emma or, perhaps, Lady Catherine de Bourgh from Pride and Prejudice. For where Miss Bates is talkative and dull but self-effacing, Masuji Ono is talkative, dull and self-important. Another difference is that whereas Miss Bates takes up only a few paragraphs of Emma, the conscientious reader of An Artist of the Floating World is stuck with Masuji Ono from start to finish. It’s true that when Ishiguro has him speak of being “imposed on by a bore” he expects us to appreciate the irony but it is still fallacious to think that, in order to represent boring, you have to be boring. No one does egotistical dullness like Jane Austen but she doesn’t do it by writing as if she were a dull egotist herself.
We don’t learn whether Masuji Ono ever painted anything that ‘breaks the frame’, a picture that offers to extend, that is, beyond the physical boundaries of its frame or the traditional rectangular shape of a painting but, if he had, it would be a nice, fitting touch, for the journalist-praise the publisher surrounds the text of the novel with might well have been written by its narrator:
We are seeing here the emergence of one of the masters of contemporary English writing.
A gentle, moving tragicomedy … a vignette of a moment in cultural history which is as complete, in its own way, as Washington Square.
Ishiguro’s insights, like his deceptively simple prose, are finely balanced.
His writing is clean, unharried and airy; full of inflections and innuendo, it touches the reader as lightly as a breeze.
A work of precision and nuance … one of the most finely finished novels I have read for some time.
Ishiguro’s prose, polished and lucid, captures with real truth the garrulous qualities of an old man’s narrative.
Ishiguro paints a vivid picture, though in subdued and delicate colours, of place and people, mood and atmosphere, in post-war Japan. He is a master of melancholy.
In exquisite English [Ishiguro] creates an entirely Japanese world, subtle, formal and oblique … his standing as a writer is assured.
Elegant, subtle, atmospheric.
[Ishiguro’s] a true phenomenon … who writes in English to produce an almost classical sort of art, its power restrained, fixated on a past that lies outside his own time, actually quite transcendent in its mixture of Japanese and English sensibilities.
An exquisite novel
Pitch perfect … a tour de force of unreliable narration.
A work of spare elegance: refined, understated, economic.
Or, in English, “Lord! But it’s dull.”