Remember, Remember...

Ono, the central character of Kazuo Ishiguro's second novel, an Artist of the Floating World, has a terrible secret which he can keep from no one but himself. As in all of Ishiguro's work, memory and recollection is central to the novel, and as always, memory is not like a movie. Memory is not old celluloid reels stored away in some storeroom of our mind, played back every time we remember an event or conversation with perfect fidelity. Instead, it is a river to which we ever return to draw water. The river appears the same every time, but the water we draw is always different, transformed by the passage of time. For Ono, the river has been diverted, rerouting his memory to avoid that which is a secret only to himself.

Just as a river meanders, so does Ono's recollection, flowing between the past and the present, drifting from his small confrontations with his daughters and grandson into the swirling eddies of the past, where people and times meld into one another. Ono was a famous painter, a prominent figure in the art world, now retired. Through his art, Ono shaped public perception about Japan and its place in the world. His old Sensei was content to capture the subtle beauties of the Floating World, the phrase his Sensei used to refer to the Geishas and pleasure houses of the district. Not Ono, the Floating World was not enough for him. He and his art needed ambition, ambition enough to rework the entire world to his vision. This vision was Japan’s ascendant. He bitterly cut ties with his Sensei, dedicating his life to this vision. Japan could not be just a small, isolated country exploited by the politicians that now ruled it. Japan must be an Empire, with the Emperor firmly at its head. He transformed from a painter of subtle, melancholy beauty to the painter of solid outlines and bold nationalism that goaded and led Japan to war.

Now that he's retired and Japan defeated, Ono's former prominence poisons his present. It leads to the collapse of a marriage proposal for his younger daughter, it destroys his relationship with his protege, and his older daughter and her husband resent that he lives on after causing so much death. He spends much of his time standing of the Bridge of Hesitation, which connects his beautiful, ancient, bombed out, and decaying home with what is now American style office complexes. He remembers the old days, where instead of tall glass buildings, the streets crawled with bars. In one of these former establishments, Ono and his circle had their specific place, always set aside for them. Now it's the only bar left, and Ono is the only customer, his spot always set aside. Ono ruminates on the suicide of a famous composer of the nationalist movement, who killed himself as a way to ask forgiveness for all the deaths he felt responsible for.

But Ono's great secret is that none of this is true. In the devastating climatic scene, just as the creeping dread of Ono's suicide seems certain, Ono's older daughter tells him that he's not important enough to require suicide to atone for his sins. He has not sinned because he has not lived. He was never a prominent artist. He did not shape Japan. He is merely mediocre. It is this centrality of mediocrity which Ono has taken such pains to never remember. He has changed the course of his memory, undercut the river, and changed the narrative of his life to avoid the word. Instead, in his memory, he is an artist of great ambition who tried and failed to change the world. It is more palatable for Ono to be a failure than to be nothing at all.

This realization forces the reader to question all the relational collapses he recalled over the course of his life. If his controversial art did not cause these collapses, what did? Maybe there's no good reason for his failures, maybe he simply isn't the man he thinks he is. More likely, the lie of his own self-importance drives others away, which only serves to justify his own belief in his controversial, yet powerful, art. Ono sees himself reflected in great artists with high ambitions and proportionally catastrophic failures. Yet, Ono's mediocrity seems to question the purpose of all such grand, portentous art. Can paintings or poetry ever really change the world or can it only capture the quiet beauty of the Floating World, ephemeral and removed from the concerns of everyday life. Similarly, Ono considers himself to be like Japan itself. Both fail in their ambitions, but at least their ambitions were lofty. And perhaps that too is a lie Japan tells itself to avoid consideration of the unimaginable. 

To Ishiguro, living in a lie is always more harmful than facing the truth, however painful. Ono in the end, sits where his old bar used to be, now in front of the American office buildings, and sees the young people of Japan living and working. They're happy, maybe not as much as he was in his day, he thinks, but happy nonetheless, suddenly at peace. Ishiguro's heroes are mediocre. They're clones, doomed to die, who don't fight the system that oppresses them but live, suffer, and die under it. They're butlers, who maintain their dignity even when it costs them all the people they could have ever loved. They're artists, who whatever height they reach will never impress their parents. His heroes are mediocre. 

The searing truth that Ishiguro shows us is that we are too. We are like Ono, mediocre and telling ourselves lies to justify our failures. But this mediocrity is not itself a curse, only the lies we tell ourselves to avoid it. In a later Ishiguro book, Never Let Me Go, the heroes die without changing the world, but they live and love deeply while they still live. If memory is a river, it is right that the river should flow, ever changing, ever moving. We will be forgotten as our time comes and goes. It is only when the earth is torn to divert the river, or a dam is built to restrain it is real harm done, when we misremember the past, or cling to the present. When the river flows, it brings life and peace. Our lives are mediocre. Our lives are small concerns, here today and gone the next. Ishiguro prompts us not fight the river, but to embrace our smallness and float where life will take us, and live and love deeply while we can.