I am terrible at keeping journals. I always buy journals and notebooks because I love the way they look and I love flipping through the blank pages, imagining all the amazing adventures I’m going to fill them with. I also buy pens like crazy: standard black and blue as well as funky colors and ones with glitter because I imagine that the amazing adventures I’m going to write down would look so much better in sparkly forest green or neon orange. But then the writing doesn’t happen. I can go weeks or months without picking up a journal. I used to imagine myself as a Harriet the Spy type girl, taking notes on my friends and neighbors the way Harriet did in her little composition book. My friends and neighbors were not nearly as interesting, though, and I blame them for my lack of journaling skills. But all of a sudden, a month and a halfafter my last entry, I’ll get inspired to write again. I’ll pick up my journal and a funky pen and start writing. Of course, I have to fill my diary in on what’s been happening since we last spoke, so I start writing down stories that happened  a little too long ago for me to remember them clearly. I try to record conversations, but I don’t remember exactly what was said. I paraphrase experiences, sometimes recording the events of one week in a few short lines. So how reliable is my journal? How much can we rely on memory and nostalgia to tell a true tale?

            In Kazuo Ishiguro’s An Artist of the Floating World , we are presented with a tale told completely from memory. Masuji Ono is an older man looking back on his life as an artist and as a father and grandfather. The story takes place right after the bombings of Japan in WWII, and the country is still trying to get back to a state of normalcy. Ono is dealing with a marriage arrangement between his youngest daughter, Noriko, and the Saito family, but we never really hear what’s going on in real time. Even if he’s just looking back a couple of days, he’s always reminiscing in the novel. Like all people (well, those of us who don’t have a photographic memory), Ono doesn’t always remember things perfectly clearly. He frequently says things like “He might have said something like that,” or “I might not have worded it exactly that way,but that was basically what I said,” things that make us think he may not be the most reliable voice to hear these stories from. It could all be sheer memory loss, that so much time has passed that exact encounters and events are not as clear in retrospect anymore. This would make sense; some of the memories Ono recalls are from ten to twenty years old. However, there is also the feeling in the novel that as Ono remembers these past events of his life he only finally understands his actions and the effects they have had on others.

            Nostalgia can be a powerful thing. We can look back fondly on memories that make us remember better times or decide to make a change to once again live in that joy. I myself get very nostalgic for the summer camp where I played and worked for seven years. I remember the people that I loved and the fun that I had and I wish all of a sudden that I could go back there and pick up where I left off. But there’s always some memory that sneaks back in when I’m in the middle of my happy reminiscing which reminds me why I ended up leaving: that one co worker who made my life hell, the desperately hot mid-day trudge up the hill from the archery range, etc. In the novel, it appears that Ono is rethinking his fond memories as well. Now that the war has happened, he has lost his son, and Japan has begun to operate in a new way, Ono begins to rethinkhis past actions and perhaps feel some remorse. We see an example of this during the miai with Ono, Noriko and the Saito family. The younger Saito son seems to have a bad opinion of Ono from the beginning, and it comes to a head when they begin talking about Ono’s former student, Kuroda. He explains that he believes any opinion held by Kuroda regarding him would not be of the high variety. Due to the fact, he tells the reader, that he may having been drinking a little more and a little quicker than he noticed, he ends up telling the Saito’s:

“As far as I am concerned, I freely admit I made many mistakes. I accept that much of what I did was ultimately harmful to our nation, that mine was part of an influence that resulted in untold suffering for our people. I admit this. You see, Dr. Saito, I admit this quite readily.” (p. 123)

This is the first instance in the novel where Ono has ever acknowledged that he made mistakes and caused people harm. It seems significant that he’s a tad drunk, which he mentions several times when recalling the incident. In my opinion, the alcohol probably loosened him up a bit, but I don’t believe it conjured up these feelings. I think he had been repressing them so much that with the combination of the pressure of the miai and the alcohol, he finally let himself feel the guilt and express it out loud.

            We find out later in the story that the art Ono used to make was propaganda art for the war effort. The tension people feel when they are around him comes from the fact that his encouragement to join the war effort led to the deaths of many men and women in Japan, and until this conversation with the Saito’s, we don’t fully understand the weight that Ono has been carrying on his shoulders. In a later conversation with Ono’s daughter, Setsuko, about letting his eight year old grandson try a sip of sake. Setsuko is clearly uncomfortable with the situation, and when Ono reminds her that he let his son, Kenji, try sake at the same age, she makes a slight comment regarding his parenting skills, because Kenji died in the war (p. 157). This comment suggests that perhaps Setsuko blames her father, and his art, for the death of his own son. Whenhe admits his guilt to the Saito’s, it is hard not to read the guilt over Kenji’s death into his sadness.

            Memory is a funny thing. It can bring past events to our minds with such accuracy that we feel as if we are reliving the event. However, it can also get a little hazy and can be harder to rely on. Ono’s mind seems pretty clear, but he also seems unreliable and forgetful at times which makes us question how dependable his stories are. It also becomes clear as the story progresses that all the nostalgia is making Ono see things in a new light. Hindsight is 20/20 after all, and now Ono is starting to understand the guilt that everyone else seems to expect him to feel. Ono uses his memory to rethink his life and his accomplishments, and nostalgia proves to not always be the warm fuzzy feeling we want it to be.

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