Summary
This section starts with Ono's recollection of his first meeting with Dr. Saito, many years before Noriko met Saito's son. He remembers it vividly, which makes him feel sure that it really happened as he recalls. While repairing some part of his house, Ono sensed that a person stood behind him. He turned around and saw Dr. Saito, who had been reading Ono's name, inscribed into the house's gate. Saito introduced himself, clearly aware of Ono's reputation, and expressed his relief at having a person of Ono's status and sophistication in the neighborhood. He complimented some of Ono's work. Ono, too, knew of Saito and voiced his admiration of the man's reputation. From then on, these two men always greeted each other when they met. Therefore, Ono is doubtful of Setsuko's claim that Dr. Saito had never heard of him until the start of the marriage negotiations. This isn't the only thing Setsuko said in her latest visit that annoyed her father. She was there only briefly and stayed at Noriko's, with Noriko and her new husband Taro Saito, so the only time she really spent with Ono was a walk in Kawabe park. Much of what she said that day irritated him later, though at the time he was perfectly cheerful. It happened a month before the current narration. Ono launches into a description of the park itself, which, he says, holds a special interest for him. The park is full of empty patches of grass. Many years before, Akira Sugimura, the rich man whose house Ono lives in, wanted to build all kinds of ambitious buildings in this park—a Kabuki theater, a European-style concert hall, even a pet cemetery. Sugimura ended up losing much of his money and reputation, so these places never got built. Ono, though, admires Sugimura's ambition and his desire to do something of importance rather than settle for mediocrity. Ono drags himself back from this tangent and describes walking around the park with Setsuko to meet Noriko and Ichiro. Because Noriko and Setsuko had various errands to run, Ono takes Ichiro to lunch at a local department store.
Ichiro has gotten older and more serious. He's determined to order spinach at lunch, since he knows it will make him stronger. Ono sees a resemblance between Ichiro and his parents, but also between Ichiro and Ono's own son, Kenji. He finds some comfort in these family resemblances. He then reflects that people sometimes inherit traits from teachers and mentors. For instance, Ono has some characteristics he inherited from his old teacher Moriyama. Ono hopes that, in spite of his flaws, his old students will retain some resemblance to him as they grow older.
This train of thought prompts Ono to think about his time under Moriyama's tutelage, living in a villa with other young artists. He describes an intimidating-looking view of the villa from a distance, and then vividly conveys the more dilapidated reality of life on the inside. He recalls the way in which Moriyama would invite students to view each new painting he'd finished. The students would passionately debate the piece's meaning and the artist's intention, while Moriyama himself sat quietly in the room. Though Moriyama's silence might seem haughty, Ono assures the reader, anyone who has enjoyed a position of influence will know that silence is sometimes the best course of action. Because Moriyama never settled these debates himself, that job often fell to his favored pupil, Sasaki. Sasaki was considered an authority to such an extent that, if he found anyone's painting to be "disloyal" to Moriyama, the student who had made the painting would usually destroy it right away. The "Tortoise," who had followed Ono to Moriyama's after their job at Master Takeda's, constantly destroyed his work after it was accused of being disloyal. Ono often felt frustrated with the Tortoise's inability to paint according to their teacher's principles. Ono explains those principles. Moriyama used a mixture of Japanese and European techniques, and was primarily interested in portraying the visual effects of lantern-light. While the Tortoise had trouble grasping these techniques, Sasaki grasped them easily. However, Ono points out, the person who has the best understanding of his teacher's work is also the most likely to find reason to critique the teacher. While teachers should feel gratified that they have managed to make their best students think independently, they often feel betrayed and angry instead. Certainly, Ono says, he and the other students treated Sasaki too harshly.
Ono revisits the night that Sasaki left the village. Ono had already gone to bed, but he heard Sasaki walking around, opening the doors to adjacent rooms. Sasaki asked various other students where his own paintings were, but the others refused to tell him, and Sasaki was forced to depart without his paintings. Afterwards, he was called "the traitor" within the walls of the villa. It's not disclosed what exactly he did to make himself so unpopular, but it is clear that his new paintings somehow went against the artistic principles of Moriyama. Often, the students in the villa would playfully insult each other, but the few occasions on which anyone was compared to the traitor led to hurt feelings and genuine discord.
The adherence to Moriyama's values wasn't only present in painting technique, though: the students were expected to live a very specific lifestyle endorsed by Moriyama. This lifestyle revolved around the city's "floating world," its nighttime society of pleasure and partying. This world was always the subject for the students' work. The students often went to beloved spots in the city, and when they stayed back at the villa, Moriyama had a seemingly bottomless supply of artistic friends and acquaintances ready to bring excitement to the artists. On these nights, students and guests alike drank a lot and stayed up late talking and entertaining. On one such night, Ono felt the need for some solitude and walked to a storeroom on the villa grounds. He sat in the cramped, dimly lit room, lost in thought, until his teacher Moriyama happened to walk in. Moriyama sat down with Ono and asked him for his opinion of Gisaburo, the actor who is currently visiting the villa, since he senses that Ono is critical of Gisaburo. Ono carefully replies that he isn't sure why so many entertainers and artists have come to party at the villa lately, or what the benefit of such companions can be. Moriyama first changes the subject, shining a light on some old paintings of his hung up in the storeroom and pointing out flaws in the old work. Then he explains that, while Gisaburo has always been unhappy, he's found genuine, if temporary, solace in partying and revelry. Gisaburo, Moriyama says, can understand the importance of the "floating world." Moriyama says that young men are guilt-ridden about pleasure, which is why his own old paintings about the floating world don't properly convey that world. Now, though, he sees the importance of portraying transitory beauty, and is proud that he's spent his career trying to do so. Ono isn't sure that Moriyama said exactly what he remembers him saying, since it actually sounds like the kind of grandiose thing Ono used to say to his own students. Maybe, he thinks, he got that tendency towards grandiosity from his old teacher Moriyama in the first place.
We return to the department store lunch, where Ichiro is showing off how much spinach he can eat. He reveals that he is pretending to be Popeye Sailorman—another American hero. The conversation turns from spinach to sake. They joke about Aunt Noriko getting drunk on sake. Ono tells Ichiro that he resembles Kenji, back when Kenji was a boy, and that he will make sure that Ichiro gets to try some sake at dinner. Several minutes later, Ichiro asks Ono whether he knows of a man named Yukio Naguchi. Ichiro has questions about Naguchi. It seems that Ono had made a comment previously comparing himself to this man, which had upset Setsuko and caused Setsuko and Noriko to speak about Naguchi in front of Ichiro. Ono tells Ichiro that he was only joking when he made the comparison—Naguchi was the composer of popular patriotic songs, used by Japanese civilians and soldiers during the war. After the war, he killed himself as a gesture of apology. Though Ono tries to convince Ichiro that he made the comparison as a joke, Ichiro becomes quiet and pensive.
That night, Ono and Ichiro head over to Noriko's apartment. It's cramped and Ono doesn't much like it, but Noriko loves the appliances and the Western-style kitchen. Ono tells Noriko and Setsuko, who are making dinner, that he wants to let Ichiro try some sake. They find his suggestion ridiculous and immediately tell him that Ichiro won't be allowed to drink sake. The conversation remains polite but becomes tense. Eventually, Ono mentions that he let Kenji try sake at a young age in spite of his wife's protests, and that Kenji turned out fine. Setsuko then replies that, in light of Kenji's fate, their mother may in fact have been correct on various points of disagreement during his upbringing. Ono is so surprised by this that he later wonders whether he misheard or misinterpreted, since this would have been a cruel thing for Setsuko to say. Ono leaves to talk to Suichi and Taro, and when everyone sits down to dinner, the conversation is enjoyable and harmonious in spite of Ichiro's hinting that he would like to drink from the flask of sake on the table.
Analysis
This section of the novel is studded with moments in which Ono seems to be trying to comfort himself and contextualize his situation by drawing comparisons, thinking up justifications, and coming up with reasons why his losses are less permanent than they seem. He comes up with various possible psychological frameworks for processing the events of his past few years, and explains his reasoning as if he's trying to see what sticks. In terms of the book's structure, there's a clear enough reason for this. The first half of the narrative dealt with Ono's need to justify and downplay his past to others for the sake of his daughter's marriage negotiations. We saw him doing this by visiting old friends and by talking to the Saitos during Noriko's miai. But, as we learn early in this section, Noriko is now successfully married: Ono's methods of presenting his past to others have been successful in that instance. The problem, now, is that the issue at hand has been resolved, but Ono still has to deal with his daughters' resentment, his own conflicted feelings, his lower status in this new Japan, and the losses of his wife and son. In other words, he has other people reasonably convinced that he's harmless, if somewhat irrelevant, but now he faces the much harder process of trying to convince himself that he's worthy. It isn't totally clear what the stakes are—what does he want to be worthy of?—but the discussion of Yukio Noguchi makes us at least consider that Ono might be suicidal.
The reader's role also changes in this section. Because there's a second-person addressee in Ono's narration, and because Ono treats that person as a distinct being by occasionally referencing the "you"'s experiences and knowledge, we as readers have to constantly renegotiate our own position in relation to Ono. Are we witnessing a one-sided conversation with another, unnamed character? Or are we meant to identify ourselves with the "you"? In any case, to the extent that we do identify with the person being addressed, our role shifts in this section. While before, Ono was concerned with the perceptions of the outside world, and we assumed the position of a friend or acquaintance evaluating him, we now become more like a trusted confidant. In some ways, in fact, the lines between Ono and his addressee blur in this section, so that we feel less like another person being spoken to and more like a part of his own mind. One trick that Ishiguro uses, which forces us to reevaluate our relationship to the narrator, is reintroducing a few familiar people and concepts. For example, at the beginning of the section, Ono mentions "my elder daughter, Setsuko." Soon after, he describes Akira Sugimura, reintroducing the idea that he was once "one of the most influential men in the city." In both of these cases, Ono takes familiar characters and describes them as if we've never seen them before. This stops us in our tracks reading, and we wonder whether Ono himself feels the need to consider these people anew, or whether we are being treated as completely new and uninitiated readers.
Sugimura himself is one of the frameworks that Ono uses in order to understand his own situation. He describes Sugimura's ambitions for Kawabe park, which failed when Sugimura suddenly lost his fortune. We saw quite early in the book that the opinion of Sugimura's family matters to Ono, and that he in some ways considers Sugimura and his family to be both the epitome of respectability and the arbiters of it. While Ono explains his hero's sudden loss of money and status, it's hard not to notice parallels between the two men's arcs. Therefore, when Ono begins to explain why he still respects Sugimura, we are primed to understand that he also means to justify continued self-respect. He monologues for a long, uninterrupted paragraph about how the ambitious and dignified failures of Sugimura's life make him more worthy of admiration, in spite of his downfall, than the average person. The parallels to Ono's life are easily spotted here too, since he himself was once highly respected and ambitious. According to this point of view, any amount of ambition is in itself a positive thing, regardless of what it entails or whether it succeeds. This paragraph is full of the kind of grand, abstract statements that Ono makes fun of his past self for using while talking to students. Therefore, we see the reemergence of the old, confident narrator, brought back from his downfall by these reassuring thoughts. The paragraph ends with an apology, when Ono catches himself talking about Sugimura and switches back to the topic at hand. As usual, this belies the fact that the monologue about Sugimura is actually the most urgent thing to Ono at the moment, and it signals to us that the topic of Sugimura's life is actually worth paying attention to.
The next point at which Ono seems to be seeking comfort in his thoughts comes at lunch, when he notices Ichiro's resemblance to other family members. "I confess," he says, "that I take a strange comfort from observing children inherit these resemblances from other members of the family..." While Ono has just mentioned the resemblance between his own grandson and his son, Kenji, he does not acknowledge that this resemblance in particular is a comfort, or that he is hoping to make up somewhat for losing Kenji by seeing him in Ichiro. However, Kenji is mentioned so rarely that we immediately understand him to be the most important element of this paragraph. This is confirmed soon after, when Ono insists that Ichiro be allowed to try sake because Kenji drank it at his age—clearly, Ono wishes for Ichiro to be like his son. This perspective, that people retain traits from those they are related to or those they admire, allows Ono to find comfort in more than one way. Not only does it allow him to feel that Kenji is not entirely lost; it also lets him believe that his old students, including the beloved Kuroda, have internalized some of his traits.
Finally, we see Ono try to rationalize his situation by drawing another parallel, between himself and Yukio Noguchi. This is a particularly dark parallel, since Noguchi committed suicide. However, the point of view in this moment subtly shifts. We do not see the moment in which Ono actually compares himself to Noguchi. We only see the moment in which he talks to his grandson about the comparison. There is almost no information about what Ono is thinking as he talks to Ichiro, so we have no way of telling just how truthful Ono is as he delivers the information. We do know, however, that he is seeking some level of comfort in stories of disgraced Japanese men who committed suicide. Now more than ever, the narrative becomes a story about Ono choosing to stay alive, even when death seems like the easiest way to apologize to those he's harmed.
This section also contains the most vivid portrayals of Ono's past thus far. In a revelation that feels particularly momentous because it comes so late in the novel, we learn the meaning of the title—that the "floating world" is the world of the city's nightlife. In fact, it's basically just the local party scene, but Ishiguro describes it in such delicate and poetic detail that it takes on an otherworldly tinge. Most of Ono's descriptions are prosaic and terse, as if he takes relatively little interest in his surroundings, or as if he's afraid to attend to them too closely. These new descriptions of his life in Moriyama's villa are wholly different. He writes with loving attention about "room after room of torn papering" and "the smell of damp wood and mouldering leaves," using both visual and olfactory imagery to draw us into the scene. Ono evokes the scene in the storeroom, in which he and his teacher talk together, with surreal images that echo the lantern-lit content of Moriyama's paintings. "The lantern above the door, I noticed, was causing the objects around me to throw exaggerated shadows...as though I were sitting in some grotesque miniature cemetery," he recalls, using a rare simile. This sudden outburst of more poetic language clues us in to the fact that this period was one in which Ono felt creatively and personally alive, in a way that is no longer possible for him. We even understand, to an extent, why he feels so attached to his past in spite of the ways in which his world has changed, and in spite of the frighteningly authoritarian atmosphere at Moriyama's. The beautiful prose in these sections tells us that Ono found a great deal of beauty in this part of his past, and by now we know that Ono prizes beauty, even complicated beauty, above all.
