Masuji Ono and Myself

I believe that most people find themselves, at one or more points in their lives, looking back on the past and trying to justify their own actions in order to understand their present situation. This is exactly what the character Masuji Ono does Kazuo Ishiguro’s An Artist of the Floating World.

Ono is a retired artist in post World War II Japan whose somewhat mysterious past is revealed slowly and out of order in uncertainty-ridden memories. As these memories are divulged, the reader is able to see much more clearly into the truth of Ono’s past, while Ono himself also observes his own actions as he remembers them. In a way, he is keeping secrets from himself, glossing over and covering up the more traumatic events of his life with his pride in the role he took as a propaganda artist during the war. Ono is caught floating between his selective memories of the past, and trying to justify the awkward present which has formed on the foundation of his decisions.

Similar to Masuji Ono, I recently found myself very unhappy, and therefore reminiscing on the past few years of my own life, trying to figure out where I went wrong.

In the fall of 2007, I returned from a year of studying abroad in Tokyo, Japan. Ever the pessimist, upon returning to Chico, things were as I had expected them to be. Many friends had graduated, and others had taken breaks or left for whatever reason. Others had grown distant. I temporarily hated myself and wondered why I had made the decision to leave for a year. For that time, I somehow skipped over all of the amazing experiences I was lucky enough to enjoy while abroad, and could only concentrate on the negative result of coming home. It was reverse-culture shock at its finest.

While this was not the same kind of deep moral question that Ono faces in Artist, it was a difficult point in wondering whether my experience overseas was even worth it. Was the decision to leave Chico for a year worth the miserable return? In the end, I saw that I overanalyzed my homecoming and had allowed my worries to become a self-fulfilling prophesies. Of course studying abroad was worth every minute!

Like Ono, I had been somewhat blinded by my own justifications. That is something that, as humans, we cannot help. Yes, we can try our best to analyze the worth of our experiences, but we are faulted in that we often only can see part of our own stories. Despite our flawed nature, it is alright to be this way. Ishiguro uses the story of Masuji Ono to make this comment on the inescapability of being human.