The UFO Rabbit Hole: Book One

Kazuo Ishiguro examines guilt, truth and ageing through the highly subjective reminiscences of a retired painter in post-war Japan."‘A work of spare elegance: refined, understated, economic." - Sunday TimesIn 1948, Japan is rebuilding her cities after the calamity of World War II, her people putting defeat behind them and looking to the future. Celebrated painter Masuji Ono fills his days attending to his garden, his house repairs, his two grown daughters and his grandson, and his evenings drinking with old associates in quiet lantern-lit bars. His should be a tranquil retirement. But as his memories continually return to the past, a dark shadow begins to creep into his mind."Good writers abound—good novelists are very rare. Kazuo Ishiguro is that rarity. . . . An Artist of the Floating World is the kind [of book] that stretches the reader's awareness, teaching him to read more perceptively." — The New York Times Book ReviewKazuo Ishiguro’s works of fiction have earned him many honours around the world, including the Nobel Prize in Literature. The Remains of the Day and Never Let Me Go were both made into acclaimed films. Ishiguro was awarded a knighthood in 2018 for Services to Literature. He also holds the decorations of Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres from France and the Order of the Rising Sun, Gold and Silver Star from Japan. From the winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature and author of the Booker Prize – winning novel The Remains of the Day In the face of the misery in his homeland, the artist Masuji Ono was unwilling to devote his art solely to the celebration of physical beauty. Instead, he put his work in the service of the imperialist movement that led Japan into World War II. Now, as the mature Ono struggles through the aftermath of that war, his memories of his youth and of the "floating world"—the nocturnal world of pleasure, entertainment, and drink—offer him both escape and redemption, even as they punish him for betraying his early promise. Indicted by society for its defeat and reviled for his past aesthetics, he relives the passage through his personal history that makes him both a hero and a coward but, above all, a human being. From the winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature and author of the Booker Prize winning novel The Remains of the Day #160; In the face of the misery in his homeland, the artist Masuji Ono was unwilling to devote his art solely to the celebration of physical beauty. Instead, he put his work in the service of the imperialist movement that led Japan into World War II. Now, as the mature Ono struggles through the aftermath of that war, his memories of his youth and of the "floating world"the nocturnal world of pleasure, entertainment, and drinkoffer him both escape and redemption, even as they punish him for betraying his early promise. Indicted by society for its defeat and reviled for his past aesthetics, he relives the passage through his personal history that makes him both a hero and a coward but, above all, a human being World War II is over and Japan sets about rebuilding her shattered cities. Masuji Ono, an ageing painter, looks back over his life and assesses a career that coincided with the rise of Japanese militarism This is the story of an artist as an aging man, struggling through the wreckage of Japan's World War II experience. Ishiguro's first novel.