An Artist of the Floating World by Kazuo Ishiguro presents the viewpoint of an elderly artist Masuji Ono in postwar Japan. His wife and son have been killed in the war, and many young people blame their elders for leading the country into disaster. As Ono recalls his life during the peak of the Japanese Empire, in a “floating world” of changing cultural behaviors, shifting societal patterns and troubling questions, he comes to partial understanding of his own actions as a propagandist for an imperialistic regime.