Ono also recalls an incident from his own childhood when his father told him he would disgrace the family if he became an artist and then burned Ono’s paintings.

The bar, called the Migi-Hidari, became a place where Ono and his students often drank and talked about the role of their art in building a great new future for Japan. As a prominent artist, he had written to the authorities and gotten them to place their support behind a bar. Ono also recounts his role in bringing the pleasure district into existence. There, he and his former pupil Shintaro reminisce with Mrs. Kawakami’s place, the last bar standing in an area that had been a pleasure district with a number of bars and restaurants in the years before the war. Ono intersperses reflections about the past and present into his account of Setsuko’s visit. On the way there, they run into Taro Saito’s father, who tells Ono that he has discovered they have a mutual acquaintance: Mr. The day after that, Ichiro and Ono go to the monster movie. The next day, Setsuko says to her father that it may be wise to take precautions to prevent certain facts about his past from coming into the hands of the Saito family when they investigate the Ono family background.

Setsuko says that she will stay with her father the next day, and Ono and Ichiro can go see the monster movie the following day. Ono decides to take Ichiro to the movie the next day, but his daughter Noriko says she has made plans. Ichiro is fascinated by a poster for a monster movie that he saw at the train station. Ono is annoyed because he feels his daughters believe he knows the real reason why the marriage negotiations broke off and is hiding it from them. Noriko is currently at the start of new marriage talks with a man named Taro Saito, but at nearly twenty-six, she is considered old to be unmarried. The whole family is concerned about the marriage prospects of Ono’s younger daughter Noriko, because, a year before, Noriko had been in marriage talks with a man named Jiro Miyake when his family withdrew from negotiations under mysterious circumstances. Ono recalls the previous month’s visit of his older daughter Setsuko and her son Ichiro who live in a different town.

The narrator is Masuji Ono, a retired artist who lost both his son and wife during the war which also caused serious damage to his beautiful house. The novel begins in an unnamed city in Japan in October 1948. Summary of An Artist Of The Floating World

An artist of floating world