Burning Art

Asking readers to play the role of judge and jury, Kazuo Ishiguro’s An Artist of the Floating World portrays a historical and moral canvas not unlike Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. Set in the same period but in Japan, the novel considers the nature of zealotry (to believe in a cause, to justify for a cause) and our judgment of individual behavior (what if the terrible consequences were unknown).

We reckon with two visions of freedom. On the one hand, freedom as having choices and making choices (feeling free), and on the other, freedom as connected to the essential issues of evil and good, and hence imposing moral obligations to act with restraint for the general good.