Books like An Artist of the Floating World
In the years after World War II, a once-celebrated Japanese painter tries to arrange his daughter's marriage while slowly facing the propaganda he made for the imperial cause.
Explore books like this on the map12 books for readers of An Artist of the Floating World
A Pale View of Hills
A Japanese woman living in England recalls her life in postwar Nagasaki, and the gaps in her story conceal a truth she cannot bear to face.
The Remains of the Day
An ageing English butler reflects on a lifetime of service, repressed love, and the moral compromises of loyalty to a flawed master.
The Sound of the Mountain
An ageing patriarch in postwar Japan listens to the mountain and contemplates his family's slow dissolution, beauty, and the nearness of death.
The Sense of an Ending
Tony Webster, retired and settled, receives a solicitor's letter about a small bequest from the mother of his university girlfriend, and it forces him to revisit his friendship with Adrian, the brilliant schoolfriend whose story he thought he understood.
Kokoro
A student in Meiji-era Tokyo befriends a withdrawn older man he calls Sensei, whose long final letter reveals the betrayal that hollowed out his life.
The Ebony Tower
A novella and four shorter pieces about concealment and desire: a young English painter's visit to an old master and his two young companions in Brittany, a medieval lay retold, a burglary, a vanished politician and a picnic.
Cat's Eye
A painter in 1980s Toronto revisits her childhood tormentors and discovers that the cruelties of girlhood shaped everything she became.
The Master of Go
Kawabata's novelised reporting on the 1938 retirement match of the old Honinbo master of Go, lost to a younger, modern challenger across six months of play.
Whistler
At the Metropolitan Museum of Art, fifty-three-year-old Daphne Fuller's husband thinks they are being followed, and the man turns out to be Eddie Triplett, her former stepfather, whom she has not seen in almost forty-five years; their reunion takes her back to the year she was nine.
No-No Boy
Ichiro Yamada comes home to Seattle in 1946 after two years in an internment camp and two in prison for refusing to swear loyalty to the United States or serve in its army, and finds himself despised by much of the Japanese American community.
Killing Commendatore
A portrait painter in a rural Japanese valley discovers a hidden painting and a mysterious pit, and both lead him towards a vanished man and the nature of inspiration.
The Setting Sun
After the war, Kazuko and her aristocratic mother lose their Tokyo house and move to a country villa, where they wait for Kazuko's brother, Naoji, to come home from the army with his addictions intact.