Reason not result.

        As a child I was raised without a religious background. From what I can remember I have never been to church with anyone in my family. The only reason I have ever attended a mass was because my friends would always be at church Sundays and I would sit at home alone. So occasionally I would attend mass with my neighbor, but not to learn about Christ or any of his teachings. I went for the company and the free donuts after mass; who can refuse free doughnuts! Without any religious beliefs and a strong math and science background I’ve always believe that people determine their own path in life through their choices and other peoples choices that affect them. As my Multicultural Literature class closes the book on Kazuo Ishiguro’s An Artist of the Floating World we are asked to take a final reflection on the book and its themes. Naturally I chose the topic of Existentialism and how the main characters, Masuji Ono, choices affect his life.

        First I would like to start off by saying that I think Ono made good choices. It is easy in hind sight to see a flaw in a decision without exploring why one had made the decision in the first place. Take for example Ono’s decision to switch from the art of the floating world to nationalist, patriotic propaganda. After WWII Ono’s paintings were considered treacherous. Paintings and other forms of art of the sort were destroyed. Ono’s decision obviously had a bad outcome but it was not a bad decision. Ono defends himself by stating over and over again that “I acted in good faith.”(123). So is it enough to think of Ono’s past decision a good decision just because he had good faith at the time that it was a good decision. I feel that if the reason for the decision was honest and unselfish then yes, acting on good faith does make it a good decision.

        A question you may ask, and one I had after the first few infamous statements of “it was in good faith”, is how do we know Ono’s decision truly was in good faith. It is revealed to us as Ono recalls a day when his Sensei, Matsuda, takes him on a shortcut through a slum of Nagasaki in the Nishizuru district. They walked between houses that “might have been stalls at some marketplace, closed down for the day, but which in fact constituted individual households” (167). Ono was unable to escape the stench and overall despair of the place when he was faced with an image that lodged itself in his mind forever. The image was of three boys torturing an animal because they had nothing better to do. Ono saw potential in these boys. He saw the potential for Japan to be a country free of such despair and poverty. It was this inspiration that led Ono to begin painting his first work of propaganda titled ’Complacency’. It was this that leads me to believe Ono decision was honest and unselfish, truly in good faith.

        A counter to this belief could note how Ono was ignorant of a painters potential to truly relieve his countries poverty through propaganda paintings, making his shift a poor decision. It is clear throughout the novel that Ono holds himself in much higher regards than reality; he no doubt is quite ignorant of many things. However I feel this ignorance does more to attest for Ono’s decisions being good ones. Ono truly believed that he could make a difference in Japan. He truly believed that by openly admitting his past mistakes, he would alleviate all obstacles for his daughter’s marriage. Ono can learn of his ignorance in the future, but he will never look back and think that he was afraid “to risk everything in the endeavour to rise above the mediocre.”(204).