Annal:1986 Whitbread Book Award for Novel
From AwardAnnals
Results of the Whitbread Book Award in the year 1986. For a ranked list of books, try an honor roll:
An Artist of the Floating World
- 1986 Whitbread-Novel winner
- 1986 Booker shortlist
- Score: 16.36
In the face of the misery he saw in his homeland, the bohemian artist Masuji Ono envisioned a strong and powerful Japan of the future and put his work in the service of the imperialist movement that led Japan into World War II. Now, as the mature Ono struggles through the devastation of that war, memories of his youth and of the “floating world”—the nocturnal realm of leisure, entertainment, and drink—offer him both escape and redemption, even as they punish him for betraying his early promise as an artist. Drifting in disgrace in postwar Japan, indicted by society for its defeat and reviled for his past aesthetics, he relives the personal history that makes him both a hero and a coward.
