The Past will Always Be

     How often do we wake up in the middle of the night with haunting thoughts about our past? How often do we spend long rainy evenings regretting the choices we have made in this life?

     We are never in the moment. It would be great if we could just enjoy the present day filled with sunshine and spring air and not think about the past. It would be great if we could shake our past off our shoulders, if we could carve it out like a malignant tumor and never feel its pain again.  But unfortunately our past keeps haunting us wherever we go, keeps occupying our living-rooms and our minds.  It follows us like a homeless dog in search of food and warmth.  It follows me, you, your neighbors and friends, people in poor districts of Boston and mansions in Malibu.  It follows Ono the narrator of Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel “An Artist of the Floating World” who through recollection of his past tries to understand what choices have brought him to the life he leads now and what mistakes have caused the change in people’s attitude towards him. He is caught up between two worlds: past and present, pre-war and post war Japan. He is standing on the “Bridge of Hesitation”, which I am sure has been visited by all of us at some point of our lives, with a desire to throw his past in the river to be washed away, yet he feels uncomforted and troubled which brings the need to look back inside his past in search of answers.

     Ono is a respectful retired artist who has two daughters and lives in a beautiful house that occupies “a commanding position on the hill” (7). At first he seems rather content with his life, yet there is something that bothers him. There is something going on in his life that makes him feel uneasy and worried.  Why did the marriage negotiations for his younger daughter fall through? Did he have something to do with it? Could it be his past that cost his daughter her marriage? Why is his son-in-law Suichi so resentful towards Ono’s generation, why is there such a “hardness, almost a maliciousness to Suichi’s views” (59)? All these questions occupy Ono’s mind making him stir the past and think twice about the choices he has made.  Obviously those choices have influenced his present life, but he is not telling us quite yet what they were. Our past undoubtedly influences our present; the mistakes we made in the past are certainly reflected in the present.  

Many people can relate to Ono and his narrative of life as there is no doubt in my mind that we’ve all stood on the “Bridge of Hesitation” contemplating about our life and trying to figure out if the choices we made in the past were right, if the mistakes we made could have been avoided.  But unfortunately we can’t turn back time and “relive” our life. We just have to learn how to let go of our past problems, move on and start our life with a fresh page every day. But it’s easier said than done. Instead, that homeless dog of our past keeps following us, and no matter how hard we try to get rid of it, it will continue to haunt us. It will always need food and warmth.