An Artist of the Floating World

by Kazuo Ishiguro

‘Father takes a lot of looking after now he’s retired,’

It is perhaps a sign of my advancing years that I have taken to wandering into rooms for no purpose.

For indeed, a man who aspires to rise above the mediocre, to be something more than ordinary, surely deserves admiration, even if in the end he fails and loses a fortune on account of his ambitions.