An Artist of the Floating World

by Kazuo Ishiguro

I remember they labelled us ‘the engineers’, comparing the intense and frantic way we worked once an idea had struck with an engine driver shovelling on coal for fear the steam would at any moment run out. We in turn named the slow faction ‘the backwarders’. A ‘backwarder’ was originally a term used at the villa for someone who, in a room crowded with people working at easels, insisted on stepping backwards every few minutes to view his canvas – with the result that he continually collided with colleagues working behind him. It was of course quite unfair to suggest that because an artist liked to take time with a painting – stepping back, as it were, metaphorically – he was any more likely to be guilty of this antisocial habit, but then we enjoyed the very provocativeness of the label. Indeed, I recall a lot of good-humoured bantering concerning ‘engineers’ and ‘backwarders’.