An Artist of the Floating World

by Kazuo Ishiguro

‘But there’s no need to blame ourselves unduly,’ he said. ‘We at least acted on what we believed and did our utmost. It’s just that in the end we turned out to be ordinary men. Ordinary men with no special gifts of insight. It was simply our misfortune to have been ordinary men during such times.’

For their kind do not know what it is to risk everything in the endeavour to rise above the mediocre.