What is Nostalgia?

            According to www.merriam-webster.com nostalgia means, a wistful or excessively sentimental yearning for return to or of some past period or irrecoverable condition.  The part of this definition that stands out the most to me is “irrecoverable condition.”  This is exactly what Masuji Ono is doing in the novel An Artist of the Floating World by Kazuo Ishiguro. 

            In Japan Ono was a well known man.  In his own mind Ono was a hero.  He was an artist that people seemed to notice throughout the years, through his work.  But the reason that I keep saying “was” is because those times are no more.  Now that the war has happened and Japan has changed, Ono is not what he used to be.  No one is what they used to be.  The whole country is going through a change, and that means that the people inside are going to be going through that same change.  The people who once were considered heroes may just be another person now.  Something as big as a loss in a war can cause people to totally drop what they used to have and just be upset about the present time and the future ahead of them, but not for Ono.

            Ono just wants to hold onto what he had in the past, and doesn’t realize that everyone else has moved on.  He wants the past that he had, where he was well known, and was considered a great artist.  This is where I go back to my opening statement; Ono is trying to go back into an irrecoverable condition.  Japan can never go back and win, or stay out of that war.  This will never happen.  So along with losing the war, one must forget the past that they once had and move on to the new future.  Ono has this problem because to him his past is what he is still living. 

            There are times that I wish things would go back to how they used to.  There are times where I have said “why can’t it be how it was in the good ol days?”  Times like when countries would go to war and their leaders were actually out on the battle field, and not just sending out troops and praying that they win.  This is nature that people will remember things from the past, but people have to realize that some of these things will never be the same.  It is good to recognize what positives a person had in the past, but sometimes a person just needs to move on.  It is dangerous to get stuck in the past, and this is the territory that Ono has found himself caught in right now.  Hopefully at some point he can get out of this, because otherwise if he lives the rest of his life thinking about how great it used to be and how bad it sucks now, he will have a terrible life.  Ono needs to look towards the future and try to make it go in a good direction rather than always having his eyes in his rear view mirror.