3 ideas
Masuji Ono, a retired painter who made nationalist propaganda before the war, fears his past caused the collapse of his younger daughter Noriko's previous engagement. At the formal meeting with the prospective Saito family, he confesses unprompted that his work did harm to the nation. The Saitos seem puzzled and barely register it, and his elder daughter Setsuko later insists no one ever considered his work significant enough to matter.
Ono's narration repeatedly says he cannot recall exact words, and he puts his harshest judgments of himself into other people's mouths. These techniques let him revise the record while appearing honest. Damning episodes surface only in fragments, such as his denunciation of his pupil Kuroda, who was then imprisoned. The unreliability lies less in lying than in controlling emphasis, sequence and attribution, so that the self stays defensible.
Ono broke from his teacher Mori-san, who painted the transient pleasures of the 'floating world', because he believed art should serve urgent social and national causes. In his case, that conviction and the prestige it brought him among his followers made him an eager servant of imperialism rather than a cynical one. The novel then shows the same pattern of master-pupil rupture and punishment recurring between Ono and his own pupils.