This chapter addresses two works set in post-war Japan: Kazuo Ishiguro’s short story ‘The Summer After the War’ (1983) and novel An Artist of the Floating World (1986). It begins with a survey of various forces (legal, social, and political) which convinced contemporary commentators that moral sense had been left bewildered and judgements rendered ephemeral by the events of the Second World War and early Cold War, and then goes on to trace how this crisis of faith influenced the style and ethical consciousness of Ishiguro’s early fiction. Together ‘The Summer After the War’ and An Artist of the Floating World display a powerful interest in those Japanese citizens who flourished in a society operating with transient and ultimately dangerous values, and whose lives were threatened and emptied of meaning following their nation’s defeat. The chapter contains close readings of both texts and shows how subtle stylistic features contribute to their presentation of individuals endeavouring, through imaginative acts of narration, to attain absolution and stability in the face of changing moral norms and shifting geopolitical alliances.

This chapter discusses the two main counter-frames that challenge the loyalist frame about deserters presented in Chapter 8. The main challenge comes from the deserters themselves, who refused to be labelled as traitors and do not want to be identified as ex-combatants, in addition to fearing being hunted down by both loyalists and FARC dissidents. The secondary challenge arises from the government, which continues to place all ex-combatants into the same category of desmovilizado and whose neglect of the collective economic projects promised in the peace agreement is creating mass abandonment of the protected reincorporation zones – thus dismantling the FARC hierarchy and putting the group’s stated revolution project into further jeopardy.