The article is an attempt to examine aspects related to memory and identity, and its thematic centrality in Kazuo Ishiguro's An Artist Of The FloatingW orld (1986) with special references to the manner in which memory initiates the construction of identity. Kazuo Ishiguro concerns himself with memories and their problematic function in the process of forming one's identity. His narratives centre upon memories and their potential to digress and distort, to forget and to silence the past and above all to haunt the present. The protagonists of his fiction seek to overcome loss by making sense of the past through acts of remembrances. In An Artist of the Floating World, the protagonist, Ono feared that his involvement in the Nationalist movement might hamper the marriage negotiation of his daughter. In order to justify to the readers that his actions were done with the heart of innocence, Ono reflects upon his past with the aid of his fragile memory. In the emptiness of his waning life, he desperately sought relief from the desolation that he faced, and therefore he returns to his past (working to extract from it proof of his own significance) and hence to deny the unendurable emptiness and powerlessness of his life