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Jun'ichirō Tanizaki (1886-1965) - written also: Jun'ichiro |
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Japanese novelist, poet, and essayist, who dealt with the influence of the West on the old cultural heritage of his native country. After publishing novels written in a fairly orthodox style, Jun'ichirō Tanizaki fused traditional Japanese storytelling and experimental narrative. He emphasized the fabrication as the basis for fiction, stating that in both his reading and his writing he was "uninterested in anything but lies." "I read somewhere the other day that men who are too fond of the ladies when they're young generally turn into antique-collectors when they get old. Tea sets and paintings take the place of sex." (from Some Prefer Nettles, 1928) Jun'ichirō Tanizaki was born in Nihombashi, in the commercial district near Tokyo Bay. His family owned a printing press, founded by Tanizaki's grandfather near the rice merchants' quarter. "Grandfather was very fond of me, his last grandchild; and sometimes in later years I suddenly felt I could hear his voice calling my name – "Jun'ichi, Jun'ichi," as he had during my earliest years, while he was still alive. A much-enlarged photograph of him was always prominently displayed in our house, so I got to know his face well, and could call it to mind and so encounter Grandfather whenever I wished." Aften falling on hard times Tanizaki's family had lost much of its former wealth. Tanizaki worshiped his mother who breast-fed him until he was 6. Despite financial problems, his parents pampered him and took him to countless theatrical performances, which early gave birth to the author's passion for drama and the traditional Japanese arts. Tanizaki's studies at the university of Tokyo ended in 1910
in shortage of money – or according to some sources his nonpayment of
fees was an act of rebellion. At the age of 24 he published one of his
best short stories, 'The Tattooer', which show influence of Edgar Allan Poe, Oscar Wilde and the French
Decadents. Wilde's Portrait of Dorian Gray Tanizaki also
translated. In the story the character of a young woman starts to
change when she has taken a tattoo. When in Wilde's novel the painting
displays the decay of the subject, in Tanizaki's tale the artist's
design is the cause of the woman transformation. The theme of feminine
beauty and moral integrity marked his following stories, among then
'Whirlpool' in which an evil woman poses as a Buddhist saint for an
artist's drawing. --...Standing aside, he studied the enormous female spider tattooed on the girl's back, and as he gazed it, he realized that in this work he had expressed the essence of his whole life. Now that it was completed, the artist was aware of a great emptiness. Following
some other celebrated stories Tanizaki experienced some kind of burn
out roughly from 1914 to 1923. In 1915 he married Ishikawa Chiyo
(1896.1982). His second wife was Nezu Seitaro (1900-1956), whom he
married in 1923. They had one child, Ayuko (1916-1994). The turning point in Tanizaki's life was the great
earthquake in Tokyo region in 1923. His house in the fashionable
residential area was leveled by the disaster. Tanizaki left his wife and
child and lived in the more old fashioned suburbs between Osaka and Kobe.
There
he stopped using Western models and started to take interest in
traditional literature, especially the classical Japanese tale Genji monogatari (The
Tale of
Genji), which was written by Lady Murasaki Shikibu (c. 980-1030).
Tanizaki put it into modern Japanese three times. Moreover, feeling
himself free, Tanizaki entered into unconventional sexual
relationships, if not in real life at least in books. Chijin no Ai
(1924, Naomi, translated into English in 1985), Tanizaki's first novel from this period, with which he emergen from his slump, was serialized in the
mid-20's. In the story a 28-year-old
engineer, Joji, goes through his love affair with a very young girl,
who is totally immersed into Western culture. This masochistic work anticipated Nabokov's Lolita, but it also drew on the Pygmalion
theme. "As Japan grows increasingly cosmopolitan, Japanese and
foreigners are eagerly mingling with one another; all sorts of new
doctrines and philosophies are being introduced; and both men and women
are adopting up-to-date Western fashions. No doubt, the times being
what they are, the sort of marital relationship that we've had, unheard
of until now, will begin to turn up on all sides." (from
Naomi) In Tade kuu mushi (Some Prefer Nettles, 1928-29) Tanizaki continued the theme of the clash between traditional values and modern culture; Tokyo and Osaka were symbols of the conflict. The protagonist, Kaname, considers himself a man of his time, but eventually abandons the modern world. Tanizaki's casual remark on his preference of novels with well-made plots led to a debate with Akutagawa Ryonosuke, who argued that the sole value of a novel does not reside in its plot. Tanizaki responded by saying that "A good novel . . . creates beauty by introducing a great number of events one after another; it has a grandeur like that of a far-extending mountain range." (Modern Japanese Writers and the Nature of Literature by Makoto Ueda, 1976, pp. 71-72) At
the time of writing 'Professor Rado' (1925-28), an erotic
story about an eccentric bachelor professor, Tanizaki's marriage
was ending. Her third wife, Matsuko, become again for the author a
target of worship, as many other women in his life. Matsuko met
Tanizaki when she was twenty-four. He adopted her daughter, Emiko
(1929-2013). Tanizaki's years of immersion in Japanese history produced some of his finest works. The Secret History of the Lord of Musashi (1935) was set in the the 16th-century civil-war period. In the story Lady Kikyo set out to revenge the murder of her father and mutilation of his face. But the culprit is not her won husband, as she thinks, but her lover, the Lord of Mushashi, whose bizarre sexual obsession is behind the whole plot. Tanizaki's admiration for old Osaka is seen in Sasameyuki (The Makioka Sisters, 1943-48), a recreation of Osaka family life in the 1930s. The first chapters of the novel appeared during the World War II, but further publication was stopped by censorship of the military government. Tanizaki continued writing and published the first part at his own expense and delivered the copies to his friends. The second part appeared in 1947 and the third part was first printed in a serialized form in a magazine. Although Tanizaki's used his own wife and her three sisters-in-law as models – and the author himself plays a small part in the middle of the story – it is not a roman à clef. Tanizaki wanted to record the vanishing cultural milieu of Osaka, its dialect, and the daily life of a middle-class family. The story is about four sisters, who are trying to find a suitable husband for Yukiko, the third sister. She is a woman of traditional belief and has rejected several suitors, and remains almost unmarried. Until Yukiko marries, Taeko, the youngest, the most Westernized, must wait for her turn according to the social convention. His nostalgic love for the traditions and remnants of the
past, even rustic and worn-out, Tanizaki expressed in the essay 'In
Praise of Shadows' (1933-34), first published in Keizai ōrai,
a general-interest magazine. Tanizaki juxtaposed Western harsh
clinical light and opaqueness and the ''muddy'' Japanese complexion:
''I would call back at
least for literature this world of shadows we are losing. In the
mansion called literature I would have the eaves deep and the walls
dark, I would push back into the shadows the things that come forward
too clearly, I would strip away the useless decoration.'' Even the
comforts of moders flush toilets do not have appeal to Tanizaki; the
traditional Japanese toilet "is the perfect place to listen to the
chirping of insects or the song of the birds, to view the moon, or to
enjoy any of those poignant moments that mark the change of the
seasons." Tanizaki's characters are often driven by obsessive erotic
desires. His famous post-war novels include Futen rojin nikki (1962,
Diary of
a Mad Old Man), which depicts an aged diarist who is struck down by a
stroke caused by an excess of sexual excitement. He records both his
past desires and his current efforts to bribe his daughter-in-law to
provide sexual favors in return for Western baubles. Feminist critics
have accused Tanizaki of portraying women as toys and labelled him as
an author who cannot write love novels. On the other hand, his
fascination with perversion has been interpreted as questioning the
idea of love. Kagi (1956, The Key) was a story of dying marriage examined through parallel diaries. "If now, for the first time, my diary becomes chiefly concerned with our sexual life, will she be able to resist the temptation? By nature she is furtive, fond of secrets, constantly holding back and pretending ignorance; worst of all, she regards that as feminine modesty. Even though I have several hiding places for the key to the locked drawer where I keep this book, such a woman may well have searched out all of them." The two protagonists start to use their diaries as a means of communication by tacitly agreeing to read each other's diaries while outwardly pretending that they do not. During the course of their diary keeping, the couple reveal their problems of understanding each other and separateness even during the shared activity of sexual union. The Key was adapted into screen by Kon Ichikawa in 1959, and later by Tinto Brass. Tanizaki was one of Japan's first crime writers. In the short story 'The Thief' Tanizaki again studied the theme of fabrications and the truth. The narrator is a young student who is suspected of stealing from his comrades. "It also struck me that if even the most virtuous person has criminal tendencies, maybe I wasn't the only one who imagined the possibility of being a thief." Finally the protagonist admits his guilt but defends himself that he told the truth in a roundabout way. Several of his stories have been made into films, in Japan and in other countries. For The Makioka Sisters he received the Imperial Prize in 1949. His later years Tanizaki lived his mostly in the Kansai, the area around Kyoto-Osaka-Kobe. Mishima Yukio, from the younger generation of writers, was an ardent admirer of Tanizaki; they both were committed aesthetes. Tanizaki died in Yugawara, south of Tokyo, on July 30, 1965. His childhood memoirs appeared serially in a Japanese magazine in 1955-56, and were published in English in 1988. For further reading: Tanizaki Jun'ichiro ron by Noguchi Takehiko (1973); Modern Japanese Writers and the Nature of Literature by Makoto Ueda (1976); The Moon in the Water: Understanding Tanizaki, Kawabata, and Mishima by Gwenn Boardman Petersen (1979); Visions of Desire: Tanizaki's Fictional Worlds by Ken K. Ito (1991); Three Modern Novelists: Soseki, Tanizaki, Kawabata by C. Van Gessel (1993); The Secret Window by Anthony Hood Chambers (1994); Tanizaki Jun'ichiro: Kitsune to mazohizumu by Chiba Shunji (1994); Shadows on the Screen: Tanizaki Jun'ichiro on Cinema and "Oriental" Aesthetics by Thomas LaMarre (2005); Exploring Japanese Literature: Read Mishima, Tanizaki, and Kawabata in the Original by Giles Murray (2007); This Perversion Called Love: Reading Tanizaki, Feminist Theory, and Freud by Margherita Long (2009); Remembering Tanizaki Jun’ichiro and Matsuko: Diary Entries, Interview Notes, and Letters, 1954-1989 by Anthony Chambers (2017); 'Translators' Introduction,' in Longing and Other Stories, translated by Anthony H. Chambers and Paul McCarthy (2022) - Film adaptations: Oyu-sama, dir. by Kenji Mizouchi, 1951; Okuni to Gohei, dir. by Mikio Naruse, 1952, Akuto, dir. by Kaneto Shido, 1965 Selected works:
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