A Japanese Mirror

by Ian Buruma

  There are of course one or two successful entertainers who remain single, but they are careful to show themselves suitably repentant. At every public performance they stress with consummate professional skill how much happier they would have been as ordinary married people. Meanwhile their popularity keeps on rising.

  The reaction to scandals, when they become public (the many tabloids make sure that they do), is equally predictable. Obviously Japanese love reading juicy stories as much as anybody. But the punishments meted out to offending talentos are curious. One female talento, after being questioned – not even arrested – about smoking pot with friends in a hotel-room, found all her contracts cancelled, including a lucrative tampon commercial she starred in. This would have been quite conceivable in Hollywood in the 1940s: Robert Mitchum, too, was arrested for smoking pot. But the following scene has an unmistakably Japanese flavour: the talento was made to go through a humiliating public apology on television, something like those self-criticism sessions in China during the Cultural Revolution, telling us how truly sorry she was, and how frightful the effects of pot smoking are. Only after this tearful demonstration of sincerity and good intentions did the wrath of the public-spirited media abate and she was let back into the tampon advertisements and the sing-along shows.

  Sagara Naomi, another female singer, was not so lucky. One ill-fated day her lesbian lover told all in a television talk show. Why she did it nobody knows, but as a result Sagara was barred from appearing on television as long as the incident remained in the admittedly fickle public memory. Sagara’s problem was not, I think, due to any innate wickedness of lesbian love. Homosexuality as such was never a sin in Japan. The problem was that she did not keep her friend under control. She let down the façade of propriety, she caused embarrassment, she rocked the social boat, and of course, she happened to be single. Nobody seems to care much about what people do in private, as long as they conform in public. After all, it is perfectly acceptable for a Japanese prime minister to keep several mistresses, as long as he is not a bachelor, in which case he would never have become prime minister in the first place.

  In a way the talentos in Japan fulfil the function of royalty: they are models of propriety as well as entertainers; bubble-gum royals, as it were. The talento world even had its own prince Charles and princess Diana: Yamaguchi Momoe, the girl and Miura Tomokazu, the boy. She, a singer/actress with cute good looks; he, a handsome actor of average, but not more, ability. Both were hugely popular, especially after being cast together in films as the romantic couple.

  They were known in the heady summer of 1980 as the ‘Goruden Combi’ (Golden Combination). They were the most virtuous, most handsome, most polite, most quintessentially Japanese couple of the decade. When they decided, with or without the prompting of their producers, to get married, the mass media – and thus the rest of the nation – went berserk. Not a day went by without some T. V. special, ‘Goruden Combi’ issue or exclusive interview. It was a true royal bubble-gum wedding: she wanted to retire, his career had never really taken off, so why not go for some big money in the end? Reality is beside the point here: what matters is what is proper and lucrative.

  Everybody got into the act: his mother, Momoe’s first schoolteacher, his best friend, her sister. There was even a real ‘mother thing’ sob story about her abandoned mother who sacrificed everything for her children: Momoe had a good cry over this on television at least twice every week. The national broadcasting company, NHK, devoted two evening-long specials to the impending event. Newspapers and magazines outdid each other with long studies about her skills as a housewife and his favourite dishes. Momoe herself wrote a book, published in great haste, about the proper role of women in Japanese society. I stopped counting the number of ‘sayonara (goodbye) concerts’.

  What was most impressive of all, however, was the decision by Yamaguchi Momoe, a much bigger star than her fiancé, to give up her lucrative career for ever, in order ‘to look after Tomokazu’. She did the right thing. It was the most improving, uplifting, truly proper event of the decade. This was two years ago. His film career is virtually at a standstill, though he still manages to cut a dash in commercials for men’s clothes and cigarettes. The magazines are speculating now about her ‘come backu consato’.

  4

  Demon Woman

  There comes a point in every man’s life when he realizes, sometimes with considerable dismay, that women’s needs and desires go beyond the simply maternal. The fact that women have sexual desires, for instance, is a delight to some, but a source of intense anxiety to others. Both reactions are of course as common in Japan as anywhere else. But for a country internationally known as a paradise of guiltless erotic fun – geisha girls, mixed bathing and so on – anxiety plays a remarkably large part in its popular culture.

  Once again we sense the grip of the matriarch. This is evident, for example, in the work of Terayama Shuji, poet, playwright, photographer and avant garde film-maker. He was obsessed, in his work at least, with his mother. One scene which appears in a number of his works is of a young, pretty boy seduced by a sluttish older woman, the caricature of a whore. This is then followed by some expression of unbridled aggression against the mother: choruses belting out, ‘please die, mother!’ or, in one of his books, photographs of Terayama’s own mother, torn to bits or framed under shattered glass.1 This seems to be symptomatic of most of his work.

  So many modern and traditional artists show a similar preoccupation that one can only assume that it reflects something deeply embedded in Japanese culture. Woman, it appears, is not readily forgiven for her fall from grace. She is worshipped as a maternal goddess, but feared as a demon. When the maternal mask is ripped off, a frightening spirit is revealed.

  This is a common theme in folk beliefs as well as classical literature. A famous play, performed both in the No and the Kabuki theatre, entitled ‘Dojoji’,2 is about one of these demon women, called Kiyohime. She falls in love with a young priest. But since he has taken his vows of celibacy, he tries to escape from her advances. Her pursuit gets more and more desperate until finally she turns into a hissing serpent. The terrified priest then hides under a great bell. But in the climactic scene the serpent coils itself around the bell and destroys it as well as the poor priest with the deadly flames issuing from her fangs.

  Victorian Englishmen also insisted on a dichotomy between the pure woman and the sexual savage, but that had less to do with the dominating mother-figure than with the morality of the period which denied sexuality to ‘respectable’ ladies. This was never the case in Japan. As exemplified by the goddess Izanami, purity and pollution can exist in the same person. This same principle can be seen with the Tantric Indian deities who appear as beautiful women inspiring the life-force in men, or as ogres decorated with garlands of dead corpses.

  The process of pure female turning into demon is described in modern literature too. For examples let us turn once more to Tanizaki Junichiro who was something of an expert on the subject. When he was twenty-five in 1910, he wrote ‘The Tattooer’ (‘Shisei’),3 a short story about a tattoo artist obsessed with the idea of finding the perfect woman as a canvas, as it were, for his art. When he does find such a woman, a young geisha with ‘exquisitely chiselled toes’, he drugs her in his studio and, ‘pouring his soul into the ink, he sinks it into her skin’. When she wakes up, she sees to her horror a great black spider covering her back and ‘with each shuddering breath, the spider’s legs stirred as if they were alive’. Henceforth, the artist tells her, all men will be her victims.

  The foot with its ‘exquisitely chiselled toes, nails like the iridescent shells along the shore at Enoshima, a pearl-like rounded heel, skin so lustrous that it seemed bathed in the limpid waters of a mountain spring’ becomes a weapon to be ‘nourished by men’s blood and to trample on their bodies’

  Mishima Yukio wrote about Tanizaki’s fascination for the demon woman, the metaphysical femme fatale, that when ‘the pure love for t
he mother is confused with sexual desire an immediate metamorphosis takes place. She becomes a typical Tanizaki woman, such as the girl in “The Tattooer”. Her beautiful body houses a dark, cruel and evil element. If we examine this more closely, it is clear that this is not a particular evil inherent in women. Rather it is an evil desired by men; a reflection of masculine lust.’4

  The typical Tanizaki hero worships the feet that trample on him. The more they trample, the more he worships. This erotic game escalates further and further, sometimes resulting in actual death, which no doubt adds to the frisson. This is especially true of his later characters, such as the old professor in ‘The Key’ (‘Kagi’, 1956) or Utsugi Tokunosuke in ‘Diary of a Mad Old Man’ (‘Futen Rojin Nikki’, 1962), both in their seventies and neither of them up to the cruel temptations of their female idols.

  Sex literally is a dance of death. Each time Utsugi’s daughter-in-law Satsuko allows the old man to lick her feet, as a special favour, his blood pressure shoots up to dangerous heights. After almost meeting his end at one of these sessions, he writes in his diary:

  The thought of really dying did frighten me. I tried to calm myself down, telling myself not to get excited. The strange thing is, however, that I never stopped sucking her feet, I couldn’t stop. The more I sought to stop, the harder I sucked, like an idiot. Thinking I was going to die, I still kept on sucking. Fear and excitement and pleasure came in turns.

  The mad old man wants to continue the game even after his death. Instead of the more usual effigy of Kannon, the goddess of mercy, on his grave he plans to have his daughter-in-law’s feet cast in stone to trample on him forever. Thus he shall ‘feel the full weight of her body, and the pain, and the velvety smoothness of her feet’.

  The hero of an earlier story (‘Aguri’, 1922) has similar fantasies about his wicked temptress. He imagines his own death and how his spirit will then meet his lover, showing off her gorgeous legs in silk stockings and garters:

  ‘I’ll hug that old corpse as hard as hard as I can,’ she will say, ‘hug it till his bones crack, and he screams: “Stop! I can’t stand it any more!” If he doesn’t give in, I’ll find a way to seduce him. I’ll love him till his withered skin is torn to shreds, till his last drop of blood is squeezed out, till his dry bones fall apart. Then even a ghost ought to be satisfied.’5

  Georges Bataille has said that eroticism is the joy of life pushed to the point of death.6 There are shades of this in Tanizaki’s work, but his imagery comes closer to the tradition also found in India, China and Tibet of the life-force being drained by demon-like passion: the ultimate union of eros and thanatos. Traditionally, though, it is often the female demon, not the male victim, who is depicted as a skeleton. One thinks, for example, of a print by Kunisada of a samurai making love to a horrible skeleton in a graveyard, under the illusion that it is his wife. In another Kunisada print, entitled ‘Hell of Great Heat’, we see the Hell of a libertine with his grotesquely extended penis being eaten away by evil-looking spirits with vulvas instead of heads.

  The most modern example of man being consumed by female passion is Oshima Nagisa’s film ‘Realm of the Senses’ (‘Ai No Korrida’, 1976). A love affair between a gangster and a prostitute accelerates in an ever-tightening coil of passion culminating in violent death. Sex becomes the lovers’ whole claustrophobic universe and after strangling her lover during a shuddering climax, the girl cuts off his penis as the ultimate gesture of possession. It is a beautiful but frightening film perfectly expressing that anxious–sensuous ambivalence which is so much part of the Japanese psyche.

  Tanizaki was an unusual individual, yet at the same time representative of his culture and times. None the less the typical Tanizaki temptress, or the ‘Eternal Woman’, as he often called her, is far removed from the pure Japanese mother; or, for that matter, from the pure, virginal young girls Kawabata favoured in his novels.

  The Tanizaki Venus is indeed young, though hardly innocent; she is usually rather vulgar, an ex-nightclub dancer or a waitress, and thoroughly modern in her tastes, in a word, ‘Westernized’. But never Western. The hero in ‘Aguri’ dreams of his mistress as ‘a sculpture of the “Woman” under the kimono … He would strip off that shapeless, unbecoming garment, reveal that naked “Woman” for an instant, and then dress her in Western clothes … Like a dream come true.’

  Like most of his countrymen, Tanizaki felt ambivalent about the West and its women. He had a taste for things Occidental, but always from a distance. He lived in a foreign quarter of Yokohama for a time. He even took English lessons and tried to learn dancing.7 But he never actually went to the West. Like many intellectuals he preferred his ideals to be pure and unsullied by too much reality.

  He once wrote in an essay entitled ‘Love and Sex’ (‘Ai to Shikijo’) that Occidental women are best seen at a distance. Western women, according to Tanizaki, are better proportioned than Japanese, but ‘they are disappointing when one gets too close and sees how coarse and hairy their skins are’. He concluded that Western women are to be looked at, admired even, but not to be touched. This sums up rather well, I think, the common attitude of Japanese intellectuals to the West.

  Feelings of superiority and inferiority towards the West are strangely mixed in Japan, especially during Tanizaki’s lifetime, when the economic decline of the Western world was not quite so apparent as it is today. The main protagonist in ‘A Fool’s Love’ (‘Chijin no Ai’), an as yet untranslated masterpiece, explains how he would love to marry a Western woman if only he had the money or the social opportunity. But, he confesses, ‘even if I did have the money, I have no confidence in my appearance; I’m small, I’m dark-skinned, and my teeth stick out in all directions.’ So he settles for a Western-looking Japanese.

  An aesthetic fascination for the West is still evident in modern Japan. Fashion magazines use blondes from Sweden and California to show Japanese-designed clothes; Caucasian dummies stand stiffly in Japanese shop-windows; students decorate their dormitory walls with Playboy magazine pin-ups. On the other hand, like Tanizaki, they seem to favour more traditionally Japanese types, plump and maternal, as girlfriends and wives.

  This aesthetic schizophrenia was particularly strong during the Meiji period, when Tanizaki grew up. Japan wanted to be or at least look like a modern state. And to be modern in those days, in aesthetics as well as politics and economics, was to be Western. Tanizaki’s femmes fatales had to be influenced by the West. The romantic idea of the femme fatale is largely European, and it enjoyed a special vogue in the nineteenth century. The examples of females using their demonic powers over men in Japanese literature are, by and large, just that: demonic – jealous spirits, vengeful ghosts, fox-women and serpents.

  The cruel temptress using only her earthly powers is rarer and the adoration of her almost non-existent. There is no Salome in Japanese mythology and no Dietrich or Mae West in its cinema. Tanizaki hinted at this when he wrote that ‘the greatest influence we received from Western literature was the liberation of love, and indeed even of sexual desire.’8 According to Tanizaki sexual love in pre-modern Japanese literature had never been treated as a serious subject. Hitherto, he thought, it had been mostly play or suicidal sacrifice. Whether he was right about this or not (it is debatable), is not the point. What is interesting is that in his own mind the influence from the West was linked to his masterly analysis of the libido. He was also certainly aware of the romantic trends in nineteenth-century European literature, of which he was quite fond, in which the destructive powers of ‘das ewig Weibliche’ played such an important part.

  But, as we have seen, creating the eternal female, in Tanizaki’s novels, is a Frankenstinian business. One of his most Frankenstinian creations is Naomi, the girl in ‘A Fool’s Love’ (‘Chijin no Ai’, 1924). Naomi starts life as a waitress in a seedy area of Tokyo, ‘the name of which is enough for most readers to guess at her background’. Her creator, Joji, is a thrifty, mousy engineer at an electrical company. The only wom
an in his life, apart from Naomi, is his mother. Joji decides to adopt this fifteen-year-old waitress with a face like Mary Pickford’s, and dreams of turning her into a ‘dashing, modern woman one can take anywhere without feeling ashamed’. He tries to teach her English, they attend dancing classes together and he dresses her in costly Western clothes. But as usual the creator is doomed to be engulfed by the forces he has unleashed. Naomi becomes a pampered goddess, changing foreign lovers as often as new clothes, while her benefactor is reduced to being her grovelling slave, his will utterly shattered, licking the feet that kick him in the face.

  The character of Naomi is said to have been based on Tanizaki’s sister-in-law, with whom he was infatuated for a time, without, it appears, much success. But she is also a caricature of the modern Japanese woman, the so-called moga (modan garu = modern girl), the flapper of the naughty 1920s, dancing the wicked nights away. The succès de scandale of the book was such that the type of behaviour exemplified by Naomi, and widely imitated by others, became known as Naomism.

  Naomism essentially meant a breakdown of traditional restraints. The ‘Woman’ was revealed under the kimono. Raw passion was unleashed. Westernization, especially before the war, was in some ways like the opening of a fascinating can of worms. Hence, the death of the mother in Tanizaki’s work and the birth of the wicked temptress can be read as a metaphor of the loss of the traditional Japanese past. The West, as attractive as it is illusory, is a stain on this mythical, irretrievable past. The flowering of extreme nationalism, resulting in the doomed militarist adventure, came very soon after the golden age of Naomism.

  Naomi was born less than twenty years after a woman much like her: Rosa Frohlich in Heinrich Mann’s novel Professor Unrat, better known as Lola-Lola in Von Sternberg’s film ‘The Blue Angel’. I doubt if Tanizaki was aware of it, but the two women are remarkably alike. Both are beautiful, vulgar temptresses, whose sexual powers drive their pathetic male slaves to the edge of insanity. Both, in their time, signalled a breakdown of their respective old worlds: bourgeois, small-town Germany and traditional Japan.