by Donald Keene
“The Tattooer” is entirely fictitious, and whether or not the background is historically accurate is irrelevant. What remains in the reader’s mind is the intensity and the decadent atmosphere. Seikichi, the tattooer, is attracted to a girl when he catches a glimpse of her naked foot. We are told: “To his sharp eyes a human foot was as expressive as a face…. This, indeed, was a foot to be nourished by men’s blood, a foot to trample on their bodies.”* Tanizaki’s foot fetishism is often coupled with his ideal of the beautiful but cruel woman. In his last novel, Diary of a Mad Old Man (Fūten rōjin nikki, 1962), he describes his perfect woman: “Above all, it is essential for her to have white, slender legs and delicate feet. Assuming that these and all the other points of beauty are equal, I would be more susceptible to the woman with bad character.”†
The slavish worship of cruel women is a frequent theme in Tanizaki’s writings. In the early story “Children” (Shōnen, 1911), a group of small boys and one girl play at games involving sadomasochism. “Cops and robbers” is given a distinctive twist by the savagery with which the “robber” is punished. The most memorable of the games is the last. Up until this point the girl has always had to play the part of a victim, but this time she makes the boys her slaves. They eagerly trim her toenails, clean the insides of her nose, and even drink her urine.
In his novel Jōtarō (1914) the central character seems to be an alter ego for Tanizaki himself, although the work is in no sense confessional. While Jōtarō was at the university, he had read Krafft-Ebbing and learned that many famous men had been masochists. He was particularly fascinated by accounts of European prostitutes who gratify men by whipping them, demanding that the men worship their boots and indulging in similar varieties of amorous play. Unfortunately, there was almost no chance of finding a Japanese woman who would behave so cruelly. Tanizaki sometimes regretted that he had been born in contemporary Japan; it might have been easier in the Tokugawa era to gratify his “slightly abnormal” tastes.
Tanizaki married in 1915, a year after completing Jōtarō. It did not take long for him to begin behaving atrociously toward his wife, apparently because of her overly close resemblance to the traditional Japanese ideals of a good wife. He wrote that he had married in order to deepen his art, but soon afterward he openly stated that his marriage had been a mistake. In 1919 and 1920 he published several works of fiction whose subject is a man’s murder of his wife. On the other hand, he found himself increasingly attracted to his sister-in-law, Seiko, who had un-Japanese features, un-Japanese gaiety, and un-Japanese waywardness.
The attraction that the West exerted on him is most clearly revealed in the story “The German Spy” (Dokutan, 1915), which describes his first European acquaintance, a shiftless Austrian with whom he studied French conversation. Tanizaki recalls in the story that previously he had been totally uninterested in Western painting and music: “Even while our gentlemen of letters were making a fuss over Gauguin and trumpeting the cause of exoticism, I was of the opinion that any Japanese who was interested in exotic art would do better to direct his attention to China or India.” He goes on:
Two or three years later, however, I reached the point where I could not but shake off such stupid ideas. I discovered that as a modern Japanese, there were fierce artistic desires burning within me that could not be satisfied when I was surrounded by Japanese. Unfortunately for me, I could no longer find anything in present-day Japan, the land of my birth, that answered my craving for beauty. There was neither the overripe civilization of the West nor the intense barbarity of the South Seas. I came to feel utter contempt for my surroundings. At the same time, I thought I would have to observe more deeply, more intimately, the West, whose art was so infinitely greater than our own. I would have to seek from the West objects to satisfy my craving for beauty, and I was suddenly overcome with passionate admiration for the West.
Western painting and music had hitherto left me cold, but now they made me tremble with excitement at every contact. For example, the paintings of the Impressionist school … overwhelmed me by their powerful, intense character, so unlike the manner of expression of Japanese paintings, which are distinguished only by manual dexterity and totally lack content or stimulation. I could hear Western music only on the rare occasions when it was performed by Japanese, or in excerpts on phonograph records, but how directly and how grandly it sang of the sorrows and joys of human life as compared with the faint and somnolent sounds of the samisen, or the curiously perverse, retrogressive, superficial hauta, jōruri, and the like. Japanese vocalists sing in voices trained to produce unnatural falsetto tones, but Western singers sing boldly and with impetuousness, like birds or wild beasts, sending forth their natural voices so ardently they risk bursting their throats. Japanese instrumental music produces a delicate sound like the murmur of a little stream, but Western instrumental music is filled with the grandeur of surging waves and has the intense beauty of the boundless ocean.
Once I had become aware of these truths, I felt an uncontrollable desire to learn everything there was to be known about the countries of Europe that have given birth to these many astonishing works of art and about the various aspects of the daily lives of the superior race of men living there. Everything labeled as coming from the West seemed beautiful and aroused my envy. I could not help looking at the West in the same way that human beings look up to the gods. I felt sad that I had been born in a country where there seemed no possibility that first-rate art could be nurtured. I grieved in particular over my misfortune that having been condemned to the fate of being born in Japan, I had chosen to make my life as an artist rather than as a politician or military man. And I made up my mind that the only way to develop my art fully was to come into ever closer contact with the West, if only by an inch closer than before, or even by totally assimilating myself into the West. In order to satisfy this craving I would go abroad if possible—no, going abroad would not be enough. The best and only way was to move there permanently, resolved to become one with the people of that country and to have my bones buried in its soil.
There could hardly be a more uncompromising admiration for the West than Tanizaki’s in “The German Spy.” Of course, this was a work of fiction, and the sentiments do not necessarily reflect Tanizaki’s beliefs, but the tone carries conviction, and similar sentiments are found in other works. In Naomi (Chijin no ai, 1925), for example, Jōji’s infatuation with Naomi is stimulated by her un-Japanese behavior, her un-Japanese features, and even by her name, which, by coincidence, is also found in the West. Tanizaki’s fascination with his sister-in-law was similar to Jōji’s with Naomi.
In the early 1920s Tanizaki began to be interested in films as an artistic medium. His first scenario, Amateur Club (Amachua kurabu), was filmed in 1920. It was a comedy and the star was none other than Seiko, his sister-in-law, who appeared in the first scene in a bathing suit. He once remarked that her feet were the most beautiful objects in the entire world.
Tanizaki moved to Yokohama in 1921 and led a totally Western-style life. He wore flashy clothes, notably red neckties, and boasted that he never took off his shoes all day long. A European friend of Seiko’s taught him to dance, and dancing soon became a mania with him. He even encouraged his shy wife to dance. He reveled in the exotic atmosphere of the Yokohama Bluff and wrote stories and plays based on his experiences there. Although the newspapers reported that Tanizaki was about to leave for Europe, he postponed the journey until the autumn of 1923. Then his whole life was changed by an event that occurred on September 1, 1923: the Great Earthquake.
Tanizaki was on a bus when the earthquake struck. The bus veered wildly on the road, but he was not in danger. His first reaction was worry about his family. “However,” he related, “at almost the same time joy welled up inside me. I thought, ‘How marvelous! Tokyo will become a decent place now!’” He was sure that in ten years Tokyo would revive, as San Francisco had done after its earthquake in 1906, but this time as a far more imposing city:<
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Orderly thoroughfares; shiny, newly paved streets; a flood of cars; apartment houses rising floor on floor, level on level, in geometric beauty; and, threading through the city elevated lines, subways, streetcars. And the excitement of a great city, a city with all the amusements of Paris or New York, a city where the night life never ends. Then, and then indeed, the citizens of Tokyo will come to adopt a purely European-American style of life, and the young people, men and women alike, will all wear Western clothes. This is the inevitable trend of the times, and whether one likes it or not, this will happen.
Tanizaki was pleased to think that his daughter, now seven, would no longer have to sit on the tatami or constrict her body with an obi or wear heavy wooden clogs. She would grow up healthy and play sports. He saw the emergence of a new species of Japanese woman: “The change will be so great it will be almost as if they belonged to a different race. Their figures, the colors of their skin and their eyes will all become like those of Western people, and the Japanese they speak will have the ring of a European language.”
The essay containing these sentiments was written in 1934, eleven years after making these predictions. He now admitted that his predictions had not come true, blaming this on the fact that Tokyo had not been as extensively damaged by the earthquake as he had supposed. The old habits had also proved unexpectedly tenacious: even though Western food was now more generally available, people still preferred Japanese food, and nine out of ten women still wore kimonos. He no longer hoped that the future would bring a greater degree of Westernization. He confessed also, “Now that Tokyo has at last become Westernized, I have bit by bit come to dislike the West. Instead of pinning my hopes on the future, I think nostalgically of the Tokyo of my childhood.”
The change in Tanizaki is generally ascribed to his move from Yokohama to the Kansai region. Although in 1923 he was at the height of his infatuation with the West, he had begun to be intrigued by the old Japan, much as a foreigner is captivated by a Hiroshige print, and he thought he would enjoy visiting picturesque sites in the Kansai while waiting for Yokohama to be rebuilt. He gravitated naturally to Kobe, where the largest colony of Westerners in the Kansai region lived. But when the other refugees began returning to Tokyo and Yokohama, he stayed on. In 1926 he decided to settle permanently in the Kansai and declared he no longer felt any attachment for Tokyo.
He explained the change in terms of his preference for Kansai food, for the voices of Osaka women, for the prevailing atmosphere. Increasingly, too, he took pleasure in discovering in Kyoto or Osaka many of the customs that had disappeared from Tokyo but still lingered in his memory. The change in Tanizaki was qualitatively not very different from what many other Japanese men have experienced in their forties, when they discover the comfort of sitting on the tatami drinking saké with friends, or the taste of quite ordinary Japanese food, or the beauty of a Japanese lyric. In Tanizaki’s case the process was more complicated because it was conscious, and the results were more important because they involved not merely his private life but also his work. Tanizaki’s lasting reputation as a writer was established on the basis of what he wrote after moving to the Kansai; if all his earlier works were lost, his reputation would not be much affected.
It would be hard to exaggerate the importance of Tanizaki’s accidental removal to the Kansai, although the change in his work did not occur right away. Naomi, his first novel after the move and the best book he had written in a decade, has many ties to his Yokohama period. It is a summing up of the craving for modernity, free love, and liberation from cramping old traditions that marked his earlier works but implicitly condemns Jōji for the unreasoning love for a coarse waitress that destroys a decent man. (This is reminiscent of Somerset Maugham’s Of Human Bondage, published in 1915.) However, to its first readers, the book did not seem like a condemnation of the way of life it describes. Indeed, the term “Naomiism” was invented to evoke her appeal. The novel Naomi is not wholly successful, but it compels attention, and Tanizaki’s characterization of Jōji as a “fool,” in the original Japanese title of the work, Chijin no ai, indicated that he was emerging from his mindless worship of the West. When he visited Shanghai in 1926, he complained that the city had become infected with foreign ways.
Tanizaki, however, had no intention of abandoning the West completely. Examining the contention of certain orientals, notably Tagore, that the West was materialistic and the East spiritual, he concluded that “with the exception of the historical fact that Shakyamuni, Christ, and Mahomet, the founders of the three great religions, were all born in Asia, I am convinced that there is no basis for the claim that the East is more spiritual than the West.”
Tanizaki believed that as the result of the introduction of Western literature, the special qualities of Japanese prose, especially its unspoken overtones, would steadily disappear. He expressed no regrets over what he considered to be an inevitable change. In the past, it is true, Japanese had come to appreciate Eastern traditions as they grew older, but by the time the present generation had reached full maturity, Eastern traditions might have disappeared, leaving them nothing to which they could return.
In 1929 Tanizaki completed Some Prefer Nettles (Tade kuu mushi). Some critics consider this to be Tanizaki’s finest work, not only because of its intrinsic literary excellence, but because it presents subtly and effectively the great transformation in Tanizaki’s life from a worshiper of the West to a believer in the value of the Japanese heritage. In this novel a man—rather like Tanizaki—discovers that he has returned imperceptibly into the world that he remembers from childhood.
The novel opens as Kaname stretches out on a reclining chair to read an unabridged English translation of Arabian Nights. Kaname, an alter ego of Tanizaki, is having an affair with a Eurasian prostitute. He does not object when his wife in turn announces that she is going to meet her lover, but even though their marriage is breaking up, some ties still join them—their son and Kaname’s father-in-law. Kaname, more and more attracted to the old man, who enjoys performances of the puppet theater and lives in a typical Kyoto house, is intrigued also by Ohisa, the inarticulate mistress of his father-in-law. Ohisa’s old-fashioned ways contrast with those of Kaname’s wife, an “enlightened” woman under the influence of the West, and Kaname’s interest in Ohisa parallels the rediscovery of the past. At the end of the book, as he lies inside a mosquito netting of the kind depicted in old prints, Kaname sees Ohisa enter the dimly lit room with an armful of Japanese-style books. He has come to share his father-in-law’s tastes, anticipating Tanizaki’s own “return” to Japan. Various events were modeled on incidents in Tanizaki’s life at a time when he was moving toward a divorce, but the work was more prophecy than autobiography.
In the early 1930s Tanizaki wrote a series of stories that established him as the most accomplished writer in Japan, even though virtually no critic of the time recognized this. Arrowroot (Yoshino kuzu, 1931) reveals that he had found a subject and a language for expressing his changed way of looking at the Japanese past. The work contains several layers of time: the earliest goes back to the twelfth-century story of Shizuka, the mistress of the hero Yoshitsune, and her magical drum. This in turn is linked to the nō play The Two Shizukas (Futari Shizuka) of the fifteenth century and to the eighteenth-century drama The Thousand Trees of Yoshino (Yoshino senbonzakura). These different echoes of the past, unified by an undercurrent of belief in fox magic, give depth to the story and make it live in the reader’s memory.
The transformation of Tanizaki from a popular author, known especially for his “diabolism,” into the most important spokesman for the value of traditional Japanese culture was prefigured by the “return to Japan” indicated in Some Prefer Nettles by Kaname’s awakened interest in his father-in-law’s way of life.
Tanizaki remarried in 1931. He and his bride went to Mount Kōya, the center of Shingon Buddhism, for their honeymoon and remained there for four months while he studied Buddhism and wrote A Blind Man’s T
ale (Mōmoku monogatari), another important work set in the past. It would not have been surprising if happiness with his bride had been reflected in the work, but it was Mrs. Nezu, the neglected wife of a well-to-do Kobe cotton merchant, who inspired the work. In his introduction to the work Tanizaki wrote, “The lettering on the box, the cover, the title page, and inside title pages are from the brush of Mrs. Nezu.” He had been informed also that the artist who drew the portrait of Chacha, the heroine of this sixteenth-century tale, based her features on those of Mrs. Nezu.
In the summer of 1932 Tanizaki confessed that he loved and even worshiped Mrs. Nezu. He declared in a letter,
To tell the truth, when I wrote A Blind Man’s Tale and other stories last year, I had you in mind all the time, and I wrote as if I were the blind masseur myself. I feel sure that my art will continue to be enriched, with your help, and even if we are apart, my creative powers will spring afresh within me, in infinite abundance, as long as I can think of you. Please do not misunderstand me. It is not that you exist for the sake of my art but that my art exists for you. Please believe me when I say that if, by some good fortune, my art endures, it will be because it informs future generations about you.
Before long, he and his second wife were divorced, and he married Matsuko, the former Mrs. Nezu.
“The Reed Cutter” (Ashikari, 1932) tells of the author’s visit to Minase, the site of the palace of the thirteenth-century emperor Gotoba. In a manner reminiscent of Mérimée describing Roman ruins in Spain as the prelude to his tale of Carmen, Tanizaki passes from the present-day loneliness of Minase to the Minase of fifty years earlier. A man emerges from the reeds of the river at Minase and relates the story of the beautiful but cruel Oyū-san. The old-fashioned nature of the narrative is accentuated in the original edition by ruled lines between the columns of text, by the occasional use of obsolete forms of the script, and even by the paper, all contributing to create the appearance of a book of the Meiji era.
