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Your dear
editor has a taste for Japanese literature. She also has a taste for works
written during the first half of the twentieth century, which is to say,
writing during our first two world wars. There's a specific despondency
and rigor present in these works, a feeling that encompasses the challenges
of a newly modernized world, and the hopeless violence it seems to bring.
Japan, a society quite reverent of its traditions and customs, gives us
a most fertile proving ground on which to examine such conflicts. Junichiro
Tanizaki, a bit less tempermental than his depressed contemporary Ryunosake
Akutagawa, managed to live long enough to tell all about it, and from
a more hedonistic point of view.
Tanizaki was in particular
enamored of a more graceful, more traditional Japan, himself moving from
a more Western Tokyo to the gentile, old money world of Osaka in 1923
(and leaving a wife and kids to do it). He's said to have been incredibly
close to his mother. In fact, he was breastfed until he was six which,
in all its icky truth predicts the common theme of his work: The search
for the perfect woman, caught somehow between Western modernity and Japanese
tradition. In her imperfection - he never quite finds that perfect woman,
although he is perfectly able to write her up at any time - she straddles
the two, unable to ever satisfy anyone and least of all, herself.
What is it about his perspective
that makes Tanizaki so interesting? Historically speaking, he was a pleasure
seeker, and it shows in his work; he treats his characters, however tenderly,
as though they were playing a game only he could win. It amuses him in
the meantime to watch his characters negotiate the world through their
own imperfections and abnormalies. All the while he remains remarkably
detached from his characters in a way similar to Anthony Burgess's A
Clockwork Orange.
Which begs the question: What
isn't he saying? His claim was that he refused to write anything but what
was completely made up; there was nothing autobiographical to be found
in his work. Yet one can find traces of Tanizaki wishes in his characters,
no matter how fervently he claims not to know them. The trick is like
all Japanese works, ancient or contemporary, what's interesting is what's
not said and what's not done. It's a lot like overly polite societies:
The things that people won't do are fascinating compared to what they
will do.
Should you enjoy Tanizaki's
writing, you might also enjoy Lady Murasaki's Tale of Genji (Arthur
Waley's translation is best) or the held-back, yet telling, fiction of
Simone de Beauvoir. If you're feeling quite fanciful and hare-brained,
you will find startlingly common threads between Tanizaki (especially
The Makioka Sisters) and the comedies of errors by Jane Austen.
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