The great Japanese ironist Jun’ichirō Tanizaki was born in 1886 into an old Tokyo merchant family. His father was a businessman who failed over and over again, and the young man was raised in a downwardly mobile household that struggled to provide for his education.
Yet Tanizaki excelled at school, writing poems in classical Chinese and publishing his first stories while still in middle school. To afford further education, he worked as a live-in servant and tutor for a wealthy family — only to be fired for carrying on a love affair with a maid.
This brief sketch of Tanizaki’s biography suggests triple qualities — domination, virtuosity, and the erotic — that are everywhere in his writings. In one of his greatest stories, a young servant falls in love with his charge, Shunkin, the blind daughter of a well-to-do Osaka family. He leads her everywhere, and because she is a master of the Samisen, he becomes one too. Yet even though they have children together and live as husband and wife, she treats him always a servant — and he welcomes it. When an assailant disfigures her face, he blinds himself with a needle so that her beauty will always be as he remembers it — and Shunkin is pleased. His subordination to her desires is presented as both heroic and erotic, the final consummation of a love forged through domination.
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The origins of these themes can be found in “The Siren’s Lament,” three early stories newly translated by Bryan Karetnyk. “The Qilin,” first published in 1910, takes the form of a classical Chinese story, and relates an episode in the life of Confucius. While traveling with his disciples, the sage arrives in the state of Wei, where everyone is hungry and nothing grows in the fields. Everything beautiful has been transplanted to the royal palace to entertain the Duke Ling and his consort Nanzi, an immensely beautiful and profoundly cruel woman who has mastered the life of pleasure, devouring great banquets, burning exotic incense and draping herself in the skins of rare beasts. But her indolence has a cost: a garden, deep within the palace walls, where Nanzi tortures men who spoke ill of her vices, and takes special pleasure in disfiguring any women who, for even a moment, caught the Duke’s eye. Though he tries to teach Ling the essence of good governance, Confucius is no match for Nanzi’s cruel beauty. He leaves Wei, and the Duke returns to Nanzi on his knees.
“The Qilin” is related in the high, allegorical style of those classical Chinese tales that helped form the basis of Japanese literature, and it would be easy to read it as a simple morality play: the good, wise Confucius against the perverse Nanzi, with the weak Duke Ling caught hopelessly in the middle. But Tanizaki’s allegiances lie with the consort’s voluptuous sensuality, and the story comes to life during those pages when she plies the Master with luxury after luxury, tempting him with the pleasurable suffering of the flesh.
Tanizaki came of age during a buoyant time in Japan’s history, when the young empire had won wars against China and Russia and the importation of western culture was at a high. For a period he was a fervent advocate for westernization, dressing in European-style suits, moving his family to Yokohama’s western quarter, and devouring great quantities of foreign food. When Tokyo and its surroundings were destroyed by the Great Earthquake of 1923, he exulted at the possibility that it might be rebuilt according to a Western grid. “How marvelous!” he wrote. “Tokyo will become a decent place now!” By that, he seems to have meant a place better designed to suit his pleasures. Tanizaki’s work of the later 1910s was often described as “Diabolist,” and his stories of the period are full of sexual liaisons and sadomasochistic desires.
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The collection’s latter two stories, published in 1915 and 1917, both focus on lives undone by indulgence, with pleasure giving way to vice, and finally to dissolution. The longest, “Killing O-Tsuya,” is set during Japan’s Edo period, and tells in a somewhat simple, protracted fashion the fall of a pair of star-crossed lovers, who begin as shopboy and merchant daughter. As pleasure deadens their senses, they are driven to increasingly craven acts, and they end up drunken criminals fighting to death beside a shrine. A similar pattern plays out in the title story of “The Siren’s Lament,” which traces an overindulged prince’s fascination with a mermaid.
These stories are told with a deliberate lack of psychological depth, focusing on physical and emotional sensations without suggesting deeper motivations. They obey the stricture of the classical Japanese tales known as monogatari, where characters occupy formal roles (the scheming daughter, the corrupted servant) and the plot seems to follow an essentially predetermined path. “Monogatari,” writes the philosopher Karatani Kojin, “is pattern, nothing more, nothing less,” and it lends these stories a feeling of predetermination, as if the shape were present before Tanizaki thought of a single word.
Many of Tanizaki’s best works keep his characters at a distance, yet that very quality opens a rich space for both writer and reader, suggesting a character’s complicated inner life by how each performs their particular role, whether teacher or pupil, master or servant, and finding irony in the gaps. Unfortunately, none of the stories in this volume approaches the heights of his best work. “Killing O-Tsuya” sprawls on and on, with only the occasional striking moment, and for all its descriptive brio, “The Siren’s Lament” eventually gives over to a one-sided dialogue. In other early stories, by contrast, you can almost feel Tanizaki quivering.
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Tired of depravity, Tanizaki would, eventually, move away from Tokyo, and become an advocate for traditional Japanese aesthetics, penning a treatise on architecture (“In Praise of Shadows”) and writing a series of masterpieces in a deliberate, methodical style. But in these stories we have that still-young man, randy and undisciplined, ranging everywhere for pleasure, seeking still some powerful force to subdue him once and for all.
Robert Rubsam is a writer and critic whose work has been published in the New York Times Magazine, the Atlantic, the Baffler and the Nation.
The Siren’s Lament
Essential Stories
By Jun’ichirō Tanizaki, translated by Bryan Karetnyk
Pushkin Press. 190 pp. $18, paperback
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