Junichiro Tanizaki Biography and List of Works

Japanese novelist whose works deal with the tensions between the traditional and modern culture of his native land. Tanizaki often uses irony and the obsessive erotic desires of his characters to mirror the influence of the West on the old cultural heritage. After publishing novels written in a fairly orthodox style, Tanizaki fused traditional Japanese storytelling and experimental narrative. He emphasizes fabrication as the basis for fiction, stating that in both his reading and his writing he is 'uninterested in anything but lies.'

Junichiro Tanizaki was born in Tokyo, where his family owned a printing press. The family had once been wealthy but had fallen on hard times. 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 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 due to a shortage of money - or according to some sources his non-payment of fees was an act of rebellion. At the age of 24 he published one of his best short stories, 'The Tattooer', which show the influence of Edgar Allan Poe, Oscar Wilde and the French Decadents. Tanizaki also translated Wilde's Portrait of Dorian Gray. In the story the character of a young woman starts to change after she has a tattoo. In Wilde's original 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 marks 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 upon 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.
   'To give you beauty I have poured my whole soul into this tattoo,' Seikichi murmured. 'From now on there is not a woman in Japan to rival you! Never again will you know fear. All men, all men will be your victims...'
(from 'Tattoo)

The turning point in Tanizaki's life was the great earthquake in Tokyo region in 1923. His house in the fashionable residential area was levelled by the quake. Tanizaki left his wife and child and moved to the Osaka area which was much more old fashioned. There he stopped using Western models and started to take an interest in traditional literature, especially the classical Japanese tale GENJI MONOGATARI (The Tale of Genji), written by Lady Murasaki Shikibu (c. 980-1030). Tanizaki'a first novel from this period, serialized in the mid-20's, was Naomi (trans. in English in 1985), in which a 28-year-old engineer, Joji, has a love affair with a young femme fatale who is totally immersed in Western culture. In TADE KUU MUSHI (Some Prefer Nettles, 1928-29) Tanizaki continues the theme and makes Tokyo and Osaka symbols of the conflict between traditional and modern culture in Japan.

At the time of writing 'Professor Rado' (1925-28), an erotic story about an eccentric bachelor professor, Tanizaki's second marriage was ending. Her third wife, Matsuko, become for the author a target of worship, as did many other women in his life.

Tanizaki's years of immersion in Japanese history produced some of his finest works. The Secret History of the Lord of Musashi (1935) is set in the 16th-century civil-war period. In the story Lady Kikyo sets out to revenge the murder of her father and mutilation of his face. But the culprit is not her 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 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 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 concerns 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 unmarried. Until Yukiko marries, Taeko, the youngest, the most Westernized must wait for her turn according to social convention.

Tanizaki's nostalgic love for the traditions and remnants of the past, even the rustic and worn-out, is expressed in the essay 'In Praise of Shadows' (1933-34). In it Tanizaki juxtaposes harsh Western light 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.''

Tanizaki's 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 favours in return for Western baubles. In KAGI (1956, The Key) the two protagonists use their diaries as a means of communication by tacitly agreeing to read each other's diaries while outwardly pretending that they do not. The diaries reveal their problems in understanding each other and their isolation even during the shared activity of sexual union. In the short story 'The Thief' Tanizaki again studies the theme of fabrications and 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 by stating that he told the truth, albeit in a roundabout way.

Several of Tanizaki's stories have been made into films, in Japan and other countries. He received the Imperial Prize in 1949 for The Makioka Sisters. 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); 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)

Other film adaptations:

• Oyu-sama, dir. by Kenji Mizouchi, 1951
• Okuni to Gohei, dir. by Mikio Naruse, 1952,
• Akuto, dir. by Kaneto Shido, 1965

SHISEI, (1910)
Oyu-sama, dir. by Kenji Mizouchi, (1951)
Okuni to Gohei, dir. by Mikio Naruse, (1952)
Akuto, dir. by Kaneto Shido, (1965)