On Jun'ichirō Tanizaki, obsession and triptychs
A love letter in three parts // welcome the weird, queasy and uncomfortable
My interest in Modern Japanese Literature blossomed when I was 16 and reading Tuttle's Exploring Japanese Literature for the first time. I had already been learning Japanese for two years and the book provided parallel text both in Japanese and in English, which made it great for reading assignments. I was too lazy to learn the new characters at the time, so I simply read through the English bits, and kept returning to the authors and stories in English translations afterwards.
Modern Japanese Literature is interesting because it was written at a time when Japan was opening up to the Western World, and the themes of the writings of that period speak about the cultural erosion, rebirth and assimilation from two such worlds colliding. There’s far more qualified sources to explain how the cultural work of that time reflected the people/government/sentiment of Japan re-evaluating its place in society, but I think it’s still an experience that we can relate to at an individual level.
My (very limited) shorthand is as follows: read Yukio Mishima for the delicate sparse beauty of prose. Read Yasunari Kawabata for the lyrical beauty of the stunning natural wonders of Japan. Read Jun'ichirō Tanizaki for a good time with that scandalous uncle whose stories your parents hastily interrupt to cut short. Which is why he is my favorite (Ryūnosuke Akutagawa is a close second, I promise, but that’s for another post.)
And now, I present to you a Tanizaki triptych: three stories sewn together through beauty, appearance, control and obsession.
Three Ukiyo-e prints blended together by the masters (L-R) Tohusai Sharaku, Katsukawa Shunchō and Katsushika Hokusai
The Secret (秘密, 1911) translated by Giles Murray
The first story I read from Tanizaki was The Secret, which, without spoilers, is about a bored college student who moves to a busy town, takes up residence in a Buddhist monastery, and starts cross-dressing as a woman because he wants to workshop a new glamorous personality. The protagonist has an abiding interest in the macabre, which hides his main fetish: elegant silk kimonos. His cross-dressing persona has exquisite taste and is highly sought after for expensive dates and hated by the local courtesans. He enjoys the attention until one day, he encounters his ex-girlfriend in town.
It’s a weird story and it gets even weirder. You could argue that it escalates into weirdness purely for shock value, which is emblematic of the narrator’s main problem (a little bit of scandal gets you a lot of adrenaline, among other brain chemicals). The real conflict of the story emerges when the narrator must decide to swallow his pride (he’s no longer the prettiest) and ask his ex (who has usurped him) for another “reunion” date.
When I read this story, I was a quintessential angsty 16-year-old who was desperately “trying to be different from the mainstream.” At the time, I was enamored with the idea (as modeled by protagonists in Young Adult literature) that I was special™ and had undiscovered powers through keeping and creating secrets about myself. Obviously, life caught up to the fantasy fast, and the ability to create a brand new persona in a digital and document-able world is far more difficult now than when the story was written. But you have control over some of the factors that the world uses to see you. Your clothes, your accent, the languages you speak and your mannerisms are all indicative of identity parameters that other people use as shorthand to index you in memory.
Years later, when I moved to Boston, I soft-tested the concept of this story. Every Uber driver who picked me up from the years of 2017 to 2019 has interacted with a workshopped version of my personality. I borrowed heavily from the lives and personas of my friends and peers. I was a Graduate Student, a Fashion Writer and a Girl Who Had The Wildest Breakup Story You Heard, a selection from a cast of recurring characters. My most convincing performance was validated by two drunken Canadian tourists I was pooling with. They offered their worst to this Imaginary Ex, and interrupted me every 20 seconds to assure me that I was definitely going to do better. There were lasting consequences from this shape-shifting behavior that would propagate to my dating life, but that is also for another post.
“Aguri” (青い花, 1922) translated by Howard Hibbett
I returned to a collection of Tanizaki’s short stories this year, in part because I am actually far behind my reading goals for the year and in part because, sometimes I reach into my deep past to see a reflection of myself through it.
Aguri is written in a very different narrative style from the rest of his work. The stream of consciousness style writing forces you to experience the protagonist’s anxiety constantly (which is annoying if you’re also an anxious person and are deeply familiar with the exhausting circles that overthinking can chase you for). The protagonist is an anxious wreck of a businessman in his 40s who is having an affair with the eponymous Aguri, who is voluptuous and 16. The story covers the span of one particular date where they are going to go shopping in Ginza, where the protagonist has promised Aguri a very expensive and fashionable Western/Foreign makeover, followed by dinner and drinks.
You would think it is creepy for a 40-yr-old man to be dating a 16-yr-old, and guess what? He does too. He cannot stop having panic attacks about it on the train, he is constantly tired and depressed and is actually a few seconds away from a medical emergency on this date. The more he indulges Aguri, the more radiant and beautiful she becomes and the more he starts losing weight, losing hair, feeling his bones peek through his skin and seeing his life flash before his hazy vision. Everything about Aguri (surprise, she has a body) sexually arouses the narrator to a point where his frail physiology causes him to almost pass out on the sidewalk. The only dialog we hear of the real Aguri in the story is when she asks if an aquamarine ring looks pretty on her and a few laughs.
The narrator has to associate Aguri with western culture and with foreign/exotic clothing because kimonos, sake and traditional Japan are home and health, which he has forsaken forever, along with his real family. There is a moral lesson to this story, and it is grim.
As a woman, what bothers me about existing is that my body is always in a hypervisible space (social media comments, the phenomenon of instagram, etc.). We live in a society where a woman's appearance dictates her social capital and the tiers of society she has access to navigate. Hence, makeup/fashion/costume/drag and the means to control our appearance are channels of political expression as well. Aguri is a story of projection, but also of a woman who exercises power just by existing.
There are parallels to this story and Neil Gaiman’s story Feeders and Eaters (from his collection, Fragile Things). In Feeders and Eaters, the eponymous characters are conscious and consenting of the parasitic relationship between them. In Aguri, the girl herself has no idea that she is destroying him from the inside. Or does she?
The Tattooer (刺青, 1910) translated by Howard Hibbett
(You can read an English translation of the Tattooer here.)
I believe that extreme behavior skews out towards both ends of the spectrum. That is, those who are capable of great kindnesses and astonishing moral positives are also capable of terrible cruelty and other miscellaneous horrors. Tanizaki’s The Tattooist explores this duality through the artist’s dilemma: are you subservient to the art or are you the master of it?
The protagonist is a tattoo artist who renders tattoos for performers and geisha’s in a red-light district of Japan during the Tokugawa era. He is trained in the classical art of the Ukiyo-e masters (perhaps a disgraced apprentice), thus his work is considered premium. His ultimate dream is to one day render the most perfect tattoo on the most perfect woman. He's such a perfectionist that he will reject patrons if their bodies aren't aesthetically sufficient for him to render his masterpieces on.
He's also a sadist. He likes picking the most painful needles and using the hardest to inject pigments on his canvas. He shames his clients for being unable to tolerate the pain, and enjoys their squirming and crying as they submit to his artistry. After decades of scouting and abusing, he sees the dangling foot of his muse (this one goes out to the “feet pics” phenomenon on the internet). She is a young servant girl (15? 16? a depressing number, to be sure) employed in a Geisha house, and is summoned on the pretext of resolving a tailoring request on behalf of the Geisha house.
Then comes the fun and sexy Tanizaki twist. By showing her his collection of portraits of gorgeous slender women subjugating men, the Tattooer also reveals her desire to be a power-hungry sadist. He dangles images of her dreams, and she is asking to be removed from the temptation lest she surrenders to the truth that she likes to control and torment. No spoilers, but when the artist’s massive and detailed work is complete and his entire creative soul exhausted from the effort, he ends up becoming the first of her victims.
I read this as a story of a complete cycle of an artist’s life (it has distinct parallels to Frankenstein’s monster). Like Aguri, labor in the pursuit of beauty can be parasitic. Like the Secret, we are only as remembered as our last final flourish of success. Perhaps for some artists, the creation of a boundary between artist and masterpiece is necessary to stay tethered to the demanding realities of life. Alternatively, some lab experiments have to run in the wild simply because they exist.