Jun'ichirō Tanizaki (1886–1965)

I continue to marvel at the range of Tanizaki’s work; some of it I have loved, some of it I thought just a little too strange. This falls pretty much in the middle for me. The title, in a roundabout way, is the translator’s paraphrase of the American saying “to each his own”; in other words, everyone is entitled to his own taste (or preference). The book, which is often said to be among Tanizaki’s best works, takes place in Japan in the late 1920s and focuses on the conflict between traditional and modern (or Westernized) culture in Japan. Tanizaki uses a variety of oppositions to illustrate this conflict, sometimes directly, sometimes obliquely. Ambiguity is omnipresent. Thus, he sets the customs and reputations of some cities against those of other cities, traditional (Japanese) arts against Western(ized) ones; customary modes of behavior and dress against modern ways; and so forth. The setting is a disintegrating marriage which the wife—with her husband’s knowledge and approval (an indication of his embrace of Western behavior, he believes)—has taken a lover and the husband has become increasingly attached to his father-in-law’s young mistress and even with his father-in-law’s devotion to traditional Japanese culture. Both husband and wife are too weak-willed, despite their unhappiness, to take any definite steps toward divorce, or even to tell their son anything. The subject and Tanizaki’s way of telling the story strikes me as exceptionally Japanese, much more so than other works of his that I have read. I can’t particularly say that I enjoyed it but I can readily understand why it is well-regarded.… (mais)

Any book of stories that begins with a story about sadism and masochism among children is likely to have more than a few surprises in store—and so it is with this collection. You may love it, you may hate it, but odds are you won’t be indifferent to these stories, all of which are—in one way or another—about power and its uses. Other stories focus on cross-dressing, food as pornography, a fetishistic obsession with a (very specific) human body, and a last, impossible-to-summarize story that ends in the toilet bowl (literally). There is one story that doesn’t fit this nearly phantasmagorical grouping: a straightforward story about two young Buddhist acolytes who do not know (for almost believable reasons) what a woman is or looks like. One leaves the monastery to investigate and never returns; the other is eventually forced to choose between joining his friend or remaining at the monastery…. Recommended for the, uh, curious.… (mais)