Fox

by Dubravka Ugrešic

  Among the novel’s expatiated themes are Jōji’s obsession with Naomi, the arc of Jōji’s descent into total submission, and ultimately, the female body and corporeality. Tanizaki is a master of the lens. In his narration, Jōji takes up the camera, photographing Naomi in various poses and attire. Tanizaki captures perfectly the relationship between light and shadow, a hunter of details, always just small details, never the whole, creating an atmosphere of enigma and understatement. Jōji is infatuated with the whiteness of Naomi’s skin (an infatuation usually understood as an obsession with a superior “westernness”), with her toes, her nails, her clothing and its fabric, her hair, her darting glances, the various parts of her body and its scents. Although the fifteen-year-old Naomi allows Jōji to bathe her, which he enjoys, she nonetheless forbids him all bodily contact. Near the end she even allows him to shave her, but only on the condition that he not touch her skin, which affords him a masochistic pleasure. In the novel’s closing pages, it seems that Naomi herself has become obsessed with the whiteness of her skin, and before going out in the evenings she “applies white makeup to her entire body.”****

  Jōji often thinks of Naomi as a creature, not human. More than once he describes her using the adjective “animal” (calling her, for example, “a wild animal”), and if the English translation is reliable, the collocation, “animal electricity” (the latter appearing several times).

  “If there’s such thing as animal electricity, Naomi’s eyes had it in abundance. It seemed beyond belief that they were a woman’s eyes. Glittering, sharp, and frightful, they brimmed with a certain mysterious allure. And sometimes when she shot her angry glance at me, I felt a shudder pass through my body.”††††

  Whether perchance or perforce, there is a connection between Pilnyak’s story and Tanizaki’s novel. Just as Sophia experiences many things as foreign, and just as she is amused by Tagaki’s Russian accent, Tanizaki, through his hero Jōji, makes merry at the expense of westernized Japanese women, in particular, a certain Miss Sugizaki, who mangles her English pronunciation to such an extent that “more” becomes moa moa, “gentleman” genl’man, and “little” comes out as li’l.

  There is, however, another person in Tanizaki’s novel in whose “accented English three became tree.”‡‡‡‡ That person is Madame Alexandra Shlemskaya, a Russian countess who fled to Japan in the wake of the revolution, and now supports herself and her two children by giving dancing lessons. Jōji and Naomi enroll in a ballroom class, yet unfortunately Shlemskaya makes but a brief appearance in the novel.

  “I’ve already reported that Naomi stood about an inch shorter than I. Though the countess appeared to be on the small side for a westerner, she was still taller than I am. It may have been because she wore high-heeled shoes, but when we danced together, my head came right up to her prominent chest. The first time she said, ‘Walk with me,’ placed her arm around my back, and showed me the one-step, how desperately I tried to keep my dark face from grazing her skin!.”§§§§

  Tanizaki intends the countess to serve as the embodiment of an alluring, superior, and untold West. Infused with an inferiority complex, Naomi is but a stunted Japanese substitute, all that Tanizaki’s narrator Jōji can afford. Yet this East-West relationship comes across as somewhat forced and unconvincing; Jōji’s obsessive and limited gaze only registers physical details, skin color in particular, but very little else.

  “What set her apart from Naomi most of all was the extraordinary whiteness of her skin. Her pale lavender veins, faintly visible beneath the white surface like speckles on marble, were weirdly beautiful. (. . .) Naomi’s hands weren’t a vivid white—indeed, seen after the countess’s hand, her skin looked murky.”*****

  Anthony H. Chambers, Tanizaki’s translator and author of the foreword to the novel’s American edition, offers an interesting tidbit: Tanizaki apparently loved “Western” dancing and dance halls, so much so that he once registered for a dance competition in Yokohama, which at the time was run by a Russian named Vasily Krupin. In this respect, in the novel Vasily Krupin becomes the Russian countess Alexandra Shlemskaya.

  In his story, Pilnyak deploys the powerful symbol of the fox, the mythological embodiment of treachery, cunning, and betrayal—and, as Pilnyak would have it, the most likely candidate for worship as totem of the literary guild. The fox in Tanizaki’s novel gets only a passing mention in an intimation that Naomi herself might be a fox, an incalculable and seductive female demon.

  “Taking care not to awaken her, I sat by her pillow, held my breath, and stealthily gazed at her sleeping form. In the old days, a fox might decieve a young man by taking the form of a princess, only to reveal its true form when it slept and gave itself away. I recalled hearing such stories in my childhood. Rough sleeper that she was, Naomi had shed her coverlet and was gripping it between her thighs. One elbow was raised, and the hand rested like a bent twig on her exposed breast. My eyes moved back and forth between the pure white Western paper in the book and the whiteness of her breast. Naomi’s skin looked yellow one day and white another; but it was extraordinarily limpid when she was asleep, or just awakened, as though all the fat in her body had melted away.”†††††

  13.

  So really, how do stories come to be written? Perhaps Pilnyak subconsciously fumbled his way to an answer in using the verb sozdat’ instead of the verb sdelat’. It’s all in the nuance: sdelat’ infers to make, to produce, to render (in the sense of Boris Eikhenbaum’s How Gogol’s Overcoat Was Made—Kak sdelana Šinel’ Gogolja). Sozdat’ infers to create, shape, mold, form, develop . . . Furthermore, Pilnyak uses the imperfective verb in the present; this, thus, is not a story about how a story came to be, but a story about how stories come into being. The imperfective verbal aspect suggests that stories are never finished, that the process of their formation remains ongoing. Perhaps this explains the title’s absence of a creator, the story’s author, he who conditions its continuation.

  In his “essay on aesthetics,” In Praise of Shadows, Jun’ichirō Tanizaki eulogizes the aesthetics of Japanese everyday life: wooden handicrafts, candles, lamps, and rice paper lanterns, lacquered wooden dishes, soft lighting, all of which engender opacity, placidity, and discretion, a penumbral quality and pliancy, a tranquility and mysticism. Tanizaki contrasts this world of shadow, the world of traditional Japanese life, with the modern world and its opposing aesthetic values, those of glare, squall, vulgarity, and clamor.

  “I would call back at least for literature this world of shadow 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 useless decoration.”‡‡‡‡‡

  Isn’t the purport of the excerpt above entirely contradictory to the principles of shi-shosetsu, the “I-novel,” under which Naomi is shelved? Because nowhere in the novel does Tanizaki strip himself bare, but does, rather, the opposite: having laid him bare, he pushes his narrator Jōji farther into the shadows. All told, where lies the secret of a well-told story? In the interplay of light and shadow, the hidden and the revealed, the declared and the suppressed? Or, to use the formalist lexicon, in the organization of the material? And moreover: did I choose Pilnyak’s story or did Pilnyak’s story choose me? Am I telling a story about Pilnyak’s story or a story about myself? And in any endgame, isn’t Pilnyak’s story also telling me?! Do the revelations connected to Pilnyak’s story alter its meaning or does it remain as it always was? What role do reader and literary interpreter play in a story’s becoming? Am I destroying Pilnyak’s story or am I its co-creator? Is Pilnyak’s story material of the same value to me as Sophia’s short biography and Tagaki’s novel were for Pilnyak, or moreover, material worth the same as Sophia was for Tagaki?

  14.

  Here is where the story could end—a story about how stories come to be written, notes Pilnyak at a certain point before, naturally, continuing his narration. Perhaps here, amid
the unanswered questions that mingle spritely beneath my fingers, could my story about how stories come to be written come to an end?

  In the early years of our puberty (years that today appear almost painfully innocent), my friends and I would engage in a kind of fortune-telling during our childish horseplay. Seeing a loose thread on a friend’s clothing, we’d gather it in our fingertips, and as if with a broom of sorts we’d sweep the spot where we’d seen the thread with our palm and intone: Someone fair is thinking of you (if the thread was white) or Someone dark is thinking of you (if the thread was black). Of course, by this we meant either a blond or dark-headed boy. We’d say it even when there was no thread, just pretending we’d found one. Recalling this innocent horseplay, I wondered how it was that later I never met anyone, anyone at all, on whose clothing I spotted any kind of thread. Where did all the black and white threads on our clothing come from? It was as if we were all daughters of the plump neighborhood seamstress, her clothing always laced with a smattering of multicolored threads. As young girls, this harmless superstition involving cotton thread had a magical allure, perhaps because of its murky undercurrent of sexuality. I wonder where the enchanting magic of black and white threads was lost. Where did it disappear? Where are those vanished threads? I think they still exist, but are now invisible. Who knows, perhaps walking the world, we exchange threads; in passing we brush against an unknown body, we slip by or collide, graze one and other . . . and thus the threads travel, from shoulder to shoulder, sleeve to sleeve. Threads are breath and body, the means by which the souls of the living and the dead travel, lodge themselves under our nails, and it is in this way that we, unknown to us, are all connected.

  It was at the “wishing tree” that I remembered my childhood superstition. I tied a strip of paper, my wish inscribed. A hot gust of wind occasionally nudged the tree, from which omikuji dangled, strips of paper tied by thread to small branches. The August night in Kyoto was warm and wet, and the asphalt glistened with a cheap glow. The night absorbed background noise like a dry blotter, and the little tree appeared like a ghostly apparition. The pieces of paper jostled with every stirring of the breeze, producing a dry, rustling sound; some threads caught and became entangled, and some will remain so, and when a stronger wind blows and the rain falls, the letters will run on the paper and the wishes slide down like tears. Perhaps here, in this place (in early August, the time of Tanabata) a story about how stories come to be written might end? I went to Kyoto, and I drank their sake, and if you don’t believe me, check, my tongue is still moist, even now.

  I never actually visited the Suwayama Inari temple in Kobe, which Pilnyak describes in his story. In its place I visited the Fushimi Inari temple in Kyoto. There I bought a cheap fox’s mask made of papier-mâché, the kind Pilnyak mentions in his Japanese travelogue. In one of the many souvenir shops, which stood honeycombed next to each other, I bought an amulet, a miniature fox made of pelt. I avoided the Japanese cookies filled with azuki, a sweet green bean paste, the outline of a fox stamped onto their surface. In neighboring Kobe I visited the house where Jun’ichirō Tanizaki had lived. The house stands in Uozaki Street and is only open to visitors on Saturdays and Sundays. It was Monday, which I had completely overlooked. Perhaps a story about how stories come to be written might end with a photograph of Tanizaki’s wooden house and abundant garden, of which on tippytoes I managed to sneak a shot above a high wooden fence.

  Perhaps a story about how stories come to be written might end in my conversations with K., who generously offered to be my guide to Kyoto and Kobe. K. had traveled endlessly through Asia, North Africa, and Europe, and read Vietnamese writers with the same interest he did Austrian or North African. He wore brightly-colored, rubber-soled tabi boots, and in a kind of modernized Japanese hakama, a bag from Laos slung over his shoulder, his Moroccan gandora and flat cap on, his attire signaled that cosmopolitanism and global culture were a fusion of both his intellectual positioning and way of being in the world. While living in Vienna, K. managed to visit wartime Croatia, participate in demonstrations against Milošević in Belgrade, and learn Polish and several words in almost every Slavic language. He had traveled to Portbou, where, kneeling at the grave of Walter Benjamin and thinking of the Arcades Project, he tried in contemplation to revive the tragic end to Benjamin’s life. Of “world literature” Benjamin had this to say:

  “World literature is like a whale around which suckerfish gather like practiced pirates. They attach themselves to the whale’s body and vacuum the parasites from its skin. The whale is a source of food, protection, and means of transport. Without the suckerfish, parasites would settle on the whale’s body and the body fall apart . . . I have no illusions about my own literary talent. I am a literary suckerfish. My mission is to attend to the whale’s health.”

  While K.’s English was probably decent, his accent made it almost impossible to understand. All the same, having come from opposite ends of the earth, K. and I didn’t get “lost in translation,” in fact, perhaps thanks to mistranslation, we found each other.

  Perhaps my story about how stories come to be written could end with a detail from the novel Dōhyō (Mileposts) by the Japanese writer, feminist, and communist, Yuriko Miyamoto. In 1927, Miyamoto traveled with a friend, Yuasa Yoshiko, to Moscow, where the two women studied Russian language and literature and befriended Sergei Eisenstein. Three years later the two friends returned to Japan, where Miyamoto became the editor of a women’s Marxist literary magazine, and Yuasa a respected translator of Russian literature. Yuriko Miyamoto lobbied for proletarian literature, joined the Japanese communist party, and married its general secretary, the literary critic Kenji Miyamoto. Her communist engagement made her a target for Japanese police and she spent more than two years in jail.

  Yuriko Miyamato wrote of all of this, and much more besides, in Mileposts, which is a kind of fictionalized autobiography. Written in the third person, the novel takes as its heroine the writer Nobuko Sasa, who travels with a friend from Japan to Moscow. Nobuko is invited to a gathering at the house of a Russian writer named Polnyak. The gathering becomes a drunken affair, yet Nobuko refuses alcohol (I can’t!—Ya ne mogu! she repeats in Russian). Polnyak’s wife is there and to Nobuku resembles a kind of doll. At some point Polnyak and Nobuko meet by chance in the hallway and he pushes her into a room where he tries to rape her, but is disturbed by other guests.

  During their time in Moscow, Yuriko Miyamoto and Yuasa Yoshiko really were invited to a farewell dinner, organized by Japanese professor Masao Yonekawa at the home of Boris Pilnyak. It is thought that there were twelve people present at the gathering, including Pilnyak’s wife. The episode from Miyamoto’s novel was kindly narrated to me by A. O., a Japanese scholar of Slavic literature. In his memoirs, Masao Yonekawa, a respected translator of Russian literature, writes of Miyamoto’s account to him of Pilnyak’s attempted rape. Perhaps Yuriko Miyamoto decided to take revenge on Boris Pilnyak: in her novel he is reduced to an ugly incident. Or perhaps there is an internal polemic at work, the irreconcilability of the two types of writer sketched by Isaiah Berlin in his essay “The Hedgehog and the Fox.” Apart from being a woman, Miyamoto was obviously also a hedgehog.

  Perhaps I should end a story about how stories come to be written with my return from Kyoto to Tokyo, at the very moment the spectacular shinkasen approached Tokyo’s main railway station, an architectural colossus and magnificent replica of Amsterdam’s Central Station. The train bolted through a line of skyscrapers that stood like trees, rays of sun cutting through a melodramatic sky filled with darkened clouds. The glass expanse of the skyscrapers reflected both the hurtling shinkasen and the skyscrapers on the opposite side, transforming the real landscape into the surreal, at once intricate, fragmented and dislocated. It was a moment of visual delirium, more perfect and true than anything reflected by reality. I raced through a multiplied world. In the train sat men-boys in business suits, haircuts like anime heroes, and women-girls whose fingers as thin
as chopsticks silently tapped the screens of their digital toys. Others, both men and women, simply slept, gently nibbling the air with their beguiling heads. The multiplied reflections in the skyscraper glass were suddenly joined by vulpine shadows, chasing each other, playing tag, trying to outrun the train. On the tips of their tails these vulpine shadows spun balls, skillful jugglers, tricksters, shape-shifters, masters of the shell-game con, illusionists, foxes with one, with three, with five tails . . . Vulpine shadows floated across the sky like illuminated globes, producing a bluish scintilla and exploding like firecrackers. Kitsune. This was their illusionistic orgy. It was somewhere here that I sensed my story about how stories come to be written had come full circle and returned to its beginning, like a fox tired of playing that lies down to rest, and blinking lazily descends into sleep. In a dream she sucks the tip of her tail like a baby its thumb.

  * All cited passages are from Beatrice Scott’s translation of the story in Pilnyak’s The Tale of the Unextinguished Moon (New York: Washington Square Press, 1967). In one or two instances, the translation has been slightly adapted.

  † As Pilnyak reveals in The Roots of the Japanese Sun, the city in question is Kobe.

  ‡ This is but one of Pilnyak’s many allusions to the emptiness, vapidity, and false sentimentality of provincial Russian women.

  § Although he twice underscores that “it is not for me to judge other people,” Pilynak wonders to himself how “the woman should have managed to miss the experiences we had known during those years. As everyone knows, the Imperial Japanese Army was in the Russian Far East in 1920 in order to occupy this region and was driven out by the partisans; there is not a word about this in the biography.” Here Pilnyak’s “I” quickly becomes a terse, declarative “we,” as if the threatening shadow of a “Comrade Dzhurba” were hovering over him, and as a consequence, he must reproach Sophia her political indifference. In another section Pilynak again reacts like a Party comisssar, remarking: “The Japanese were hated along the whole far eastern Russian coast. The Japanese caught Bolsheviks and killed them. They burned some in the boilers of battle cruisers, others they shot to death and burned in the morgue, situated on one of the hilltops. The partisans used all their guile to annihilate the Japanese: Kolchak and Somenov died, the Reds from Moscow poured down like mighty lava. Sophia Vasilyevna did not mention a word of all this.”