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Haruo, poet and friend, if he would like to marry her. In 1930, after encouraging the affair, Tanizaki divorced Chiyoko, and she married Sato. Obviously, this arrangement was on his
mind during the writing of Some Prefer Nettles, and his ambivalence is perhaps reflected by the book itself.
Far more important, however, in assessing the book, is the struggle in Kaname be-
tween his appreciation of Western culture and his appreciation of the merchants’culture of old Japan surviving in Osaka, particularly represented in this novel by the Bunraku, or
puppet theater. At the end of the novel, Kaname confuses a puppet with the Osaka beauty
O-hisa, showing perhaps that the old way of life is a fantasy that cannot be recaptured. Edward G. Seidensticker, who translated the novel, argues that Kaname (and Tanizaki) is attempting to return to the peace of childhood, although the adult knows the new world is
here to stay. In his essay “In’ei raisan” (1934; In Praise of Shadows, 1955), Tanizaki wrote
“I know as well as anyone that I am dreaming, and that, having come this far, we cannot
turn back.”
It should also be noted that whatever ambivalence or vagueness readers might find in
Some Prefer Nettles and other Tanizaki novels is as much a reflection of his aesthetic as of any personal feelings. He always insisted on exploiting the vagueness of Japanese and objected to writers who were too clear. One cannot, for example, know exactly what will
happen to Kaname the day after the novel closes. Primary among Tanizaki’s goals in writ-
ing was to achieve poetic suggestiveness, which the last scene certainly does.
The Makioka Sisters
During the late 1930’s, Tanizaki continued his rediscovery of traditional Japanese cul-
ture by beginning his translation of The Tale of Genji, a work that, in many ways, influenced the composition of The Makioka Sisters, his longest and, many argue, his greatest novel. Although Tanizaki was always a slow, very careful writer, wartime circumstances
forced him to work even more slowly than usual. He spent many years on The Makioka
Sisters, and censorship prevented complete publication of the work until 1948.
Before Tanizaki began writing the novel, he delineated a precise plan and followed it
nearly to the conclusion. Despite this detailed planning, The Makioka Sisters—unlike his usual lean, straightforward novels—is a sprawling, indirect novel in the episodic form often favored by Japanese authors. Complex characterization and diverse social forces cre-
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ate many layers of action and emotion to give the book a texture quite different from that of Tanizaki’s typical works, which focus on a single character.
In the novel, the four Makioka sisters represent various aspects of Japanese culture
during the 1930’s. Once a rich Osaka merchant family, the Makiokas have declined.
Tsuruko, the eldest, is the most conservative, trying to hang on to a way of life they have outlived. Taeko, the youngest, seems the brightest, the most talented, and the most corrupted by the Tokyo-style intelligentsia with its Western fads. Sachiko, with her husband, Teinosuke, holds the family together by mediating between the impulses that tear at it.
Yukiko, despite her traditional beauty, is too shy to deal effectively with her sisters or the world about her.
Most of the novel concerns the attempt to find the aging Yukiko a husband; the Japa-
nese title Sasameyuki (thin snow) refers to the number of miai (marriage arrangements) that fail. Tsuruko generally insists on going through the slow traditional investigation of potential husbands, while Sachiko recognizes the diminishing value of Yukiko as a bride
and tries to carry the arrangements out in a reasonable, though not hurried, time. Taeko, who intends to marry a Westernized playboy, must wait for her elder sister’s marriage before marrying on her own. Yukiko is so introverted that she often seems indifferent to the whole struggle, except when she rejects another candidate.
This plot, however, is not Tanizaki’s main concern. Using details from his wife
Tomiko’s family history, he re-creates Osaka as it was before the war, revealing foreign influences that would inevitably destroy that way of life—the clothing, the foreign films, the German neighbors, the visit to the White Russians, Taeko’s desire to go to Paris to learn dressmaking—and the traditional Japanese customs as they were then practiced. Attention is devoted to the cherry blossom festival, Taeko’s dollmaking, Kabuki, Japanese
dance, and the old house of the Makiokas. The elegant Osaka dialect is spoken by the main characters and the Tokyo dialect is portrayed as being corrupted. Despite these contrasts, The Makioka Sisters is not a didactic work that preaches the superiority of the old ways over the new. It captures a particular way of life at a certain period in a certain place. Free of the grotesqueness that characterizes his early works and of the obsessive characters that populate most of his works, The Makioka Sisters is a panoramic view of diverse characters with complex motivations, a work unusual in Tanizaki’s oeuvre but indisputably a
masterpiece.
Unlike many writers, who, once they have achieved an integrated work such as The
Makioka Sisters, run out of things to say, Tanizaki remained as creative in the final decades of his life as he had earlier. Entering the third phase of his career, he returned to many of the themes that had occupied him in his youth; with a more detached and sometimes ironic point of view, he dealt with the obsessions of sex in old age. Composed of the parallel diaries of a fifty-six-year-old professor and his forty-five-year-old wife, The Key progresses through the former’s attempt to expand the sexual abilities of the latter, a woman whom he loves madly but who no longer satisfies him. Once again, one might note the autobio-228
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graphical resonance of the professor’s gradually directing his wife into the young
Kimura’s arms. One might also note the return of the devouring woman as the wife en-
courages the eating of beef and incites his jealousy, in spite of her knowledge of her husband’s rising blood pressure, which eventually kills him.
The Key
The Key created a sensation on its publication, no doubt largely because of its frank treatment of sex; like other works of literature—Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary
(1857) and D. H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover (1928)—which achieved notoriety before their literary merits were admitted, The Key‘s craftsmanship can now be assessed more objectively. Presenting one diary in the katakana script and the other in the hiragana script, Tanizaki exploits the differences between the two characters’perceptions of the situation. Further, he complicates the ostensibly sincere presentations of the diaries by having each character aware that the other may be reading what is written. This complex treatment of point of view turns an apparently simple, short work into a multilayered
psychological study.
Diary of a Mad Old Man
Tanizaki’s last novel, Diary of a Mad Old Man, also consists mainly of a diary, but by a man even older than the protagonist of The Key. Also suffering from high blood pressure, he is sexually impotent as well. Nevertheless, he is attracted to his daughter-in-law,
Satsuko, estranged from her husband and having an affair with another man. As in many
of Tanizaki’s works, the narrator devotes much attention to Satsuko’s feet as sexual ob-
jects, and he thinks often of his mother. He compares Satsuko’s feet many times with those of his mother, and he delights in kissing Satsuko’s feet and biting her toes when she comes from the shower. Her feet also become associated with the Buddhist goddess of mercy,
and the old man plans for his daughter-in-law’s footprints to be carved on his tombstone.
Objec
tively treated, Diary of a Mad Old Man is a great deal less sensational than it would appear from a plot summary. The artistic coolness that Tanizaki worked so hard to
achieve saves the work from any pornographic content. Further, the novel is comic in its attitude toward the main character, satirizing the high intensity of Tanizaki’s early works.
Several of his works have comic elements—he was fond of cats and often wrote of them in
a lighthearted vein—and Tanizaki seems to have ended his career looking back on his ex-
traordinary achievements with a whimsical detachment.
J. Madison Davis
Other major works
short fiction: “Kirin,” 1910; “Shonen,” 1910; “Shisei,” 1910 (“The Tattooer,”
1963); “Hokan,” 1911; “Akuma,” 1912; “Kyofu,” 1913 (“Terror,” 1963); “Otsuya go-
roshi,” 1913; “Haha o kouruki,” 1919 (“Longing for Mother,” 1980); “Watakushi,” 1921
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(“The Thief,” 1963); “Aoi Hano,” 1922 (“Aguri,” 1963); “Momoku monogatari,” 1931
(“A Blind Man’s Tale,” 1963); “Ashikari,” 1932 (English translation, 1936); “Shun-
kinsho,” 1933 (“A Portrait of Shunkin,” 1936); Hyofu, 1950; “Yume no ukihashi,” 1959
(“The Bridge of Dreams,” 1963); Yume no ukihashi, 1960 (collection); Kokumin no bungaku, 1964; Tanizaki Jun’ichiro shu, 1970; Seven Japanese Tales, 1981; The Gourmet Club: A Sextet, 2001 (Anthony H. Chambers and Paul McCarthy, translators).
plays: Aisureba koso, pb. 1921; Okumi to Gohei, pb. 1922; Shirogitsune no yu, pb.
1923 ( The White Fox, 1930); Mumyo to Aizen, pb. 1924; Shinzei, pb. 1949.
nonfiction: Bunsho tokuhon, 1934; “In’ei raisan,” 1934 (“In Praise of Shadows,”
1955); Kyo no yume, Osaka no yume, 1950; Yosho-jidai, 1957 ( Childhood Years: A Memoir, 1988).
translation: Genji monogatari, 1936-1941, 1951-1954 (of Murasaki Shikibu’s me-
dieval novel).
miscellaneous: Tanizaki Jun’ichiro zenshu, 1930 (12 volumes); Tanizaki Jun’ichiro zenshu, 1966-1970 (28 volumes).
Bibliography
Chambers, Anthony Hood. The Secret Window: Ideal Worlds in Tanizaki’s Fiction. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1994. Chambers analyzes seven of Tani-
zaki’s novels and novellas, focusing on the characters’ attempts to create “ideal
worlds” and the elements of fantasy in these works. Includes notes and a bibliography.
Gessel, Van C. Three Modern Novelists: Soseki, Tanizaki, Kawabata. New York: Kodan-sha International, 1993. The sixty-five-page chapter on Tanizaki concentrates on his
approach to modernism. Includes detailed notes but no bibliography.
Golley, Gregory L. “Tanizaki Junichiro: The Art of Subversion and the Subversion of
Art.” Journal of Japanese Studies 21 (Summer, 1995): 365-404. Examines the “return to Japan” inaugurated by Tanizaki’s Some Prefer Nettles. Discusses themes and images in the work and suggests that Tanizaki’s traditionalist fiction both championed
and undermined the idea of an essential Japanese traditional culture.
Ito, Ken K. Visions of Desire: Tanizaki’s Fictional Worlds. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1991. A critical biography, with chapters arranged in chronological or-
der of Tanizaki’s life and work. Ito primarily focuses his analysis on Tanizaki’s best-
known works that have been translated into English, and pays special attention to
Tanizaki’s language, narrative style, and his male characters’projection of their desires upon women. Includes notes, a bibliography, and a section on names and sources.
Keene, Donald. Dawn to the West: Japanese Literature of the Modern Era—Fiction. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1984. A massive study of the fiction produced since
the Japanese enlightenment of the nineteenth century. Chapter 20 is devoted exclu-
sively to Tanizaki, and he is discussed in the introduction and in several other chapters in association with other writers and literary movements.
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_______. Five Modern Japanese Novelists. New York: Columbia University Press, 2003.
Keene devotes a chapter to Tanizaki in his tribute to five twentieth century Japanese
novelists. Includes his personal recollections of Tanizaki, with whom he was ac-
quainted, and discusses the writer’s works.
_______. Japanese Literature: An Introduction for Western Readers. New York: Grove Press, 1955. Unlike the comprehensive treatment in Dawn to the West, this is a brief introduction to Japanese literature. Tanizaki is briefly mentioned in the introduction and chapter 4, “The Japanese Novel,” but is discussed throughout chapter 5, “Japanese Literature Under Western Influence.”
Lippit, Noriko Miuta. Reality and Fiction in Modern Japanese Literature. White Plains, N.Y.: M. E. Sharpe, 1980. Lippit considers the struggle of several Japanese writers to
define the function of art and literature, both socially and personally. The sections on Tanizaki deal with his aesthetic preference for fantasy and complex structure, with a
comparison to Edgar Allan Poe. Includes notes.
Suzuki, Tomi. Narrating the Self: Fictions of Japanese Modernity. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1996. Two of the chapters are devoted to Tanizaki: “Allegories
of Modernity in Tanizaki Jun’ichiro’s Fool’s Love” (also known as Naomi) and the epilogue, “Tanizaki’s Speaking Subject and the Creation of Tradition.” Includes notes and
a bibliography.
Ueda, Makoto. “Tanizaki Jun’ichiro.” In Modern Japanese Writers and the Nature of Literature. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1976. Discusses Tanizaki as one of the eight major writers who make up the majority of modern Japanese fiction familiar to Western readers. Provides an introduction to major literary theories underlying
Japanese novels and stories. Supplemented by source notes, a bibliography, and an
index.
Yamanouchi, Hisaaki. The Search for Authenticity in Modern Japanese Literature. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1978. Discusses twelve modern Japanese writers,
analyzing the ways each dealt with difficult personal, social, and intellectual questions in art. The sections on Tanizaki focus on the concept of eternal womanhood in his
works. Includes notes, a bibliography, and an index.
231
J. R. R. TOLKIEN
Born: Bloemfontein, South Africa; January 3, 1892
Died: Bournemouth, England; September 2, 1973
Also known as: John Ronald Reuel Tolkien
Principal long fiction
The Hobbit: Or, There and Back Again, 1937
The Fellowship of the Ring, 1954
The Two Towers, 1954
The Return of the King, 1955
The Lord of the Rings, 1955 (collective title of previous 3 novels)
The Silmarillion, 1977
The Children of Húrin, 2007
Other literary forms
The novels that J. R. R. Tolkien (TAHL-keen) produced represent only a small part of
the complicated matrix from which they evolved. During Tolkien’s lifetime, he published
three volumes of novellas and short stories, Farmer Giles of Ham (1949), Tree and Leaf (1964), and Smith of Wootton Major (1967). Some of these tales had originally been bedtime stories for his own children, such as those in the posthumously published The Father Christmas Letters (1976) and Roverandom (1998). The Silmarillion and Unfinished Tales of Numenor and Middle-Earth (1980) both contain stories Tolkien composed early in his life, material that sets the stage for the events in his novels. His poetry collections, Songs for the Philologists (1936), The Adventures of Tom Bombadil (1962), and The Roa
d Goes Ever On: A Song Cycle (1967), link Tolkien’s poetic formulations of Middle-earth’s themes with the historical and linguistic themes of which both his professional work and much of his dreams were made, “the nameless North of Sigurd of the Völsungs, and the
prince of all dragons.” Tolkien’s academic publications dealt with the history of the English language and Middle English literature: A Middle English Vocabulary (1922) and editions of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (1925; with E. V. Gordon) and the Ancrene Wisse (1962). His seminal essay “Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics” (1936) and his only play, The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth Beorhthelm’s Son (pb. 1953), offer fresh interpretations of ancient English epic poems.
Tolkien’s novels have been adapted for cinema and television, and many, though not
all, of his fragmentary stories, articles, and letters have been published since his death. His histories of Middle-earth, a remarkable invented mythology comprising chronicles, tales, maps, and poems, were edited as a series by his son, Christopher Tolkien. Volumes include The Book of Lost Tales, The Lays of Beleriand, The Shaping of Middle-Earth, and The Lost Road, and Other Writings.
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Achievements
J. R. R. Tolkien’s fiction dismayed most of his fellow scholars at the University of Ox-
ford as much as it delighted most of his general readers. Such reactions sprang from their recognition of his vast linguistic talent, which underlay both his professional achievements and his mythical universe. Tolkien led two lives at once, quietly working as an Oxford tutor, examiner, editor, and lecturer while concurrently Middle-earth and its mythology were taking shape within his imagination.
For twenty years after he took first-class honors in English language and literature at
Oxford, Tolkien’s teaching and linguistic studies buttressed his scholarly reputation. Editing the fourteenth century text of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight with E. V. Gordon helped bring Tolkien the Rawlinson and Bosworth Professorship of Anglo-Saxon at Oxford in 1925. His lecture “Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics” approached the Anglo-