A Tanizaki Feast Michigan Monograph Series in Japanese Studies Number 24 Center for Japanese Studies, The University of Michigan A Tanizaki Feast The International Symposium in Venice Edited by Adriana Boscaro and Anthony Hood Chambers Center for Japanese Studies The University of Michigan Ann Arbor, Michigan, 1998 Open access edition funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities/ Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Humanities Open Book Program. 1998 The Regents of the University of Michigan Published by the Center for Japanese Studies, The University of Michigan, 202 S. Thayer St., Ann Arbor, MI 48104-1608 Distributed by The University of Michigan Press, 839 Greene St. / P.O. Box 1104, Ann Arbor, MI 48106-1104 Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data A Tanizaki feast: the international symposium in venice / edited by Adriana Boscaro and Anthony Hood Chambers. xi, 191 p. 23.5 cm. — (Michigan monograph series in Japanese studies ; no. 24) Includes index. ISBN 0-939512-90-4 (cloth : alk. paper) 1. Tanizaki, Jun'ichir5, 1886—1965—Criticism and interpreta- tion—Congress. I. Boscaro, Adriana. II. Chambers, Anthony H. (Anthony Hood). III. Series. PL839.A7Z7964 1998 895.6'344—dc21 98-39890 CIP Jacket design: Seiko Semones This publication meets the ANSI/NISO Standards for Permanence of Paper for Publications and Documents in Libraries and Archives (Z39.48-1992). Published in the United States of America ISBN 978-0-939512-90-4 (hardcover) ISBN 978-0-472-03838-1 (paper) ISBN 978-0-472-12816-7 (ebook) ISBN 978-0-472-90216-3 (open access) The text of this book is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ Contents Preface vii The Colors of Shadows 1 Maria Teresa Orsi The West as Other 15 Paul McCarthy Prefacing "Sorrows of a Heretic" 21 Ken K. Ito The Maternal Landscape of "Longing for Mother" 33 A. V. Liman Eroticism, Grotesquerie, and Nonsense in Taisho Japan: Tanizaki's Response to Modern and Contemporary Culture 41 Suzuki Sadami The Plays of Tanizaki 55 Donald Keene Tanizaki and the Shinkabuki 65 Jean-Jacques Tschudin The Literary Link: Tanizaki and the Pure Film Movement 75 Joanne R. Bernardi The Double Face of Writing 93 Anne Bayard-Sakai Tanizaki's Art of Storytelling 101 Irmela Hijiya-Kirschnereit The Function of Source References in Arrowroot 107 Jacqueline Pigeot Contents Presentiments 117 Kono Taeko The Makioka Sisters as an Emaki 125 Chiba Shunji The Makioka Sisters as a Political Novel 133 Anthony Hood Chambers Illness, Disease, and Medicine in Three Novels by Tanizaki 139 William Johnston In Pursuit of the Prints of Those Feet 151 Adriana Boscaro Comic Mischief 157 Howard Hibbett The Film Adaptations 163 Donald Richie Chronology of Tanizaki Jun'ichiro 171 Contributors 175 Index 179 VI Preface This volume presents eighteen papers originally prepared for Tanizaki Jun'ichiro: An International Symposium, which convened in Venice in 1995. The papers have been significantly revised, and some expanded, for this publication. Tanizaki Jun'ichird (1886-1965), on whose writings this volume focuses, was prominent in Japan from his literary debut in 1910 until the end of World War II; he became the preeminent living Japanese writer with the complete publication in 1948 of Sasameyuki {The Makioka Sisters), which the government had suppressed during the war. In 1949, Tanizaki received from the emperor the Order of Culture, the highest honor the gov- ernment can bestow on an artist. In his seventies he was still able to shake the public with the audacity of works like Kagi {The Key, 1956) and Filten rojin nikki {Diary of a Mad Old Man, 1961-62). Tanizaki's place in the history of Japanese literature seems secure. In addition to his own fiction, plays, poetry, essays, scenarios, and transla- tions of Western literature, Tanizaki is remembered in Japan also for trans- lating the eleventh-century classic Genji rnonogatari {The Tale of Genji) into modern Japanese. His complete works have been published repeatedly. He is well represented in series, anthologies, and textbooks of modern Japa- nese literature; virtually every bookstore in Japan sells his novels and sto- ries; and many of his works have been adapted for the stage, television, and film—even for ballet, opera, and the bunraku puppet theater. A major literary prize is named for him. Tanizaki's reputation has gradually spread around the world. He was translated as early as 1917 {Shisei, into English) and achieved wide- spread international recognition during the 1950s and early 1960s with translations into English and other languages. In 1964, Tanizaki was elected to honorary membership in the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, the first Japanese to be so honored, and it is widely believed Preface that he was being considered for the Nobel Prize in Literature. His works have been translated into at least twenty languages: Bulgarian, Chinese, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Esperanto, Finnish, French, German, Hun- garian, Italian, Korean, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Swedish, and Turkish. Donald Keene's assessment appears to be coming true: "It is likely that if any one [Japanese] writer of the period [the twen- tieth century] will stand the test of time and be accepted as a figure of world stature, it will be Tanizaki."1 Riding the crest of Tanizaki's international recognition, Tanizaki Jun'ichrro: An International Symposium convened on 5 April 1995. Twenty- two speakers from seven countries addressed an audience of about two hun- dred students and scholars in the magnificent Aula Magna of the Univer- sity of Venice. The papers are arranged here roughly in the order in which the works they discuss were published. We hope that the reader will find all of them savory. THE SYMPOSIUM, VENICE, AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS The organizers of the symposium sought to bring together scholars of Tanizaki who in many cases had never met before, to enable them to dis- cuss their projects at length, to give students from Italy and other countries the opportunity to meet and talk with the scholars whose texts they study, and to remind everyone that many aspects of Tanizaki's work are still rela- tively neglected: his poetry and plays, his brief career in film, his transla- tions from Western literature, his pioneering detective stories, and the sig- nificance of food in his works, to mention a few. Behind the decision to organize the symposium lies the coincidence that 1995 was the thirtieth anniversary of the author's death and also the thirtieth anniversary of the founding of the Japanese Studies Institute at the University of Venice. Venice hosted courses in Japanese in 1873-88 and 1908-9 when the Faculty of Commerce offered free courses in the Japanese language as a result of a crisis in silkworm breeding in Europe. During those years, six Japanese teachers occupied the Japanese chair. Among them was Ogata Korenao (in 1876-77), son of Ogata Koan, the famous late-Tokugawa phy- sician. In November 1965, the University of Venice decided to include Japa- nese among the languages and literatures taught at the university level. By the 1960s, a number of Tanizaki's works had been translated into Italian, giving students an opportunity to enter his fictional worlds. Tanizaki was soon chosen as a subject for seminars at the university. The V11I Preface results were exciting, leading to many graduation theses and then to the publication of a number of studies and translations of Tanizaki. Mean- while, Italian publishers returned to Tanizaki in the 1980s, after a decade of silence, with a collection of short stories written between 1910 and 1917, and in 1988 they included Tanizaki in a series of literary classics. Against this background, the symposium took shape rapidly. Sev- eral achievements anticipated it, welcoming the participants to Venice and celebrating the event. Three volumes containing Italian translations of Tani- zaki stories, novellas, essays, and dramas appeared in Venice bookshops. In addition, symposium participants were presented with a preliminary version of a work still in progress, "Tanizaki in Western Languages," a bibliography of translations and studies in European languages with a list of films based on Tanizaki's works. Among the speakers were three who discussed Tanizaki from a personal perspective: Shimanaka Hoji, Tanizaki's publisher and friend; Ibuki Kazuko, Tanizaki's research assistant and amanuensis from 1953 to 1965; and Takeya Naomi, of the Osaka University of Arts, who organized an international campaign to preserve Ishoan—Tanizaki's house at Sumiyoshi and the set- ting for The Makioka Sisters—when it was threatened by Kobe officials. Since their papers do not appear in this volume, we provide brief summa- ries here. In "The Key and Obscenity," Mr. Shimanaka addressed the troubles Tanizaki encountered with public opinion in the 1950s. Tanizaki had be- gun writing The Key after finishing The Makioka Sisters, Shosho Shigemoto no haha {Captain Shigemoto's Mother, 1949), and his second translation of Genji. The Key represented a return to a different, more daring approach. Serialization began in the January 1955 issue of Chuo Koron, with illustra- tions by Munakata Shiko. This was the time of the Chataree saiban (the Lady Chatterley's Lover case), and it is perhaps no surprise that the mass media and some politicians attacked Tanizaki's new novel as pornographic. These attacks fueled a national debate on the relationship between pornog- raphy and literature. Mr. Shimanaka explained that Tanizaki had origi- nally planned a four-part novel, following the qi-cheng-zhuan-he (intro- duction-development-turning-conclusion) pattern of traditional Chinese poetry, but when the controversy arose Tanizaki decided to omit the third part (turning). Accordingly, the text we read today is not the novel Tanizaki envisioned, and one can only guess what the "turning" might have involved.