ABSTRACT
Over the course of a career that spanned more than half a century, Tanizaki Jun'ichirō (1886–1965), possibly Japan’s greatest modern writer, explored man’s yearning for ideal worlds and for images of femininity that stood for all that was beautiful, sensual, and seductive in these imagined realms. The stories in Seven Japanese Tales provide an introduction to a body of work, comprising some twenty-eight weighty volumes in the standard edition, that records the writer’s lifelong pursuit of worlds charged with desire. In the first part of his career, the writer was drawn to an imagined “West,” endowed with a freedom unavailable in a repressive Japan and adorned with beautiful, spirited women. Later, he professed an attraction to the burnished beauty of the past, the measured order of tradition, and the warm sensuality of the “mother.” But Tanizaki refuses to fit into the convenient pattern of native identity rediscovered, for in the fiction written in the final decade of his life he again explored desires unbound by traditional restrictions, intoxications associated with the new and the foreign. The shifts and reversals in Tanizaki’s preferences call attention to an important facet of his cultural sensibilities: the ideals he pursued were, for all the seeming contrasts they exhibited, connected by powerful, interwoven currents of feeling. Both his “West” and his “past” are products of the imagination, alternatives to a mundane reality. They are realms of desire that existed within the mind of a writer endlessly sensitive to the cultural fantasies and yearnings spawned by a society in flux.
