A Japanese Master

...I think that, like Chekhov, Tanizaki needs the roominess of the larger form for his highest artistry...

...When Sasuke tells Shunkin of his act, she for the first time feels respect and love for him, and they embrace, weeping...

...One day last month I picked up Junichiro Tanizaki's Seven Japanese Tales (translated by Howard Hibbett, Knopf, 298 pp., $5.00...

...The narrator's skepticism at the end of the story is perfect: "It seems that when the priest Gazan of the Tenryu Temple heard the story of Sasuke's selfimmolation, he praised him for the Zen spirit with which he changed his whole life in an instant, turning the ugly into the beautiful, and said that it was very nearly the act of a saint...

...Before I had finished the first tale, "A Portrait of Shunkin," I knew that I was in the presence of a master, and that however native Tanizaki's fiction might be, it is also securely within the tradition of European literature...

...It is the very texture of Japanese life, and that is the trouble...

...Hardly longer than a novella, it is a sensual and melodramatic story, told in His and Hers diaries, of a professor's debauching of his innocent wife, so successfully that she kills him to live with her lover, who will be married for convenience to her daughter...

...thus the perverse attachments of the members of the family can be recognized as the corruption of traditional virtues...

...In this perversity, again, there is great beauty...

...There is no matter-of-factness, but a burning sensuality, in the professor's photographing his wife naked in The Key, published when the author was 70, or in Tadasu at his stepmother's breasts in "The Bridge of Dreams," published when the author was 73...

...Tanizaki's theme is not really devotion, but devotion curdled into neurotic fixation...

...It seems to symbolize the security and reassurance that are the goal of the characters' neurotic attachments...

...Some Japanese prints, less powerfully, give me the same experience, but Japanese literature does not...

...Ikuko is another monster, like Shunkin, but here we watch the process of manufacture...

...The novella rises to two related horrors...

...Ultimately, though, the water mortar remains mysterious, a voice not quite explainable by either hydraulics or psychoanalysis...

...The story is thus a succession of ingrown triangles...

...The Makioka Sisters is an excellent novel of a sort that does not very much interest me, the long realistic family chronicle...

...it is disconnected when his father is dying, and started up again after the funeral...

...I had the sense of immediate communication that the Takanobu portrait gives me...

...I am inclined to think," the narrator comments, "that the destruction of her beauty had its compensations for Shunkin in various ways...

...The odd symbol is a "water mortar," a hollow bamboo tube under the pond's inlet, designed to clack regularly as it fills and empties...

...There are a number of exotic Japanese customs in the novella, but Tanizaki's craft makes the details of nightingale singing or lark soaring, Shunkin's hobbies, seem as reasonable and familiar as my own pursuits...

...Its framework is the struggle to get the third sister, Yukiko, properly married, and when that is achieved the novel ends...

...These relations are perverse and symbolically incestuous: Tadasu suckled at his mother's breasts until he was four...

...It is "Portrait of Taira Shigemori" by the medieval Japanese painter Takanobu, and it is in a private collection in Tokyo...

...It is the story of a female monster and her devoted slave...

...Thus we see Sasuke's fanatic joy in sacrifice through the eyes of a man who cannot comprehend it (Melville uses the same device in "Bartleby the Scrivener" and "Benito Cereno...

...The symbolic resonance that birdsong brings to "A Portrait of Shunkin" is obtained here by poetry and one odd symbol...

...The title symbol, the bridge of dreams, is at once the title of the last chapter of The Tale of Genji (where it represents Life), the footbridge over the pond at Heron's Nest, and Father's dying words, which well represent his Faustian ambition, handed on to the others, to bridge love across death...

...When, on their honeymoon, Teinosuke asks his wife Sachiko to name her favorite fish, and she names sea bream, this is not some powerful symbol of her aspirations, like Shunkin's nightingale or Tadasu's water mortar, it is just her taste in fish...

...The other four are short, and much less impressive...

...As an infant sleeping at his mother's breast, Tadasu heard the clack of the water mortar in his dreams...

...and Shunkin's prized lark that soars up and never returns bears with it her sight, her beauty, and her life...

...She will not marry him because of his social inferiority, however, and the children are sent out for adoption...

...Shunkin is a blind samisen virtuoso and Sasuke is a former servant of her family and pupil of hers, who himself becomes a samisen master...

...I feel (as Malraux meant me to feel) that this painting communicates perfectly to me across great barriers of time and culture...

...after she dies he divorces his wife and takes his half-brother, who "looks exactly like Mother," to live with him...

...The two novels that I have read further display Tanizaki's range...

...In the first, Shunkin, probably in revenge for her sadistic and rapacious treatment of pupils, is disfigured by an unknown attacker, who throws a kettleful of boiling water in her face as she sleeps...

...Like Japanese culture generally, he is very matter-of-fact about the body...

...when her baby is sent away, Tadasu, then 19, sucks the milk from her breasts...

...the second wife loves her husband so devotedly that when she has a child by him she sends it out for adoption, so that her predecessor's son may retain all her maternal love...

...He suffers "an agony of shame" until he realizes that his father must have arranged it all...

...the narrator, Tadasu, loves his stepmother, who has entirely merged with his mother in his mind, to the point of marrying, after his father's death, in order to have someone to take care of his stepmother...

...The various trios sit by the garden pond to enjoy the cool of the evening, with one mother or another dangling her feet in the water while father or son drinks beer, blissful in their web of ties...

...The nightingales, which must be taken from the nest in infancy and carefully trained to sing artificial calls, perfectly symbolize the exactions of art...

...Poems are quoted in connection with so many features of the house that the effect is to cover Heron's Nest (the house) with a patina of order and beauty...

...The other superb novella in the book is "The Bridge of Dreams" (1959...

...I wonder how many of us would agree with him...

...Both in love and in art she must have discovered undreamed-of ecstasies...

...These awful deeds, which arouse the sort of pity and terror that the self-discovery and self-blinding of King Oedipus do, result in a love of serene beauty...

...When she dyes a syllable of his name on her kimono, or he gives her the smaller segments of the tangerine, it is enormously significant, is it not...

...All the mysteries of this uncanny novella remain: We never learn the real reason for anything, or which mother wrote a significant poem, or even whether Tadasu's wife killed his stepmother, as he suspects that she did...

...Shunkin makes Sasuke promise never to look at her ravaged face, and he keeps his promise by blinding himself with a sewing needle...

...He cares for her, runs her school, and they live together and have children...

...The best of the other stories, "A Blind Man's Tale" (1931), is a historical novella about the warlord civil wars of the 16th century, its theme again devotion, the lifelong loyalty of the narrator, a blind minstrel and masseur, to his noble lady...

...They are not put in for local color, but function symbolically in the story...

...Meanwhile Tanizaki has taken us through "the most disastrous flood in the history of the Kobe-Osaka district," "the worst typhoon" to hit Tokyo "in over ten years," and the China Incident...

...The poetry seems to me entirely untranslatable, reading in English like faint rubbings of vanished poems...

...The horror and ecstasy of the novella are kept in perfect tension by a narrator, a masterly creation, who endlessly questions, speculates, and doubts...

...I know it from a color reproduction in André Malraux's The Voices of Silence, and every time I look at it again I am left breathless with wonder and delight...

...It is another disturbing and perverse study of devotion, now in a recurring chain...

...his stepmother encourages him to continue the habit, and he suckles at her dry breasts until he is 13...

...The few Japanese novels that I have read tended to leave me with a vague feeling of having missed the point...

...The narrator's father is so devoted to his first wife that he gives his second wife her name and turns the second into a facsimile of the first...

...I have now read all except the first, which is currently out of stock and being reprinted, and I am lost in admiration for Tanizaki's talents and variety...

...I am a little late coming to him...

...Two of the novellas in Seven Japanese Tales are masterpieces...

...The Key is something else again...

...What is quite remarkable is the way Tanizaki combines this with a sense of the body's mystery...

...Tanizaki is 77, he has been publishing for more than 50 years, he is said to be Japan's greatest living writer, and he is a strong candidate for the Nobel Prize...

...Three of his novels have been published in this country by Knopf: Some Prefer Nettles in 1955, The Makioka Sisters in 1957, and The Key in 1961...

...In this respect, as in many others, Tanizaki reminds me of the Leskov of "Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District...

...My favorite, "A Portrait of Shunkin" (1933), is like nothing else I have ever read...

...But significant of what, exactly...

...If one cannot be Tolstoi or Dostoievsky, it is not too bad to be Leskov...