Shadows on the Screen: Tanizaki Jun’ichirō on Cinema and “Oriental” Aesthetics (review)

By offering translations and discussion of essays, fiction, and film scripts written by Tanizaki Jun’ichirō between the late 1910s and early 1930s, this book presents the peculiar experiences of modernity brought about by cinema as a new medium in Japan. It is a welcome addition not only to the body of translations of and research on Japanese literature and Tanizaki’s works but also to interdisciplinary studies connecting literature, film, and modernity. Indeed, LaMarre makes a nuanced argument on the complex relationships between Tanizaki’s writings and motion pictures while challenging previously dominant conceptions of Tanizaki, cinema, and history—conceptions of Tanizaki’s “conversion,” “classical cinema,” and “modernization theory.” On the other hand, LaMarre’s view echoes a current scholarly trend in the humanities to understand media and modernity as sources of sensory experiences and contradictory relationships among diverse factors rather than objects of knowledge and representations of the prevalence of rational systems.

The volume takes a unique form. Sandwiched between the introduction and conclusion, its chapters comprise translations of 12 Tanizaki works— seven essays, three works of fiction, and two film scripts—and ten of La- Marre’s own essays. Tanizaki and LaMarre alternate, with one exception: chapters 17 and 18 each present a translation. The translations are arranged not by genre but in chronological order of publication. It should be noted that the translations do not cover all of Tanizaki’s works yet to be translated into English; they are selective and conform to LaMarre’s interests. In combination with this arrangement of the translations, each of LaMarre’s essays centers on the Tanizaki text translated in the preceding chapter, and his overall discussion, if loosely, follows the historical change in Tanizaki’s oeuvre. At the same time, though, key terms such as “more-real-than-real,” “whiter-than-white, “a-modality,” and “displacement and disavowal” are often reiterated across chapters. Thus, the entire design of the volume suggests that LaMarre’s study is strategic rather than positivistic: it is inclined less to give an exhaustive and neutral account of Tanizaki than to offer a critical view on modernity by appropriating Tanizaki’s insights, which can be read in some of his texts on cinema, especially what LaMarre calls the “cinematic experience.”

Although LaMarre’s writing is sophisticated enough to render complicated philosophical issues intelligible, the intricate organization of the chapters makes it difficult to summarize the volume. The overall argument is revealed by the three main analytical viewpoints that govern it: aesthetics, time, and space in cinema and Japan’s modernity. LaMarre illuminates in Tanizaki’s texts the aesthetics in which cinema offered unprecedented sensory experiences in the first three decades of the twentieth century. This “cinematic experience” is significant for the author not because it results from a distinctive form of the cinema but because it, along with the experience of other media, constituted a momentous dimension of modernity.

One example of cinematic experience are “figural qualities,” which early chapters introduce as a key concept for understanding Tanizaki’s aesthetics. Distinguished from linguistic and semantic meanings and ideas, figural qualities refer to tones, hues, scents, and visual effects by which any art form including literature or music can arouse sensation and emotion. Cinematic experience symbolically designates this aesthetics. LaMarre thus repeatedly emphasizes shock, horror, and other elements as powerful cinematic effects of figural qualities incorporated into Tanizaki’s fiction while contrasting them with the idea of the causally structured film form, which film scholars, most notably David Bordwell, have illustrated as a remarkable characteristic of classical Hollywood cinema. As typically seen in Jinmenso (The tumor with a human face) and Aozuka-shi no hanashi (Mr. Aozuka’s story), shock and horror blur the boundary between the real and screen worlds and pose the threat in which the onscreen image jeopardizes the existence of the original. Moreover, the author...