Tanizaki and the Enjoyment of Japanese Culturalism

Most of what novelist Tanizaki Jun'ichiro (1889–1965) wrote as nonfiction in the late 1920s and 1930s he wrote as zuihitsu, or “following the brush” essays. A classical literary form, the zuihitsu seemed appropriate for his “return to the classics” (koten kaiki) period, when he is supposed to have abandoned his youthful interest in crime fiction, stage plays, cinema, and novels about sexual perversion in favor of traditional Japanese genres, allusions, and settings. “When we are young we are interested in imported art and literature,” he wrote, “but in the long span of a lifetime such a period can last ten or twenty years at most [and ] . . . with the onset of old age I have gradually returned to Eastern tastes.”¹ Describing these tastes in odes to Japanese architecture and food, the classical language, and the traditional culture of western Japan, Tanizaki made regular contributions to journals such as Chuo koron [Public debate] and Kaizo [Reconstruction]. His “return” coincided with a larger intellectual shift from the cosmopolitanism of the 1920s to the “culturalism” (bunkashugi) of the 1930s.

An attempt to come to terms with what Harry Harootunian has called “the doubling of Japanese modernity,”² culturalism struggled to balance the perceived evenness of tradition with the unevenness of global capitalism. In its more progressive forms, it used culture as a vantage point from which to critique capitalism's inequities, particularly Japan's classification as somehow still lagging, still insufficiently Westernized on a scale of global modernity. In its more conservative forms, and increasingly as the war approached, it imagined culture as an escape, an “overcoming” of capitalism, modernity, and the West. The various “returns” to Japan, the East, and the classics staged by intellectuals in the 1930s belong to the latter kind of culturalism. With noted exceptions, this is the sense in which I use the term here. Culturalism was associated in literature with the Romantic school and with writers of the bungei fukkoki, or cultural renaissance, of the mid-1930s.³ On the whole, however, it was less a literary movement than a broad philosophical inquiry across a range of disciplines, including the ethics of Watsuji Tetsuro (1889–1960) and Nishida Kitaro (1870–1945), the folklore studies of Yanagida Kunio (1875–1962) and Origuchi Shinobu (1887–1953), the “modernology” of Kon Wajiro (1888–1973), and the history of Miki Kiyoshi (1897–1945) and Tosaka Jun (1900–1945).

In this article I examine three of Tanizaki's best-known culturalist essays to consider an undertone of suffering not usually acknowledged. Beautifully translated into English in 1977, “In Praise of Shadows” [“In'ei raisan”] (1933–1934) is widely read in North America and has long served in Japanese criticism as the culmination of Tanizaki's return to traditional aesthetics in the 1930s. “Love and Passion” [“Ren'ai oyobi shikijo”] (1931) continues to be included in paperback editions of Tanizaki's zuihitsu and is important, I argue, for the conversation it stages with Watsuji Tetsuro. “On Art” [“Geidan”] (1933) gained notoriety as the target of a review essay by Kobayashi Hideo in 1933, recently translated into English as “Literature of the Lost Home” [“Kokyo o ushinatta bungaku”].

⁴ In each of the three essays, suffering is evident in dalliances—with racial abjection, sexual inferiority, and artistic exhaustion—that contradict Tanizaki's otherwise exquisite defense of Japan's East vis-à-vis Euro-America's West. I will suggest that taking these dalliances seriously means watching the Japanese uniqueness celebrated by culturalism emerge as a kind of fetish, an alternative focal point that both diverts attention from and compensates for the trauma of the pain that lies behind it.

In this article I aim first to show that this pain finds intermittent expression in the essays and then to ask what purpose it serves. If exposing it means exposing the contingent, fictional nature of Japanese uniqueness, then it is tempting to read the essays as a critique of...