This Perversion Called Love: Reading Tanizaki, Feminist Theory, and Freud (review)

Margherita Long's study of Tanizaki Jun'ichiro is a welcome addition to the body of work on this author in English. As a devoted reader of Tanizaki since graduate school, I have often felt that the historicist/biographical approach to his writings falls short of the mark. We need more help in understanding the dedicated masochism of Tanizaki's works and the part played by women in those visions. The notion that woman is simply other—mistress, mother, whore or a little bit of all three—becomes clichéd to the point of tedium. Why do we continue to read Tanizaki, and with such anticipation and pleasure?

Long's answer to this question is complex, offering rigorous textual readings and demonstrating a strong command of her sources. She reads psychoanalytically and without apology. Early in the book she tackles the question of the relevance of psychoanalysis to Japan and answers in the affirmative. She asserts that Tanizaki's discoveries not only anticipate or replicate Freud's, but that they critique modern subjectivity itself. Long avoids most of Tanizaki's canonical works even as she writes a study of him; her method is to unearth the less-studied works, including fiction, essays, and discussions, and to observe how Tanizaki's texts interact with other central texts in Japan's modern history. In chapter 1, for example, she gives a reading of In Praise of Shadows (In'ei Raisan) and its purported "return to the East." Long uses Freud's idea of moral masochism to unlock Tanizaki's project. Rather than stand as a defiant assertion of Eastern aesthetics, In Praise of Shadows delineates the process by which an internalized superego in the form of a stern Western father figure makes a weaker Japan suffer. Long locates this suffering in the racial humiliation implied by shadowy rooms, grimy objects, and women's dark skin. This is not to say that Tanizaki resists this masochism, but he is the only culturalist writer of the 1930s to expose its mechanism. Long's range of sources in this discussion is dizzying, from Slavoj Žižek to Komori Yoichi to Jacques Lacan and back again, and at times I wished for less, not more. Nevertheless, Long makes an original contribution to our understanding of Tanizaki's writing: she effectively argues that it is a critique, albeit a nuanced one, of modernity itself.

My favorite chapter in the book is chapter 3, "Toward a Mother-Love Worthy of the Name: The Language of Abjection in Arrowroot, Nakagami, and Irigaray." Using Luce Irigaray's observations on the mother's body, Long compares Tanizaki's position toward the maternal realm with the attitude of the much younger Nakagami Kenji (1946-1992). Long argues against Julia Kristeva's notion of abjection because it debases the mother, thus perpetuating the process by which "mother" is erased from the symbolic order. Following Irigaray, Long proposes an alternate role of mother as the element that breaks into the semiotic order through "a relational ethics of skins, membranes, petals, leaves, and finally mucous" (p. 70). In a reading of Tanizaki's novella Yoshinokuzu (Arrowroot, 1931), Long locates "Tanizaki's determination to write a different relation to maternal origin" (p. 83). Here, she productively uses Japanese literature to shift our understanding of psychoanalytic concepts. And herein lies the real strength of the book: instead of moving from West to East in terms of epistemic paradigms, Long makes a move in the opposite direction. Through Tanizaki's reinstatement of the mother, Long also reconsiders an important feminist thinker whose work has at times been criticized for being essentialist and utopian.

Equally instructive is Long's explanation for a truism about Nakagami's work: despite Nakagami's consciousness of the brutal oppression of burakumin—the "polluted" and thus feared class of outcasts—by majority Japanese, his texts are dotted with scenes of the violent subjugation of women. Although Nakagami recognizes the importance of the mother in his...