The six stories in this collection are broadly representative of Tanizaki Jun’ichirō’s long, varied, and brilliant career. The first two come from 1911, just after the young writer’s debut, and their lush style well represents the tambishugi, or aestheticism, with which he was immediately identified—a kind of belated fin-de-siècle manner. The next three stories date from the period between the mid-1910s and mid-1920s when Tanizaki wrote in a somewhat more restrained, realistic manner and explored themes described by Japanese critics as ero-guro-nansensu: the erotic, the grotesque, and the “nonsensical,” in the sense of wild or black comedy. (“The Two Acolytes” stands somewhat apart from the other two, more typical stories, as does a fantastical work like “The Magician” from the same period.) The last piece dates from 1955, by which time Tanizaki was the grand old man of Japanese letters, with ten active years of writing still before him until his death in 1965. The collection thus spans virtually the whole of the writer’s career.
I will not attempt to summarize each story or subject it to analysis in this short introduction. Instead, I propose to point out certain themes or motifs that run through the collection and indeed through Tanizaki’s entire oeuvre.
The story that lends its title to the collection as a whole is “The Gourmet Club.” Mishima Yukio once famously said that Tanizaki’s fiction was, above all, “delicious,” and an international symposium held some years ago in Venice resulted in a volume of papers entitled A Tanizaki Feast. The man Tanizaki, too, was a gourmet, and at times a gourmand. At various times in his life he thoroughly indulged his taste for Western, Chinese, and Japanese cuisines. According to his late wife Matsuko, when young and in his prime he delighted in the rich sauces of French and Chinese food, while in his later years the simpler, more natural flavors of Japanese cooking had more appeal. In “The Gourmet Club” the hero is the president of a dining club whose members are constantly on the lookout for unusual delicacies to stimulate their jaded palates. He discovers a new form of Chinese cuisine in which even the most repellent things can serve as ingredients and in which the distinction among the foods consumed, the dinnerware, and the hands and fingers of the serving girls becomes, as if by magic, blurred.
Nor is Tanizaki’s interest limited only to the receiving end of the alimentary canal. In “Manganese Dioxide Dreams” the diary writer (whose age, occupation, residence, and relations all mirror the real-life Tanizaki, making this one of the more autobiographical of his writings) meditates on the shape and color of his own feces as they lie revealed to his gaze in the water of his Western-style toilet. The French actress Simone Signoret and an unfortunate court lady of ancient China are among the things that float up in the course of the slightly befuddled old man’s free associations.
Secrecy is another favorite theme. In “The Secret,” the protagonist leads a hidden life in the back streets of downtown Tokyo and disguises his gender under the cosmetics and kimono of a traditional Japanese woman. He becomes involved in a love affair, one of the conditions of which is the secrecy in which the woman concerned envelops herself and her whereabouts; when he penetrates the secret, the charm is lost and the affair ended. “The Children” centers on what is essentially sadomasochistic play among schoolchildren, the setting for which is a forbidden, exotically Western-style house within the grounds of a grand mansion—a zone of secrecy. The Chinese dining club in a central district of Tokyo that the Count happens upon in “The Gourmet Club” is also strictly private, by invitation only, no Japanese allowed; it is only through a peephole in a hidden opium den that he is able to observe the Chinese feast that becomes the inspiration for his own outré banquets. And of course there is Mr. Bluemound, his name a literal translation of the Japanese name Aozuka, suggesting to the reader an affinity with Bluebeard, the murderous nobleman of legend. Mr. Bluemound, too, has his secret room, the revelation of whose contents so horrifies the narrator that he eventually sickens and dies. He reveals the secret he has learned to his young wife in a last will and testament discovered and read posthumously, which forms the bulk of the story.
Obsession, usually erotic, is a key theme in many of Tanizaki’s works—The Key and Diary of a Mad Old Man are good examples from the later period. The obsessive desire is typically directed at a woman who is thereby “objectified.” This is the core of some feminist critiques of Tanizaki’s imaginative world. But one should remember that it is imaginative, the free play of fantasy, and not a prescription for living a balanced, healthy life of mature, mutually fulfilling relationships. Tanizaki delights in pushing the obsessional as far as he can, in the direction of horror or comedy or both. The menu items that appear toward the end of “The Gourmet Club,” Mr. Bluemound’s collection of “Real Yurakos,” and the elderly diarist’s toilet musings in “Manganese Dioxide Dreams” are all examples of that curious mixture of the horrific and the comic. Some readers will no doubt take offense, as did the censors in prewar Japan: portions of “Mr. Bluemound” were excised by government fiat. Tanizaki can hardly have been pleased at having his works cut up by the censors, but he never let it deter him, pursuing his fantasies and obsessions to the limit in his fictional writings.
The one story that is rather untypical of this collection, and is indeed unusual among Tanizaki works, is “The Two Acolytes.” Here two boys engaged in religious training on Mt. Hiei are faced with a choice: to remain on the holy mountain or to enter the world outside, with its pleasures and pains—the ukiyo, which can mean both “the sad world” or “the floating world,” depending on which Chinese characters are used. The former is the more traditional Buddhist interpretation, while the latter suggests the world of the pleasure quarters, actors, geisha, and courtesans—the world depicted in Saikaku’s novels and the wood-block prints of Utamaro. Though from a certain perspective the two readings may come neatly together, with the distinction between the sacred and the profane collapsing, as William R. LaFleur convincingly demonstrates in his writings on Buddhist influences on the traditional literary arts of Japan, in Tanizaki’s story the two realms are seen as clearly distinct alternatives. The older boy, from a less distinguished background, chooses to stay in the outside world and indeed claims that its pleasures surpass those of the Buddhist Paradise; the younger boy, whose “good breeding” is several times remarked upon, elects to stay in the monastery and forgo present pleasures for more lasting joys. The lyrical ending of the story has the faithful acolyte attending on the death of a white bird, who loved him vainly in a former life as an Indian woman but will eventually be united with him spiritually in the Pure Land. It is hard to relate this to most of Tanizaki’s other writings, but perhaps it is an imaginative means of working out, many years later, a crisis the adolescent Tanizaki underwent. He was very much influenced by a teacher whose interests were philosophic and religious, and at one time he planned to pursue those paths. In time, though, he came to realize that his own destiny was tied to the world of beauty, as both the object of sensuous desire and the subject of aesthetic endeavor. In terms of the story, he made the choice of the older of the two acolytes, leaving the holy mountain for “the floating world” outside. In this story, he seems to pay tribute to the part of himself that might have chosen the other path.
A few remarks about Japanological matters seem in order. The ages of Tanizaki’s characters are given in the traditional kazoedoshi count, which means that they are one or two years older than they would be by Western count. The reader should mentally subtract one or two years (it is impossible to say which without knowing birth dates) from their ages as given in the text to arrive at a Western approximation. Japanese names appear in the Japanese order, with surnames preceding personal names. The names of Buddhist bodhisattvas are given in their Japanese form in “The Two Acolytes”—thus, Kannon rather than Avalokiteśvara and Monju rather than Manjuśri—since these are the forms that would seem natural to the characters themselves. On the other hand, in “The Secret,” where Buddhist references are intended to exoticize the protagonist’s surroundings, and he himself has no interest in them as objects of religious devotion, they have been rendered in more recondite Sanskrit form.
Finally, on a personal note, Anthony H. Chambers and I have been planning some sort of Tanizaki collaboration for many years; this collection of translated stories is the fruit of those plans. The editorial work of Stephen Shaw and Moriyasu Machiko on the original edition of this work was invaluable, and we gratefully acknowledge it. We are grateful also to the editorial staff at University of Michigan Press for additional editing in this new edition. We would both like to dedicate this volume to Howard S. Hibbett and the late Edward G. Seidensticker, illustrious translators of Tanizaki and our mutual mentors and friends.
Paul McCarthy
February 2001/March 2016
Tokyo