Childhood Years: A Memoir (Japan's Modern Writers) - Softcover

Tanizaki, Junichiro

Softcover

ISBN 10: 4770023227 ISBN 13: 9784770023223

Publisher: Kodansha Amer Inc, 1998

Synopsis

Tanizaki was, in his own words, "spoiled rotten" as a child; and his early gift for getting his own way extended to his career as perhaps Japan's greatest modern novelist. From the first, he ignored the autobiographical Naturalism that was the current literary orthodoxy and declared his devotion to "Art for Art's Sake." In his maturity, he still insisted on the value of true fiction, the pleasure of a good story told for its own sake rather than to make a point, either personal or ideological. Unaffected by shifting fashions, he went on writing, dealing with a few great central themes in a startling variety of styles, from the classical to the modern, and of tones, from the profoundly dark to the comic.

The genres he worked in were also extremely varied: the short story, the novella, the long novel, the drama, and the essay. Within the last category, Tanizaki produced several notable collections of reminiscences--it was as if, after establishing the right of an author to be unrepentingly fictional, he then felt free to train his talents on his own life. Especially in his later years, as he entered his seventies, he looked back on the world of late nineteenth-century Japan--focusing on that modest, close-knit section of Tokyo, with its small shops and family businesses, in which he grew up--and Childhood Years is the result. The main themes of his fiction are echoed in this memoir, with its central figure of his mother, and its foreshadowings of other, more ambiguous feminine presences--murderesses and victims, geisha and "archery-booth girls," and (most ambiguous of all) the male actors who play female roles on the Kabuki stage.

If the well-known Kabuki is here, so too are forms that will be less familiar to Western readers: the sacred kagura dances and the burlesque chaban. Japanese literature is represented, from age-old, half-legendary chronicles through medieval warrior tales, and on to the political novels of the turn of the century. Above all, though, the men and women of Meiji Japan are here, the little known, the famous, and the notorious. All are depicted with the acute observation and vividness of expression so characteristic of Tanizaki. The result is a nostalgic record of great beauty and power, shot through with flashes of the author's rather macabre humor and delight in the grotesque.

About this title

About the Author:

Jun'ichiro Tanizaki was born in central Tokyo in 1886. After becoming an overnight celebrity with his literary debut in 1910, he produced a steady stream of novels, short stories, essays, plays, poetry, and translations for the next fifty-five years. His versatility is further demonstrated by the film scenarios he wrote for a Yokohama studio in 1920-21. The 1923 Tokyo earthquake forced him to move to the Kansai region, where he chose to remain for most of the rest of his life. Trips to Korea and China in 1918 and to Shanghai in 1926 were his only overseas experiences. By 1948, when he completed The Makioka Sisters, he was widely considered the preeminent Japanese novelist. In 1949 he received the Order of Culture, the highest honor the emperor can bestow on an artist.

He married three times; his third wife, Matsuko, shared the last thirty years of his life. Even in his seventies he was still startling readers with audacious fiction like The Key and Diary of a Mad Old Man, and a year before his death in Atami in 1965 he was elected to the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, the first Japanese to be so honored.

Translations of his work began to appear as early as 1917, and by now his novels have been published in at least twenty different languages. Donald Keene's assessment appears to be coming true: "It is likely that if any one writer of the period will stand the test of time and be accepted as a figure of world stature, it will be Tanizaki."

Paul McCarthy, Professor of Comparative Cultures at Surugadai University, has translated Tanizaki's "The Little Kingdom," "Professor Rado," The Gourmet Club, and A Cat, a Man, and Two Women, which won the Japan-America Friendship Commission Prize. He has also translated Takeshi Umehara's Lotus and Other Tales of Medieval Japan and Zenno Ishigami's Disciples of the Buddha.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:

The earthquake struck at around two o'clock in the afternoon when the exchange was very crowded, with groups of rice dealers filling the streets and the shops and offices that lined them. I had just come back from school and was having a dish of sweet bean paste and shaved ice in the kitchen. As soon as I felt the quake, I dashed outside. The streets in the back section of the rice dealers' area, where our shop was, were much narrower than those in other parts; and I was terrified of being crushed if the houses on either side collapsed. I ran for my life to the wide road that separated l-chome and 2-chome and stood right in the middle of the intersection where one turned off on the way to the Tanizaki Printers.

Only then did I notice my mother: had she been with me all along, or had she only now caught up with me? I found her hugging me tightly as we stood there together. The first violent up-and-down movement had ceased, but the ground was still undulating in great, slow waves. From where we stood huddling together, the surface of Ningyo-cho Avenue about one block away seemed to rise and sink, over and over again. My face was pressed against my mother. Her kimono had come open at the neck, and the whiteness of her breasts blocked the fearful scene before me. Suddenly I became aware that I had a writing brush gripped tightly in my right hand. (I had, I know, been eating an ice when the earthquake came and, throwing it down, had dashed out of the house. How, then, did this brush come to be in my hand? Why had I picked it up, and when?...) As we stood in the middle of the intersection, holding on to one another as we swayed back and forth, I began to move the brush, tracing lines in black ink upon my mother's breasts.

About this edition

• Publisher: Kodansha Amer Inc
• Publication date: 1998
• ISBN 10: 4770023227
• ISBN 13: 9784770023223
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 196