The ideal woman in Tanizaki Jun’ichirō’s (1886-1965) works. Rethinking views on national Japanese culture

This paper focuses on Tanizaki Jun’ichirō’s views on Japanese aesthetics through the images of ideal women in the writer’s landmark work Each to His Own (蓼食う虫, 1929). This novel was being serialized during twelve months in the newspapers Tōkyō Nichinichi Shimbun and Ōsaka Mainichi Shimbun from 1928 to 1929. The novel is a milestone, for it marks Tanizaki’s transition from the “early creative work”, when he admired Western culture and his ideal woman was a “modern girl”, a follower of Western culture, to the “late creative work”, when Tanizaki Jun’ichirō’s national identity came to the fore. Having realized that the unique home world in which he had lived his whole life might disappear, Tanizaki Jun’ichirō joined the discourse of that time with his ideas of beauty. He used his literature as a tool to disseminate his ideas and to shape national concepts. However, the national question was just purely aesthetic for the writer. The novel reflects both the writer’s personal drama - a rather complicated relationship with his first wife Chiyoko - and his first attempt to demonstrate the loss of interest in Western aesthetics through the protagonist’s loss of sexual attraction to his West-oriented wife. In his essay “Love and Sensuality” (恋愛及び色情, Ren’ai oyobi shikijoū ) written in 1931, in which Tanizaki Jun’ichirō invited the Japanese to rethink their views on the traditional conception of life, he clearly stated that, in Each to His Own , he described his own philosophical ideas and his new feminine ideal of a “doll-like” woman of the past. The novel fits into the general trend of the late 1920s, when the whole Japanese culture had a tendency of a ‘return to Japan’. This is also due to the fatigue caused by the inferiority complex towards the West from which Japan had been suffering for a long time.

Tanizaki Jun’ichirō, Each to His Own, Japanese traditional culture, image of an ideal Japanese woman, female beauty in Japan

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