The choice of the Japanese themselves
Francis King
CHILDHOOD YEARS: A MEMOIR by Junichiro Tanizaki Collins, £15, pp.250 Ask a westerner to name the greatest Japanese novelist of the last 50 years and it is probable that — if he has any opinion at all, which is unlikely — he will reply Yukio Mishima. Put the same question to a Japanese and it is no less probable that he will reply Junichiro Tanizaki. The influ- ences — Wilde, Huysmans, Gide, Proust, Dostoevsky — which ingratiate Mishima. with his western readers are precisely those which alienate him from his Japanese ones, Tanizaki, the Japanese often tell one — as they also tell one of Yasunari Kawabata, winner of the 1968 Nobel Prize — is a truly Japanese writer, whereas Mishima, for all his strenuous posturings as a champion of samurai values, is seen as a mongrel.
Near the close of a long life (1886-1965) during which he turned out novels, plays, essays, reminiscences and critical articles with the perseverance and stamina of an Anthony Burgess, Tanizaki looked back, in the book under review, on the period of the late 19th century when he had grown up, nervy, self-willed and cossetted, in a middle-class family in Tokyo. The problem (as his excellent American translator Paul McCarthy points out in his introduction) is that, so exact are all the details and so precocious the child's sensibility, that one can never be sure to what extent the author is remembering a vanished world and to what extent creating one. So much Japanese writing, whether autobiography or novel, is thus situated in a tantalising no man's land where fact and fiction merge, as in some waking dream.
McCarthy writes of 'an episodic, un- structured quality which may disconcert the reader'. He ascribes this in part to the fact that, like so many books by eminent authors in Japan, Childhood Years was first written for serialisation; and in part to the Japanese tradition of zuihitsu or 'fol- lowing the pen'. But in fact there is considerable artistry in the way in which Tanizaki seems to be reminiscing at ran- dom and yet succeeds in producing a totally integrated, perfectly proportioned work of art. It is as though a fragile, rudderless boat, at the mercy of every whim of wind and tide, nonetheless, by some miracle, unerringly reached its haven, The Meiji Japan described by Tanizaki is far more remote from modern Japan than the late Victorian age from our own. The streets through which Tanizaki walked as a child have been long since erased to make room for high-rise apartments, offices and motorways. Even such treasured posses- sions as letters from schoolfellows and schoolmasters, books by admired contem- poraries and his own manuscripts were lost in the horrific fire consequent on the Great Kanto Earthquake of 1923. Often one has the impression that, by so meticulously naming these vanished streets and build- ings, Tanizaki was striving somehow to obtain for them a physical resurrection. Unfortunately, this process — which im- pels Tanizaki to record, for example, that Mitsubishigahara has now become 'the present-day Marounouchi high-rise dis- trict' or that 'the Haibara stationery shop was then located on Kaiunbashi Avenue' — is as likely to be as tedious to English readers who have never lived in Tokyo as would be topographical details about 19th- century Kensington to Japanese who have never lived in London. Similarly, although Tanizaki has much that is interesting to record about his visits to the Kabuki Theatre in its tastelessly lavish heyday, one soon wearies of learning that this or that actor played this or that role or inherited this or that name from an illustrious predecessor.
The book is most fascinating when, no doubt adroitly mixing fact and invention, Tanizaki produces what is in effect a short story. One such short story, delicate and poignant, is about the schoolmaster under whose tutelage the youthful Tanizaki first began to write. The man, unhappy and restless, drifted out of teaching and so out of Tanizaki's life. Later, in early adult- hood, Tanizaki was seized with a desire to see him again and tracked him down to the small, shabby house in which, a consump- tive, he lived with his still beautiful mother. Later still, Tanizaki learned that the former teacher and his mother, both then mortally ill, had spent their last weeks lying side by side on their sick beds in their wretched little house, the son surviving the mother by only a few days. Another such short story is of a classmate, who although coming from a family no superior to that of any other boy and although not conspic- uously gifted with intelligence or physical strength, nonetheless exerted such a domination over his peers that he became, in effect, Shogun within their small world.
Hardly less fascinating are the revela- tions about the structure and workings of a Japanese family. The author's father was not born a Tanizaki but was adopted into the family on his marriage to a Tanizaki daughter. Two of the author's brothers were sent away to foster-parents in the country almost as soon as they were born, and he was never again to see them or even to have any contact with them. When Tanizaki pere, always subordinate to his beautiful, remote and strong-willed wife, fell on hard times, his close relatives unquestioningly accepted the obligation to see that he and his family never wanted.
Sexual themes which obsessed the novel- ist in his later years are here fitfully adumbrated, as the young Tanizaki, re- turning home in the dark, becomes aware of the presences of pederasts eager for a pick-up; as he hears of a geisha who stabs her lover to death; or as he spies on the activities of prostitutes in charge of archery stalls near the family printing press.
The book, as I have indicated, has its wearisome stretches; and it would have benefited from notes to explain some of its more abstruse references. But by so truth- fully and so tenderly evoking both his youthful self and all those — family, teachers, friends — who helped to form him, Tanizaki has produced a classic of autobiography.
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