[The Taisho period (1912–1926) in Japan] was one of reaction to naturalism and to the confessional I-novels; it was characterized by two dominant literary movements, one of the Shirakaba group and the other the so-called aesthetic school. These movements—and the philosophic and aesthetic ideas underlying them—were almost diametrically opposed. The Shirakaba group sought a new sense of life in the limitless expansion of the self and of human possibilities, while the aesthetic school was committed to the pursuit of the beautiful, even to the point of sacrificing social and moral integrity. Yet they were in agreement that literature is an art form and that style, structure, words, and images are at least as important as the content of literary works. Perfection in a work as art, together with or in place of philosophic depth, was a professed goal of most of the writers of this period; this was especially true of the writers of the aesthetic school who were most strongly influenced by [Edgar Allen] Poe. Among them Sato Haruo, Hagiwara Sakutaro, Akutagawa Ryūnosuke, and Tanizaki Junichiro openly acknowledged their indebtedness to Poe, and their works show the depth of his influence. (pp. 83-4)

Students of Tanizaki usually agree that, like other Taisho writers, he began his career under the spell of the West: the influence of Poe, Baudelaire, and Oscar Wilde, among others, is reflected in many of his early works. It is agreed, however, that the influence of the Japanese literature of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, especially the erotic and sadistic stories in Kusazoshi and Kabuki plays, was also strong. According to the orthodox view, the influence of the Western writers became superficial by the end of the Taisho period. Drawn to both East and West, Tanizaki, after a period of severe internal conflict between the two attractions, turned completely to the world of classical Japanese literature and made a conscious artistic endeavor to link his later works with his Japanese heritage. My purpose here is to consider whether the Western influences were indeed superficial and to examine Poe's influence on Tanizaki's later development, when he attempted to create his Japanese Byzantium. (p. 84)

Most of [Tanizaki's works] … were controversial, and critics do not agree in their assessment of them or of Tanizaki himself as a writer; they do agree, however, on the perfection of his novelistic skills in creating a self-sufficient, polished world of beauty. In most of his works, especially those of his middle period, Tanizaki fastidiously excluded the social, economic, and political life of Japan, creating a literary space untouched by the forces of life in modern Japan. Often drawing material from Japanese history or old Japanese legends, he created a "pleasure dome" which is "out of space, out of time."

It is only natural that proletarian writers and such existentialist writers as Oe Kenzaburo criticize the lack of basic ideology and relevance to modern existence in Tanizaki's works. On the other hand, critics like Ito Sei argue that to regard the conditions of the flesh, such as erotic desire for life, as a determining factor in human life is an ideology in its own right, and defend Tanizaki as a writer whose major theme was man's struggle to attain the sense of life at the risk of moral and social integrity. (p. 85)

Tanizaki's creative works can be divided roughly into three periods; the first ends with Some Prefer Nettles in 1928, and the third starts with The Key in 1956. It is in the first period, from the forty-third year of Meiji to the third year of Showa (1910–1928), that Western influences, including that of Poe, were most evident; we can find many themes, expressions, descriptions, and stories reminiscent of Poe and of such writers as Baudelaire, Wilde, Zola, and Thomas Hardy.

Some critics have emphasized the influence of Wilde on Tanizaki, underestimating that of Poe. The importance of Wilde's influence is undeniable. Tanizaki tries to separate art from life, placing art above life. Because of his characters' antimoralistic and antisocial pursuit of sensual pleasure, justified for the sake of artistic creation, the term "diabolism" has been widely applied to Tanizaki's early works. Yet Tanizaki's diabolic aesthetes do not suffer from the severe remorse or pangs of conscience experienced by Dorian Gray. In Tanizaki's works, there is no struggle against conscience, against a firmly established social and religious orthodoxy. (pp. 85-6)

Tanizaki's heroes' diabolic pursuit of sensuous pleasure proves to be a distorted effort to attain a sense of life through the pursuit of unattainable feminine beauty, the pursuit of the absolute. Throughout Tanizaki's works, the search for a sense of life through the masochistic pursuit of an unattainable woman is a major theme. Tanizaki's heroes feel a deep sense of alienation that spurs them to perverted efforts to recover from it. Tanizaki's grotesque expresses these efforts to overcome alienation: it is not merely an exercise in decadent aestheticism. Indeed, the grotesque that expresses the heroes' pursuit is an appropriate style. In Tanizaki, as well as in Poe, the grotesque does not refer merely to this perverted pursuit, but also to the narrative form or perspective, which is ironic and tragicomic. Furthermore, Tanizaki developed, in his later period, his own myth of eternal woman, a myth that justifies the heroes' grotesque efforts at self-recovery. By developing his own myth, Tanizaki created his own world of romanticism. In these respects, Tanizaki's works are fundamentally similar to Poe's.

The major themes of Tanizaki's early works are the fear of death, the sadomasochistic pursuit of feminine beauty, the discovery of perversity or cruelty in human nature, and the relation of art to these themes…. In many of his tales, he describes a fear of persecution, a fear of madness and death. The narrator of "Kyofu" (The Fear, 1913) explains that his heart starts beating rapidly the minute he enters a moving vehicle. The drumming of his heart increases in speed and intensity, and he feels as if all his blood was rushing to his head, with his body about to burst into pieces or his brain into madness. This immediately reminds us of the descriptions in Poe's "The Imp of the Perverse" and "The Tell-Tale Heart," where the narrators burst out into self-destructive confessions of their crimes, urged on by the ever-growing sound of their hearts.

In "Seishun monogatari" (My Adolescent Days, 1932), Tanizaki says that he could not exalt death or madness as did Takayama Chogyu, a romantic writer of a decade earlier; instead, when he read Poe, Baudelaire, Strindberg, and Gorki, anxiety and fear permeated his nervous system, distorting his senses and his emotional responses to things. The fear of the explosion of his body and brain could be ignited at any time and place by the slightest sensory stimulus, for it had no concrete external source. He calls the period in which he suffered from this fear a period of inferno. In many of his tales he describes it in terms of the dizziness felt when standing at the verge of an abyss, a sensation of extreme fear and pain that might culminate in the total loss of his sanity.

The fear is clearly that of death and persecution, yet Tanizaki, unlike Poe, gives death itself a very small role in his works. Furthermore, the fear of death is actually the fear of his own urge toward self-destruction. The fear, therefore, can be called a "pleasurable pain," and its source is entirely internal. The hero's urge toward self-destruction is indeed the work of what Poe called the "imp of the perverse." In fact, to evoke this state of pleasurable pain, of the abysmal terror of self-destruction, is the purpose of the protagonists' diabolic actions in almost all of Tanizaki's works and is their major theme.

This sensation of pleasurable pain is directly related to the other themes of this period, the discovery of the perversity or cruel love of destruction in human nature and the sadomasochistic pursuit of feminine beauty. Many of Tanizaki's tales were obviously inspired by Poe's crime and detective stories, tales in which the heroes commit, with the utmost cruelty, crimes that are almost gratuitous. These tales include "Gold and Silver," "The Criminal," "An Incident at Yanagiyu," and "The Cursed Play."

Many devices and techniques used by Poe appear in these tales. (pp. 86-8)

In most cases, the heroes' extreme sadism, the analytical precision with which they murder and hide the corpse, and their observations on criminal psychology vividly reveal their fascination with evil and gratuitous cruelty and their concern with making murder a work of art. (p. 88)

Yet the sadism of the heroes is often masochistic…. "Hokan" (A Harlequin, 1911), a masterpiece of the early period, is the story of a man who takes uncontrollable pleasure in humiliating himself and in pleasing others by allowing them to control and manipulate him. His effort to exist only in the consciousness of others, in which condition the pain he feels gives him a strong sense of his own self and body, is a classic case of masochism. (pp. 88-9)

The act of evil for evil's sake is as masochistic as it is diabolic: the [hero's] pure evil is directed against himself, to vex his own soul so that he can be immersed in the immediacy of pain and terror. In the spontaneous experience of pain and terror, the nonreflecting consciousness kills the reflecting consciousness and thus the hero is immersed in the sense of himself, of his immediate body and subjectivity. (p. 89)

In [Poe's] "The Premature Burial" and "The Pit and the Pendulum," the heroes, by their own imagination, induce sensations of the utmost terror and pain of death. "A Descent into the Maelström" and "MS. Found in a Bottle" also describe the heroes' experience of the ecstasy and terror of self-annihilation, their experience of an abysmal descent into nothingness. Thus, both in Poe and Tanizaki, the diabolism is actually directed toward the heroes themselves as a method of inducing pain and ecstasy and of intoxicating the reflecting consciousness in the immediacy of pain.

In Tanizaki, the themes of the discovery of perversity in human nature and the masochistic desire for self-destruction are intertwined and are, furthermore, related to his other major theme, the pursuit of the femme fatale. "Bushu-ko hiwa" (Secrets of Lord Bushu, 1931), set in medieval Japan, is the most successful dramatization of the relations among these themes. (p. 90)

In all of Tanizaki's stories in which the fatal woman is the main theme, the heroes are involved in drawing out the diabolic nature of beautiful women, thus molding them into ideal women, black-widow spiders which devour males after sexual ecstasy. The creation of the cruel, beautiful woman is the externalization of the hero's inner desire, and in actuality, she is his puppet. This can be seen most readily in "Chijin no ai" (A Fool's Love, 1924). (p. 91)

The hero of the novel falls in love with a Western-looking waitress and encourages her to be more bold in displaying her beauty and sexual attraction. She begins to have many love affairs, yet the more cruel her treatment of him becomes, the more ecstatic the pleasure he finds in being with her. The creation of the fatal woman in order to be tortured by her is also the main theme of such other major works of the early period as "Shisei" (Tattoo), "Jyotaro" and "Suterareru Made" (Until Forsaken). In the latter period, such works as "Shunkinsho" (A Portrait of Shunkin), "Ashikari" and Futen rojin nikki (The Diary of a Mad Old Man) are only extensions of these early works.

Tanizaki's heroes, however, do not pursue beautiful women for the sake of erotic fulfillment. Rather, they pursue an unattainable absolute, the symbolic essence of feminine beauty. In the early period, the beauty is typically revealed in human flesh, but it is human flesh as an objet d'art which refuses normal erotic communication: Tanizaki's heroes find the essence of feminine beauty in women's feet. (pp. 91-2)

The heroes long for the beauty that rejects them absolutely as ugly and weak, precluding any possibility of normal human relationships. Thus, beauty is elevated to the position of an absolute, an almighty existence…. Tanizaki's characters are involved in such fetishism, besides the involvement in women's feet, as licking a handkerchief dirtied by the woman's mucous, drinking a loved one's urine, and so forth. The pursuit of the unattainable beauty and the pursuit of the ugly are essentially the same …

The fear of death described by Tanizaki's heroes is based on their psychic dread of life, their sense of alienation; their masochism is a means of objectifying their fear. Yet Tanizaki's hero is the creator of the sadistic persecutor; she is the externalization of his inner desire and is almost his double. Thus he is the schemer responsible for the whole situation: he is the persecutor as well as the victim. In this sense, Tanizaki's hero becomes a god, the creator of his own, self-contained world. (p. 92)

[Both] Poe and Tanizaki frequently use the uninvolved, third-person narrator to describe the hero's grotesque effort. In Poe's stories the uninvolved narrator becomes involved. Thus, at the climax, the hero's drama is experienced by the narrator as his inner experience. In the works in which Poe uses a first-person narrator, the hero is split between a rational self and an irrational one; the narrator-hero, representing the rational self, describes the grotesque drama of the irrational self, a drama which the narrator-hero says that he himself finds difficult to comprehend. This skillful use of the narrator is a device to express the ironic, dual perspective inherent in Poe's grotesque, the serious and rational appear comical and absurd, while the mad and perverted appear tragic.

Although Tanizaki uses the uninvolved third-person narrator with great skill, the tales narrated by the hero himself do not always maintain the ironic point of view successfully. The reader is called upon to take the hero's grotesque drama seriously and with sympathy, which immediately raises the question of the drama's social, moral, and ideological relevance. It is only in The Diary of a Mad Old Man that Tanizaki, dramatizing man's tragicomic struggle for life, uses the ironic perspective successfully. In this work he reveals an almost terrifying spirit of irony and self-mockery. In his middle period, however, Tanizaki turned to the world of dream and imagination in his effort to create a self-sufficient romantic world, one that could give structure to his hero's grotesque pursuit of a sense of life.

While Poe had a myth that justified the poet's grotesque endeavor at destructive transcendence through his art, Tanizaki had no such cosmic myth. Tanizaki's heroes, therefore, are not transcendental heroes, but mad aesthetes who indulge in sensuous ecstasy to the point of death. Poe was a romantic who perceived the deterioration of the isomorphic relations between the order of mind and that of the body and who believed in the power of imagination to transcend the phenomenal world to reach a higher level of reality where the split between subject and object is eliminated.

Tanizaki, on the other hand, did not yet have his own myth to explain metaphorically his view of the universe—his view of the source of man's alienation and of the life and task of the artist and his vision of the ideal reality. Although in his youth he defined himself as a romantic writer who believed in the "poetic intuition" which perceives the world beyond phenomenal reality (a world he grasped in Platonic terms), it is difficult to call Tanizaki's early works romantic in the absence of a myth which creates a self-sufficient world of dream and legitimizes the theme of grotesque recovery from alienation. While Poe's mythopoeic thrust to create his own universe resulted in the creation of the beautiful, mathematically balanced universe of Eureka in which the poet is finally absorbed, Tanizaki had to depend on his skill of expression to convince the reader of the validity of his hero's grotesque endeavor. Asking the reader to hold in abeyance the question of morality, Tanizaki sought to appeal only to the reader's aesthetic sense. In this endeavor, the novel was not quite an appropriate form, and in the middle period his works gradually moved toward the world of romance.

While Poe's exploration of the sadomasochistic attempt to attain a sense of life and of the endeavor in grotesque art to induce dreaming consciousness presents features of human experience that are meaningful and interesting from the existential-phenomenological point of view, Poe dramatized them in his own fantasy world. He also had a myth that justified them externally as legitimate endeavors for man's return to Original Unity.

Tanizaki's middle period starts with his awareness of the need to create a self-sufficient world of dream and beauty in which the question of morality and relevance to reality will be temporarily suspended. Without such a world, his exploration of grotesque eroticism might prove to be merely sensational.

This problem concerned all of the writers of the grotesque. Until the middle of the nineteenth century, the grotesque had been considered pejoratively, for it explored the realm of the ugly, the fantastic, and the subconscious, including man's fears and secret desires. During the romantic age, when artists saw the grotesque aspects of objective reality, the grotesque came to be regarded as closely related to the artist's reaction to and conception of reality. Even then, the grotesque was approved only half-heartedly; it was only in the modern period that the grotesque became recognized, through the works of Dostoevski, Kafka, Faulkner, Pinter, and Beckett, among others, as a highly significant symbol, style, form of imagination, and structural basis for literary works. (pp. 95-7)

Tanizaki's turning to the world of classical Japanese culture reflects the same concern as that of the writers of the grotesque with the legitimacy of the grotesque world he creates. It is, like Coleridge's adoption of the medieval ballad form, a device to draw a magic circle around the hero and his exploration. It also reflects his mythopoeic desire to create his own dreamworld, which first became evident at this time.

Some Prefer Nettles, the novel that marks the end of Tanizaki's first period, already presents his effort to draw a magic circle, to create a myth of ideal feminine beauty that would enable him to pursue the theme of the masochistic search for a sense of life as the theme of man's search for unattainable ideal beauty. (p. 97)

Tanizaki came to identify ideal beauty with the beauty of the classical Japanese court lady…. Glimpsed only momentarily, she is inaccessible, a dream woman existing only in one's imagination and separated in time and space. Although the essence of her beauty is also whiteness, it is no longer white flesh, but whiteness itself. Tanizaki's fatal woman thus emerges as an archetypal Japanese court lady as well as an archetypal mother.

There is no doubt that Tanizaki rediscovered the beauty of Japanese culture and literature, yet the claim that Tanizaki, abandoning his Western influences, returned to the classical world is misleading. Instead, Tanizaki created his own dreamworld and eternal woman, as exotic to him as their Western counterparts, out of classical Japanese culture. The court life he presents in "The Mother of Captain Shigemoto" (1949) and the medieval life in "Secrets of Lord Bushu" are distinctively Tanizaki's own creations rather than historically accurate representations. Tanizaki himself explains enviously in "Ave Maria" (1923) that the myth of the eternal woman and the worship of woman do not exist in Japanese culture. Thus he creates his own goddess to rule over his self-sufficient dreamworld, a mythical world or one which functions as a substitute for myth. The eternal mother as goddess, as the symbolic essence of his dreamworld, is most vividly expressed in "The Mother of Captain Shigemoto," the masterpiece of his middle period. Captain Shigemoto's mother, who has lived in his dream, finally appears at the end of the novel shining faintly in the darkness with a circle of light around her. Tanizaki's return was not to classical Japanese culture but to the primordial and infantile area of human consciousness, to the realm of the subconscious and dreams. (pp. 98-9)

Some Prefer Nettles is often considered a dramatization of the conflict between Tanizaki's attraction to the beauty and culture of the West and those of the East. With this novel, the period of Western influence on Tanizaki appears to end, and since his major works all explore the world of classical beauty, critics argue that the Western influence on Tanizaki was not lasting. Rather, however, the novel dramatizes the shift of the hero's pursuit of white flesh to whiteness itself, a shift from the world of reality to the world of romance, to the self-sufficient world of romantic dream. Poe's influence on Tanizaki appears, then, not merely in Tanizaki's early choice of the themes that were to characterize his literary career, but also in the creation of the romantic world that began with this shift. (p. 101)

Tanizaki's early exposure to Poe's world of "negative romanticism," with its central concept of grotesque transcendence, cannot be irrelevant to the ultimate development of his own world of romanticism in the Japanese literary tradition. While Tanizaki's Japanese romantic world is unique, it is not incompatible with the Western romantic tradition. Thus Tanizaki emerges not as a "pagan outcast," but as the legitimate heir to both the Japanese literary tradition and to the Western tradition of romanticism, in both of which the grotesque plays an essential role. (pp. 102-03)

Noriko Mizuta Lippit, "Tanizaki and Poe: The Grotesque and the Quest for Supernal Beauty," in Comparative Literature (© copyright 1977 by University of Oregon; reprinted by permission of Comparative Literature), Vol. XXIX, No. 3, Summer, 1977 (and reprinted in a slightly revised form in his Reality and Fiction in Modern Japanese Literature, M. E. Sharpe Inc., 1980, pp. 82-103).∗