SOURCE: "Tanazaki and Poe: The Grotesque and the Quest for Supernal Beauty," in Comparative Literature, Vol. XXIX, No. 3, Summer, 1977, pp. 221-40.

[In the following excerpt, Mizuta Lippit analyzes the thematic and stylistic influence of Edgar Allan Poe on Tanizaki 's short fiction.]

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.

Tanizaki Junichiro, one of the major modern Japanese writers, was born in 1886 in the old section of Tokyo and died in 1965 at the age of 79. He left behind thirty volumes of collected works which include novels, plays, tales, essays, and three versions of his translation into modern Japanese of The Tale of Genji. Such works as A Fool's Love, Some Prefer Nettles, The Makioka Sisters, The Key, and The Diary of a Mad Old Man were translated into English, and some were long-standing best sellers in the United States. The western reader will remember him best for the controversy aroused by The Key (1956), the sensual story of a perverted old man who schemes to throw his wife into the arms of his young assistant in order to arouse his ebbing sexual interest. In The Diary of a Mad Old Man and Seventy-Nine-Year-Old Spring, written following The Key, Taniazki turns to the theme of perverted eroticism. These erotic books, dealing with man's carnal desire and desperate effort to retain his waning sexual force in old age, have been criticized for approaching pornographic literature.

Most of his works, in fact, 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 ōe 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. With critical assessment so polarized and many critical questions unresolved Tanizaki will no doubt continue to be the subject of many critical studies in the future.

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 43rd year of Meiji to the 3rd 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 Wilder'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 serve 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.

In Taisho Japan there was no orthodoxy of religion nor was there a fully developed and established bourgeoisie against whose moral principles and hypocrisy writers had to rebel. Above all, the writers lived in a protected literary circle called Bundan, a greenhouse in which they were free to experiment with any new foreign ideas. Tanizaki's famous and quite autobiographical work, "The Sorrow of the Pagan Outcast" ("Itansha no Kanashimi," 1917), in which the hero sadistically ignores the affections of his family and friends in order to be true to his artistic sensibility and creative urge, appears to be the puerile rebellion of an adolescent; likewise, the masochistic self-torture which he calls "the sorrow of the pagan outcast," appears quite sentimental, since the orthodoxy against which he rebels at the risk of self-destruction is in fact quite obscure.

Instead, 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 sado-masochistic pursuit of feminine beauty, the discovery of perversity or cruelty in human nature, and the relation of art to these themes. As a young man Tanizaki himself suffered from a strange nervous condition manifested in sudden seizures of fear, especially fear of trains. In many of his tales, he describes this as a fear of persecution, a fear of madness and death. The narrator of "The Fear" ("Kyōfu," 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 were 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 selfdestructive confessions of their crimes, urged on by the ever growing sound of their hearts.

In "My Adolescent Days" ("Seishun Monogatari," 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, including the Dupin-narrator relationship later popularized in that of Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson. 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. The discovery of one's own perversity is related to the theme of the double; Tanizaki wrote several tales, such as "A Story of Tomoda and Matsunaga," in which he deals explicitly with the double and doppelgänger.

Yet the sadism of the heroes is often masochistic. In "The Devil at Noon" ("Hakūchyukigo," 1918), the hero, after witnessing a grotesque murder carried out by a beautiful woman, offers to be murdered by the same woman. He asks a friend to witness the scene of his own cruel death. "A Harlequin" ("Hokan," 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. The hero feels a strong sense of himself, a unity of consciousness, by existing only in the other's image of himself.

Tanizaki's grotesque world of perversity is obviously similar to Poe's. In the latter's crime stories, the heroes commit sadistic, gratuitous crimes which are often followed by self-destructive confessions. Such crimes appear in "William Wilson," "The Tell-Tale Heart," "The Black Cat," "The Cask of Amontillado," and "The Imp of the Perverse." In "The Black Cat," the hero perceives the ominous otherness in the cat's eyes and murders it brutally. The same pattern appears in "The Tell-Tale Heart," in which the hero is provoked to cruel murder by the old man's vulture-like eye. The heroes of "The Black Cat" and "The Imp of the Perverse" explain their acts of perverse evil as the result of the human impulse for self-torture.

Yet I am not more sure that my soul lives, than 1 am that perverseness is one of the primitive impulses of the human heart. . . This spirit of perverseness, I say, came to my final overthrow. It was this unfathomable longing of the soul to vex itself— to offer violence to its own nature—to do wrong for the wrong's sake only—that urged me to continue and finally to consummate the injury I had inflicted upon the un-offending brute.

The act of evil for evil's sake is as masochistic as it is diabolic: the 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. The criminal action is an extreme method the hero adopts to cultivate artificial sensuous intoxication through self-torture. Murder is an attempt to eliminate the split in his consciousness caused by the ominous eye, to restore the wholeness of his consciousness.

In "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 selfdestruction are intertwined and are, furthermore, related to his other major theme, the pursuit of the femme fatale. "Secrets of Lord Bushu" ("Bushuko Hiwa," 1931), set in medieval Japan, is the most successful dramatization of the relations among these themes. One night in his youth, Lord Bushu was taken by a devilish old lady to the attic of a castle. There, women were preparing severed enemy heads to be brought before the lord of the castle for identification. In the dark room filled with a nauseating odor, he had the sensation of looking deeply into an abyss which had suddenly opened in his mind, and felt dizzy with terror and expectation. The young boy was particularly struck by the beauty of the hands of one beautiful young girl, hands which handled the heads. A faint smile appeared on her face when she handled an especially ugly head, one without the nose, and looking at her, he felt himself in an extreme state of excitement that led him to a hitherto unexperienced ecstasy. The ugliness and the grotesqueness of the severed head brought out the sublimity in the girl's cruel beauty and he found himself wishing earnestly that he were that severed head. He later finds that the beautiful wife of his master is secretly planning to remove her husband's nose as an act of revenge. Discovering this secret wish of the lady, Lord Bushu swears to be her servant and succeeds in rendering her husband an ugly cripple without a nose. He has intense moments of ecstasy when he imagines the man with an ugly, noseless face making love to a beautiful woman.

Here the sadism of the lord is actually masochistic, and it becomes clear that the three major themes of this early period—the fear of death, the discovery of the abyss (the perversity of one's own nature), and the fear of absorption in it—are directly related to Tanizaki's heroes' masochistic pursuit of the femme fatale. Indeed, the pursuit of the femme fatale is itself, for Tanizaki, a theme which deals with man's urge for self-torture and self-destruction. In "The Devil" ("Akuma," 1912), the hero is tortured by a physically attractive and cruel woman, while at the same time threatened by a mysterious, devilish man who swears to take revenge on him because of his relationship with her. Although extremely frightened by him, the hero continues his self-humiliating pursuit of the woman. In "The Devil: A Sequel" ("Zoku Akuma," 1913), he encourages the man to murder him and is indeed murdered by him.

Both the woman and the man are devils, yet the true devil is the "imp of the perverse," his self-destructive urge. Both are only agents of his inner desire, and he deliberately manipulates them to torture himself. 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 A Fool's Love (Chijin no Ai, 1924).

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 "Tattoo" ("Shisei"), Jyōtar and "Until Forsaken" ("Suterareru Made") In the later period, such major works as "A Portrait of Shunkin" ("Shunkinshō"), Ashikari and The Diary of a Mad Old Man (Futen Rojin Nikki) 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 object d'art which refuses normal erotic communication: Tanizaki's heroes find the essence of feminine beauty in women's feet.

In "Tattoo," the author says that the beautiful is the strong and the ugly the weak. 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. This is inevitable, for the pursuit of beauty, like the commitment to evil, is self-torture. 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.

Tanizaki separates art from life and from morality (goodness) in order to associate beauty with evil. In "Unicorn" ("Kirin," 1910), which shows the strong influence of Oscar Wilde, Tanizaki presents a Chinese emperor who is torn between his aspiration to become a virtuous ruler and his desire to become a slave to his beautiful and brutal empress; he finally yields to the empress, whom he calls the devil. The pursuit of pleasure and beauty must lead to the pursuit of evil, for the true pleasure the heroes seek is that of self-persecution. 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.

In both Tanizaki and Poe, art plays a significant role in this grotesque endeavor to restore the sense of life. We have seen that the creation of an ideal fatal woman is itself an art. In "Tattoo" (1910), a sadistic young tattooer, who enjoys watching the pain he causes his customers, finds an innocent young girl with beautiful feet in whom he recognizes hidden powers of evil. Pouring all his psyche into his art, he tattoos on her back an enormous female black widow spider, thus transforming her into a diabolical woman. She then declares that the tattooer will be her first victim. Here it is the tattooer's art that turns the innocent girl into a diabolical woman, thus fulfilling his secret masochistic desire to be devoured by a beautiful and cruel woman. Art is both the secret agent for creating evil and the means of inducing a masochistically ecstatic state of consciousness.

The similarity to Poe's art here is obvious, although in Poe's case the diabolical women do not have the same fleshly eroticism. Poe's dreamers create their own "bower of dreams," the "arabesque" room, by decorating it with their art of interior decoration. The arabesque room is meant to induce a dreaming consciousness in the inhabitant's mind; there he indulges in his grotesque dreams of transcendence by destroying his own and his lover's physical being or sanity. The agents of the hero's grotesque imagination, evoked by his art, are Poe's vampiric women with supernal beauty.

The similarity and difference between the concepts of art of the two authors can best be illustrated by comparing Tanizaki's "The Golden Death" (1914) with Poe's "The Domain of Arnheim"; "The Golden Death" is almost entirely based on Poe's tale. In both tales, the narrator tells of his friend, extravagantly rich and poetic in nature, who attempts the creation of an earthly paradise. In both tales the narrator's visit to the paradise forms the climax, and in both paradises the narrator finds that the original nature has been transformed by art, creating an extremely bizarre and bewildering earthly paradise, that is, a grotesque and arabesque one. It was both Poe's and Tanizaki's pleasure dome, which their art, by correcting nature, created. For both writers, art proves to be superior to nature; it is not nature but art that saves the heroes.

In Poe's "The Domain of Arnheim," the narrator's visit to the paradise strongly suggests his actual dreaming. The river journey is actually an inner journey, the imaginative fulfillment of his dream. At the end of his journey, the "arabesque canoe" which had taken the narrator to the inner gate of the paradise descends rapidly into a huge amphitheater. This tale, like, "The Fall of the House of Usher" and in fact like most of Poe's tales, is a dramatization of the myth he presents in Eureka. Eureka presents Poe's myth of the fall of man and nature from the Original Unity—primordial nothingness—and their return through self-annihilation and the destruction of earthly reality. The poet in Eureka is endowed with the power to initiate the return movement to Original Unity. The task of Poe's artists is to dream of glorious, "golden" death, to convert the void into a space filled with meaning.

The grotesque and arabesque are for Poe a means of entering into a darkly radiant world of dreams through destruction of the body and of reality. As Poe's keen irony dramatizes in his tales, this attempt at grotesque transcendence appears mad and comical from the perspective of rational intelligence. Poe's ironic grotesque presents the grotesque, transcendental hero as both tragic and comic, as both Eureka's archetypal poet and an insane, perverted man.

In "The Golden Death" the end of the hero's dream is also death. Yet the purpose of his art is not to cause death itself, but to bring about a state of extreme sensuous intoxication, so extreme as to risk self-destruction. Tanizaki's paradise is more voluptuous and erotic than Poe's, filled with the statues of centaurs, animals, and beautiful naked women. In the midst of the ecstasy created by the effect of the paradise, the hero dies, covering his entire body with golden powder. He himself becomes a most glorious, shining part of his paradise, a work of art.

The narrators of both tales are objective observers who witness the heroes' grotesque endeavors to create their own paradises. While Poe's narrator gradually becomes involved in the drama of the hero and at the end becomes almost his double, Tanizaki's narrator remains a rational man who escapes from the intoxicating effect of the paradise. Although he calls the hero a great artist, the narrator maintains the distance between the rational reader and the grotesque hero. In Tanizaki too, the dual or ironic point of view which regards the hero both as absurd and mad and as a positive artist is present.

Indeed, 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 sado-masochistic 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, in my opinion, 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 is only in the modern period that the grotesque becomes 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. Poe, by placing the origin and function of the grotesque in his romantic myth, was the first writer to clarify the link between Gothic terror and the romantic quest, thus integrating Gothic literature into the tradition of western romanticism. The idea of grotesque, destructive transcendence occupies the central place in his myth.

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. In his early writings, beautiful, diabolic women were the object of the hero's desire and the hero wanted to be tortured by them. Tanizaki describes the essence of such women as "white flesh." In this period, the woman is a living creature with white flesh, and it is the beauty and pleasure of the flesh itself that intoxicates the hero. Yet gradually, this white flesh is transformed into a white woman, an eternal woman who becomes the object of the hero's aspiration.

The eternal woman is first of all unreachable. In "The Sorrow of the Mermaid" ("Ningyo no Nageki," 1919), Tanizaki says that the mysterious beauty of the mermaid, a beauty that absorbs the whole existence of the hero, is fully revealed in her immense, unfathomable eyes. Her "divine orbs" look as if they are gazing at eternity from the depth of her soul. The reader will be reminded of Poe's description of Ligeia's eyes, eyes which make the hero feel the approach of the full knowledge of eternity. The mermaid is unattainable for human beings, but she is the only source of excitement for the hero, who is tired of all the pleasures of this world. This unattainable beauty gradually takes a more distinct form in Tanizaki's later works as both the beauty of eternal maternity, from which the hero is alienated, and that of the classical Japanese court lady hidden behind a thick screen.

By identifying the fatal woman as a mother figure, and transforming the hero's masochistic longing for the fatal woman into man's longing for his lost mother, Tanizaki explains the origin of the hero's alienation and gives universality and human relevance to his hero's masochistic drama. Poe's longing for his mother and for a mother figure is well known. So is Tanizaki's attachment to his own mother, whom he describes as a beautiful woman. Yet unlike Poe, Tanizaki's creation of eternal motherhood and its beauty is a conscious literary device; Tanizaki as a man evidently did not suffer from a mother complex. The essence of unattainable feminine beauty is symbolized in a persona of a mother figure.

At the same time, Tanizaki came to identify ideal beauty with the beauty of the classical Japanese court lady, whose white face glows faintly in a dark, screened room like the fluorescent glow of fireflies at night. 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.

Some Prefer Nettles (Tadekuu Mushi, 1928) explains how this autonomous dreamworld is created. The protagonist Kaname is torn between his attraction to a Eurasian prostitute, who powders her legs to make them completely white, and his father-in-law's old-fashioned, doll-like mistress, who is carefully groomed to suit the old man's anachronistic taste. In this transitional novel, the hero is torn between his desire for white flesh and his longing for whiteness, the eternal beauty of woman.

With his mistress, Ohisa, Kaname's father-in-law lives an aesthete's life in complete retirement, re-creating a type of life of old Edo. They frequent the Bunraku theater and Kaname, while watching the white face of a crying doll move faintly across a distant stage, comes to realize that the essence of Ohisa's beauty is that eternalized by the Bunraku puppet. Tanizaki writes:

The Ohisa for whom his secret dream searched might not be Ohisa at all, but another, a more Ohisa-like Ohisa. And it might even be that this latter Ohisa was no more than a doll, perhaps even now quiet in the dusk of an inner chamber behind an arched stage doorway. A doll might do well enough, indeed.

After this novel, Tanizaki turned to the world of classical literature and beauty and recreated his ideal feminine beauty in historical figures and in historical settings. Such masterpieces as Yoshinokuzu, Ashikari, "A Portrait of Shunkin," "The Story of a Blind Man" ("Mōmoku Monogatari"), The Mother of Captain Shigemoto, "The Bridge of Dreams" ("Yume no ukihashi") were written one after another.

In these novels, the desire for white flesh disappears almost completely (although still lurking below the surface) and the hero's longing for the essence of feminine beauty is dramatized as his longing for an unattainable mother figure or for a superior woman with classic Japanese beauty. The hero's self-torture, born out of his longing for the unattainable, is intense, yet by fathoming this pain, the hero obtains a deep, soul-satisfying pleasure, a complete ecstasy. The eternal women in these stories are only extensions of the beautiful and cruel women of supernal beauty who tortured the heroes in the early works. Thus Tanizaki created his own world of romance by creating his own romantic myth of supernal beauty. Tanizaki also developed stories of sado-masochistic torture in historic Japanese settings, using the rich tradition of the grotesque in Japanese literature.

Poe's supernal beauty is also unattainable. Poe's myth of the Poet's return to the original unity presents a drama of the Poet in search of the beauty which exists only in the original paradise, the origin of life itself. Poe's ideal woman is doomed to die. Both Ligeia and Eleonora, whose beauty symbolizes man's original state of harmony and his aspiration for it, die and thus become unattainable for the heroes. They may even have existed only in their dreams. Following their aspiration for supernal beauty, the heroes enter the path to self-annihilation, returning to the original condition of nothingness.

Supernal beauty is attained only through self-destruction. The grotesque in Poe is a symbol of decadent human nature and reality, the result of the Fall, as well as a symbol which points towards transcendence of the decadent. In Tanizaki too, the grotesque serves not merely to induce sensuous pleasure, but as a means of entering his dreamworld, of returning home. It is a means of the hero's assuring his sense of life, a sense which he cannot obtain in the modern, industrial world. The origin and function of Tanizaki's grotesque, too, are legitimized by his creation of a romantic world of dream.

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, as I have noted, 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.

Tanizaki was fascinated by the Gothic themes presented in the writings of Baudelaire, Wilde, and Poe, such as the ties between love and cruelty, pleasure and pain, and domination and humiliation, and tried to dramatize them in his own language and in the natural settings of Japanese life. Tanizaki's later turning to the world of classical beauty did not mean that he had discarded these themes and western influences. On the contrary, he developed these same themes more fully and uniquely within the tradition of Japanese culture.

More importantly, Tanizaki developed the Gothic themes into romantic themes: Tanizaki's insistent dramatization of man's sense of self-estrangement from "home," of his vision of and aspiration for eternal femininity, and of his grotesque, desperate effort to regain it, finally results in the creation of a self-contained, romantic world of his own. Based on Japanese tradition, Tanizaki created his own literary space and his own myth of the ideal woman to enable himself to develop his Poesque romantic theme of the self-destructive pursuit of a sense of life.

Tanizaki's literary world develops, therefore, from a mere description, however interesting, of man's perverted effort to attain a sense of life, a world that reflects his Edo taste or Gothic taste, to a romantic world in which man's alienation from the original harmony and his struggle to regain it become a major theme. The grotesque is not only integrated into his romanticism, but also emerges as a positive, although paradoxical, symbol which points toward the ideal reality. Poe's influence on the formation of his world is significant—especially Poe's concept of supernal beauty, his hero's tragicomic drama of search for it, and the role of the grotesque in this drama.

Toward the end of his life, Tanizaki returned to present reality from the world of romance and seemed to resume his earlier pursuit of the theme of erotic desire for white flesh, especially in The Key and The Diary of a Mad Old Man. Yet this time the heroes are old men, nearing death, who have already lost their sexual power. Their longing for white flesh is symbolic and not physical; the white flesh is almost a symbol of desire for life itself. Their longing for erotic desire is actually a longing for a lifegiving force.

In Tanizaki's later works, eros, life, and death are linked to each other; life can be experienced only as a sense of life, and in man's pursuit of a sense of life he encounters the terror of death. Eros is a beautiful, sublime, and grotesque life-force, which brings life to death. In the old men's desperate, masochistic, erotic desires, Tanizaki presents man's tragicomic, grotesque yet sublime struggle for life. This is essentially the same struggle Poe dramatized in his tales of the grotesque and systematized in his romantic myth. Tanizaki proves in these novels that the themes which preoccupied him in his early days were indeed his own. 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.