Stories by a Japanese master
THE SIREN’S LAMENT
Essential stories
JUN’ICHIRŌ TANIZAKI
Translated by Bryan Karetnyk 192pp. Pushkin. Paperback, £12.
ONE OF THE most important benchmarks in the career of the novelist Haruki Murakami, on his way to becoming the world-renowned figure he is today, was his receipt in 1985 of the Jun’ichirō Tanizaki prize for his novel Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World. Named in honour of a novelist who had rejected the autobiographical mainstream of Japanese fiction in favour of wholly imagined fictional worlds, the award was well suited to Murakami, who told an interviewer at the time that there was nothing he enjoyed so much as the process of describing with ever finer precision the details of a thing that does not exist.
As gripping as Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World might be for its storytelling and its vivid descriptions of golden-coated unicorns and the old dreams stored in their skulls, no one would ever suspect it of being autobiographical, as can be said of these three early stories of Tanizaki’s, featuring a mermaid, an imaginary Chinese beast known as a qilin (the same colourful creature for which Kirin beer is named) and a string of bloody murders committed amid “the culture of geisha and courtesans, gangsters and cut-throats” in Edo-period Japan.
The qilin appears only briefly in the first story, “The Qilin”, as one element in a dazzling landscape of exotic Chinese sensuality that culminates in “a haunting hellscape fit to rival any nightmare”, as the solemn virtues of Confucius succumb to the sadistic charms of an evil seductress. Tanizaki’s lush prose, which teeters on the borderline of self-parody, makes inordinate demands on the translator, to which Bryan Karetnyk responds with impressive stylistic command. Indeed, this tale and the title piece comprise a stylistic tour de force. All three stories are “essential [Tanizaki] in terms of their exuberant, unflinching exploration of humanity’s darkest impulses and desires ...”, and Karetnyk captures the exuberance both as translator and commentator.
We know from the title of “Killing O-Tsuya” that the central female character is to be killed, but we are kept guessing until the last of its 105 pages exactly how and by whom this is to be accomplished. The piece is largely a prose recreation of a traditional Edo-era kabuki or bunraku puppet theatre play in which lovers flee the social restraints that keep them apart until they can do nothing but take their own lives together. Lest we miss the point, Tanizaki has O-Tsuya say, in a typical lovers’ travel scene (michiyuki), “What a lovely sound that bell makes! It’s
