I want you to imagine a specific kind of artist.
Imagine someone who builds this beautiful, just
pristine house. They spend years perfecting every
detail, the architecture, the lighting, the furniture.
Okay. And then the moment it's finished, they
invite everyone over, hand out sledgehammers
and say, okay, let's smash it to pieces just
to see what the rubble looks like. That is a...
a pretty destructive image. It is, but it feels
so appropriate for the man we are talking about
today. We are diving into the life and mind of
Junichiro Tanizaki. And if you think you know
Japanese literature, if you're picturing, you
know, quiet tea ceremonies and cherry blossoms
falling gently on the water, you really need
to buckle up. Yeah, that's not what we're getting
here. Not at all. Because Tanizaki is the guy
who brings the spiders, the foot fetishes, and
the psychological warfare to the tea ceremony.
He absolutely disrupts the tranquility. I mean,
Tanizaki is a figure of massive contradictions.
he's a paradox wrapped in a kimono sitting in
a western style chair it's it's a lot to unpack
a paradox is a good word for it it really is
because on one side you have this writer who
is just completely obsessed with the shocking
and we're talking about um destructive erotic
obsessions sadomasochism and stories where beauty
isn't just pretty it's this demonic force that
completely ruins men's lives which sounds more
like the plot of a pulp more novel honestly exactly
it has that gritty psychological edge but then
on the other side of that same coin you have
the exact same man writing these incredibly subtle
high art portrayals of traditional family dynamics
he becomes the great defender of the fading beauty
of old japan right the guy writing about shadows
the guy who writes entire treatises on the nuance
of shadows and the aesthetic value of a dim room
It really feels like we are talking about two
different people, but we aren't. It's all Jinachiro
Tanizaki. And he's not some fringe figure, right?
We aren't talking about some underground cult
author that only a few people have read. Oh,
far from it. He is one of the big three post
-war Japanese writers, right alongside Yasunori
Kawabata and Yukio Mishima. He was a literary
giant, an absolute pillar. In fact, he was one
of the six authors on the final shortlist for
the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1964. The final
shortlist. The final six. And he might very well
have won it, too, had he not passed away the
following year. So we're talking high stakes,
high art, and very low primal urges. Yeah. That's
the mix we're dealing with. That is the perfect
summary. And the mission for this deep dive,
I think, is to figure out how this guy ticked.
We want to understand how a man who started his
career as a Western -obsessed mohime, I mean,
wearing suits, watching movies, living in a European
-style house, how did he transform into the ultimate
guardian of Japanese aesthetics? And we're going
to find that the answer, strangely enough, lies
in trauma, specifically geological trauma. Earthquakes.
The earthquakes. You absolutely cannot understand
Tanizaki's brain without understanding the ground
literally shaking beneath his feet. And on top
of that... We have to unpack the scandalous aspects
of his personal life, including a wife swap incident
that honestly makes modern celebrity gossip look,
well, tame. It's unbelievable. It sounds like
something he would have written, but it actually
happened. I still can't believe that part is
real, but we will get there. Let's rewind the
clock first. Let's go back to the origin story.
Okay. Junichiru Tanizaki, born July 24, 1886,
Nihonbashi, Tokyo. What kind of world is he stepping
into? well he's born into the Meiji era which
is a time of just massive massive change in Japan
The country is modernizing at a breakneck speed.
But his immediate surroundings are very rooted
in the merchant class. His family was actually
doing quite well when he was born. They were
well off. For a time, yes. His grandfather had
established a printing press, and his uncle owned
it. So there's this connection to ink, paper,
and the written word right from the very beginning
of his life. And from what I've read in his memoir,
Childhood Years, or Yushi Jidai, he wasn't exactly
a scrappy street kid fighting for scraps. Not
at all. Not even close. He openly admits to having
a pampered upbringing. He was the young master.
He was spoiled, indulged, and very, very protected.
And I think that's a crucial detail because when
you are that sheltered, the outside world can
seem absolutely terrifying. A fragile bubble.
A very fragile bubble. And for Tanizaki, that
terror became very real, very quickly. The bubble
burst. It burst in two very distinct ways. First,
financially. As he grew older, the family fortune
just... That's a classic literary trope, isn't
it? The fall of the great house. It is, and he
lived it firsthand. It got bad enough that he
had to move out of his family home and live in
another household as a tutor just to get by.
Wow. Yeah. He eventually clawed his way into
the prestigious Tokyo Imperial University in
1908 and the literature department. But he had
to drop out in 1911. He simply couldn't pay the
tuition. So he goes from the pampered prince
to the dropout tutor. That's a massive blow to
the ego for anyone I'd imagine. It is a huge
psychological shock. But the second trauma was
more visceral and it happened much earlier. 1894,
the Meiji Tokyo earthquake. He would have been
just a child then, eight years old. Exactly eight
years old. And his childhood home was destroyed
in that quake. Now, for a child who is already
a bit sensitive and pampered, this is completely
cataclysmic. I can't even imagine. Tanizaki later
attributed his lifelong pathological fear of
earthquakes to this specific moment. When you
say pathological, you mean, what, he was just
jumpy? I mean, he was paralyzed by it. Underly
terrified. Throughout his life, friends reported
that he would freeze up at the slightest tremor.
Even a truck rumbling by outside could set him
off. OK, so that's deep seated. It's very deep
seated. And this fear is so important because
it sets up a psychological baseline for him.
The world is unstable. The ground you stand on
literally and metaphorically can open up and
swallow you at any moment. Nothing is permanent.
So we have a young man who is financially humbled.
terrified of nature, and trying to make his way
in the literary world without a university degree.
A pretty precarious position. And he makes his
debut in 1910 with a short story that doesn't
just open the door, it really kicks the door
down. The Tattooer, or Shisei. This is the birth
of what you might call Tanizaki the Demon. I
read the summary of this story, and it is intense.
It feels like a horror movie set up from the
very first line. You have this tattoo artist,
Seikichi, who is obsessed with finding the perfect
skin, the perfect canvas for his art. Right,
but he's not just an artist. He's a sadist. This
story makes it clear he enjoys the pain he inflicts
with his needles. He's been waiting for years
to find a woman with the right quality of skin
and, crucially, the right spirit to bear his
masterpiece. And he finds her, a young geisha.
And then it gets really dark. He drugs her, which
is already a major red flight. A huge red flight.
And while she's unconscious, he tattoos a giant
spider on her back. A giant black widow spider,
essentially. The text is very specific. It covers
her entire back. It's his magnum opus. Now, in
a normal story, or at least a more moralistic
one from that era, the woman would wake up, she'd
scream, cry, and be the tragic victim. But that
is absolutely not what happens here. No. And
this is the core of early Tanizaki. This is the
key. When she wakes up and sees the spider in
the mirror, she isn't horrified. She's empowered.
Yes. The story explicitly suggests that the tattoo
gives her a demonic, compelling power. The pain
of the needle and the image of this predator
unlocks something that was dormant inside her.
She actually tells the artist, you have made
me a true beauty. And then she essentially steps
on him. She completely dominates him. And he
likes it. He loves it. He becomes her first victim.
He has created this perfect, beautiful monster,
and all he wants is to be consumed by it. And
this story establishes the template for so much
of Tanizaki's early work, the femme fatale. He
combines eroticism with sadomasochism. He links
beauty directly, inextricably, to destruction.
So for him, beauty isn't passive. It's not a
flower sitting in a vase. No, it's a spider that
eats you. It's an active, dangerous force. And
it's a power dynamic. He explores this in other
early stories, too, like The Children, The Secret,
and Devil. There is this clear recurring obsession
with the idea that men secretly desire to be
destroyed by beauty. They want to be the fly
in the web. That is a pretty radical departure
from the good wife. wise mother ideal that the
Japanese government was promoting at the time.
It was a direct confrontational rejection of
it. Tanizaki wasn't interested in moral instruction.
He was interested in psychological extremes.
And this rebellious streak didn't just stay in
his books. It spilled out into his entire lifestyle.
Which leads us into what we can call his modern
boy phase. Exactly. The roaring 20s or the Japanese
equivalent, the Taisho democracy era. Right.
So from about 1913 to 1923, Tanizaki went through
this period where he was absolutely He was. You
have to understand. Japan at this time was modernizing
so rapidly. There was new technology, new fashions,
jazz, cafes. It was a cultural explosion. And
Tanizaki just threw himself headfirst into all
of it. In 1922, he makes a very significant move
to Yokohama. And Yokohama is significant because...
It's a port city. It's where the ships came in.
It had a huge expatriate population. It was by
far the most Western city in Japan at the time.
So he's immersing himself. Completely. Tanizaki
lived in a Western style house. He wore Western
suits. He led a bohemian lifestyle. He wanted
to be modern. And for him, nothing, absolutely
nothing was more modern than the cinema. I was
so surprised to learn this. Tanizaki was a movie
guy. He was deeply, deeply involved in the film
industry. He worked as a script writer for the
Taikatsu film studio. And he wasn't just, you
know, churning out pulp. He was a serious supporter
of what was called the Pure Film Movement. What
does pure film mean in this context? Well, at
the time, a lot of Japanese cinema was really
just filmed theater. They would literally set
up a camera in front of a stage play and record
it. It was very static. Ah, okay. The Pure Film
Movement wanted to use actual cinematic techniques,
close -ups, editing, visual storytelling, to
create a new distinct art form. Tanizaki wrote
scripts for films like Amateur Club in 1922 and
A Serpent's Lust in 1923. A Serpent's Lust. That
title fits right in with the spider tattoo, doesn't
it? It certainly does. The themes were consistent.
And scholars argue that you can't fully understand
his later writing style without understanding
his work in film. He learned how to tell stories
through images, through lighting, through the
visual framing of a scene. That makes sense.
That visual nature becomes absolutely crucial
later when he starts writing his masterpiece
on, of all things, shadows. So he's living the
high life in Yokohama, writing movie scripts,
living in a Western house, pretending he's in
Paris or London. That's the vibe. But we need
to talk about his personal life during this time
because there is some real life drama that sounds
like it was scripted for a particularly bizarre
reality TV show. The wife swap incident or the
Odawara incident, as it's sometimes called. This
is just wild. So he gets married in 1915 to a
woman named Chiyo Ishikawa. They have a child,
a daughter named Ayuko, but it's not a happy
home. No, by all accounts, it was a miserable
marriage. Tanizaki apparently found Shio too
traditional, too domestic. She wasn't the spider
woman or the modern girl he was fantasizing about
in his fiction. She was just a wife, and that
bored him immensely. So most people in that situation
would, I don't know, get a divorce or have a
discreet affair. Tanizaki does something much,
much more complicated. He does something unique
with Hanasaki. He actively encouraged a relationship
between his wife Chiyo and his friend, the fellow
writer Haro Satu. Wait, he pushed them together?
He did. He essentially tried to hand her off
to his friend, but then he would get cold feet
or maybe jealous and pull her back. Then he'd
push her away again. It was this years -long
psychological torment for everyone involved,
especially for Chiyo. Why on earth would he do
that? It seems so unbelievably cruel. It was
incredibly cruel. But if you look at it through
the lens of his work, it makes a twisted kind
of sense. He was treating the people around him
like characters in his fiction. He was the puppet
master pulling the strings just to see what kind
of drama would unfold. So he was mining his own
life for material? Constantly. He even wrote
plays and novels about this exact situation while
it was happening. Because I love her and between
men and the gods. That is next level narcissism.
I'm going to ruin my marriage and my friendship
so I have something interesting to write about.
It's the artist as a monster in a way. Yeah.
But eventually this all comes to a head. In 1930,
they actually released a signed public statement.
All three of them, Tanizaki, Chiyo, and Satuth,
signed a letter that was published in the press.
They published it? Yes, announcing that Chiyo
was being transferred to Satuth. They issued
a press release. for a wife swap they did it
caused a massive scandal as you can imagine but
it shows you where tanizaki's head was at he
was trying to modernize everything even the institution
of marriage he was treating life itself as one
big strange experiment so he's playing these
dangerous manipulative games with people's lives
he's living in a western house that he probably
thinks is the height of modern civilization but
while he's orchestrating all this personal chaos
The Earth is preparing to deliver some chaos
of its own. We've arrived at the pivot point,
the great pivot of his life and career, September
1st, 1923. The Great Canto Earthquake. We mentioned
his childhood trauma with the 1894 quake. But
the 1923 earthquake was on a scale that is hard
to even comprehend. Magnitude 7 .9. It didn't
just shake Tokyo and Yokohama. It leveled them.
Total destruction. Total destruction. And then
came the fires. Firestorms raged for days. Over
100 ,000 people died. It was an apocalypse. And
Tanizaki was living right there in Yokohama in
his precious Western -style house. Yes. And his
house was destroyed. It completely collapsed
into a pile of rubble. Was he home when it happened?
it happen? Fortunately, no. He was on a bus in
Hakon, which is a mountainous resort area nearby,
so he physically survived. But when he came back
down from the mountains and saw the ruins, the
psychological impact was profound. What did he
see? What was that experience like? He saw that
the modern world he had been worshipping was
made of paper and glass. He saw that the Western
architecture, which he thought was so solid and
superior, had crumbled just as easily as the
traditional Japanese structures. In fact, in
many cases, it was worse. The brick buildings
collapsed and crushed people. The fires consumed
everything. It must have been a terrifying validation
of his childhood fear. It's like the universe
telling him, see, I was right all along. The
ground is the enemy. Exactly. It confirmed his
deepest paranoia. And it triggered this massive
internal change. He realized that this modernity
he loved was fragile. It was just the thin veneer
over a volatile, dangerous landscape. So he made
a decision. He ran. He left the entire region.
He relocated from the ruins of the Tokyo area
to the Kansai region, the area around Kyoto,
Osaka, and Kobe. For our listeners who might
not be familiar with the cultural geography of
Japan, Can you explain the significance of that
move? It's not just a change of scenery, is it?
No, it's a profound cultural and spiritual shift.
It's like a time travel move. Tokyo was the center
of politics, modernization, and the new. Kansai,
and particularly Kyoto, was the historical heart
of tradition. It was the old imperial capital.
So old Japan. It was old Japan. It's where the
ancient temples were. It's where the old merchant
culture of Osaka thrived. By moving to Kansai,
Tanizaki was physically and spiritually retreating
into the past. He's running away from the modern
ruins to find... something that feels permanent.
Something with roots. Precisely. The earthquake
didn't just break buildings, it broke his obsession
with the West. Or maybe it's more accurate to
say it made him realize that he couldn't just
be Western, he was Japanese, living on unstable
Japanese soil, and he had to reckon with that.
But it wasn't an overnight switch, right? He
didn't just wake up the next day in a kimono
writing haiku. No, not at all. There was a transition
period, a kind of cultural hangover, if you will.
And the key work from this time is the novel
Naomi, or Chi - which was published around 1924
-25. Naomi, this is a famous one. Some people
call it the Japanese Lolita. It shares some themes
with Lolita, certainly. The plot is this tragicomic
exploration of sexual obsession in class. The
protagonist, Joji, is this boring middle -aged
engineer. He meets a young teenage waitress named
Naomi. And he becomes obsessed. Utterly obsessed.
But specifically, he is obsessed with making
her Western. He wants to mold her, like a Pygmalion
story. Exactly. He wants to create his perfect
modern girl. He pays for her to learn English.
It sounds like Tanizaki is writing about his
own recent past. He's working something out here.
He is absolutely satirizing himself. Joji is
the fool who worships the West without any critical
thought. And Naomi, well, Naomi takes his money
and his lessons and she turns into a monster.
The spider returns. The spider returns in a flapper
dress. She completely dominates him. She cheats
on him. him with Western men. She's cruel to
him. And Joji just takes it because he is so
enslaved by her modern allure. So even though
he's moving physically toward tradition, his
mind is still wrestling with this destructive
modern girl figure. Exactly. Naomi is the bridge.
It's him processing the failure of his Western
fantasy, showing how hollow it was. But once
he settles into the Kansai period for good, the
deep dive into tradition really begins. From
the late 1920s through the 1940s, we see the
emergence of the shadow Tanizaki. This is the
era where he writes the masterpieces that he's
most remembered for. It is. He totally immerses
himself in the local culture. He becomes fascinated
by the Osaka dialect, which is much softer and
more musical than the standard Tokyo Japanese.
He starts attending Bunraku, the traditional
puppet theater, and Kabuki. He's like an anthropologist
of his own culture. And this leads to the novel
Some Prefer Nettles, published in 1928 -29. This
book is pivotal. It's almost a manifesto for
his change in perspective. The story is about
a Tokyo man named Kaneme who is living near Osaka.
He's in a loveless marriage, a recurring theme
for Tanizaki, obviously, and he finds himself
torn. Torn between what? Torn between two worlds.
On one side, he has his modern westernized life.
On the other, he is increasingly drawn to his
father -in -law's mistress, a very traditional
woman who represents old Japan, who is obsessed
with the puppet theater, who embodies this quiet...
Subtle beauty. It's a literal representation
of his own internal conflict, East versus West,
right there on the page. It is. It's a mirror
of his own journey. And the conclusion of the
book, which is very ambiguous, suggests that
he is slowly, inevitably drifting toward the
traditional side. He stops fighting it. He's
surrendering to the Japan inside him. And this
surrender leads to an essay that I think is one
of the most beautiful and, frankly, strange things
ever written about aesthetics. In Praise of Shadows.
In E. Ray Zahn, published in 1933. If you care
about design, architecture, food, or just beauty
in general, you have to read this essay. It will
change how you see the world. Let's unpack it.
What is his core argument? It's pretty radical.
His core thesis is that Western culture is fundamentally
obsessed with light. The West wants to illuminate
everything. White walls, bright electric bulbs,
clarity, sterility. They want to banish the dark.
Which makes sense on a practical level. We want
to be able to see things clearly. Yeah, of course.
But Tanizaki argues that traditional Japanese
beauty is built on shadows. He says that the
beauty of a traditional Japanese room depends
entirely on the varying degrees of dimness. He
talks about how gold leaf looks in a dark room.
How does it look? Well, if you put gold leaf
in a bright fluorescent lit room, it just looks
gaudy. It's tacky. It's cheap. But if you put
that same gold leaf in a dark room lit by a single
candle. It glows. It seems to gather the faint
light and reflect it with this deep, heavy, mysterious
power. He says the darkness is what gives the
gold its value. He talks about soup, too. Yeah.
Which I absolutely love. The lacquerware soup
bowl, yes. He compares it to Western white ceramic
dishes. He says Western dishes are shallow and
bright. You see the soup immediately. It just
looks like brown liquid. There's no mystery.
But with a dark lacquer bowl, you have to bring
it close to your face, and you gaze down into
the darkness of the soup at the bottom of the
dark bowl. It retains the heat. It feels mysterious
and profound. He argues the pleasure of the food
itself is enhanced by the shadows it's served
in. And we absolutely cannot forget the toilet.
The famous toilet section. You can't talk about
Impreza of Shadows without talking about the
toilet. He writes this beautiful... almost romantic
love letter to the traditional japanese outhouse
he does he contrasts the western toilet which
is white tiled sterile and clinical a place of
pure function with the traditional wooden outhouse
he describes the outhouse as a place of spiritual
repose spiritual repose In an outhouse. Yes.
He talks about the dark wood, the faint light
filtering through a paper screen, the smell of
moss, the sound of rain falling on leaves just
outside. He finds this profound meditative beauty
in the most functional biological act, as long
as it is wrapped in shadow and nature. It's such
a complete rejection of the clean, bright, modern
life he was living in Yokohama. He's basically
saying that by turning on all the lights, we
killed the magic. Exactly. He's issuing a warning.
He's saying that when we chase Western modernization,
we are bleaching our own culture. We are losing
the nuance. We are losing the shadows. And for
him, the shadows were where beauty lived. This
philosophy of shadows and fading beauty culminates
in what is arguably his greatest work, the Makioka
Sisters. Sasamuki. It was written over a long
period, between 1943 and 1948. The title literally
translates to a light snowfall. It's such a beautiful,
gentle image. It fits the novel perfectly. It's
a massive book, over 500 pages. But nothing massive
really happens in terms of action or plot. It
follows four daughters of a wealthy, old money
Osaka merchant family. The Makioka family. Right.
And the central tragedy of the book is all in
the background. Their traditional way of life
is slowly... gently slipping away. It's set in
the years leading up to World War II, from 1936
to 1941. But it's not a war novel. Not at all.
The characters aren't fighting on the front lines.
They are trying to arrange marriages for the
third sister, Yukiko. They are going on trips
to view the cherry blossoms. They are catching
fireflies. They are trying on kimonos. The drama
is all in these small, everyday acts of cultural
preservation. It's about the preservation of
a mood, of a feeling. It is. It's about a world
that is fading like melting snow. And unlike
his early characters who are screaming and fighting
about their identity, these sisters don't have
identity crises. They aren't torn between East
and West. They are just trying to exist beautifully
in a world that is moving on without them. Now,
here is the fascinating conflict. Tanizaki was
writing and trying to serialize this novel during
World War II. Yes, right in the middle of it.
And the Japanese military government. They hated
it. They absolutely despised it. Well, I mean,
on the surface, it sounds like the most Japanese
thing ever written. It's about kimonos and family
and tradition and cherry blossoms. That is the
supreme irony of the whole situation. But it
wasn't the right kind of Japanese for the fascists
in power. The military government wanted war
spirit. They wanted stories about self -sacrifice,
nationalism, and soldiers dying gloriously for
the emperor. And Tanizaki was giving them. What?
He was giving them luxury, femininity, softness,
and the decadent beauty of a past they wanted
to erase. He was focusing on the unimportant
lives of women. It was banned. Effectively, yes.
The editors of the literary magazine, Tusharan,
where it was being serialized, were called in
by the military police. They were warned that
this novel did not contribute to the war effort.
They were told it was effeminate and individualistic.
And when the magazine tried to continue publishing
it, the government threatened to cut off their
paper supplies. They cut off the paper. That
is a very bureaucratic and chilling way to kill
a masterpiece. It shows that Tanizaki's version
of tradition was aesthetic, not political. He
wasn't a nationalist in the militaristic sense.
He was an esthete. He cared about beauty, not
war. In a way, he was resisting the war simply
by ignoring it and focusing on the pattern of
a beautiful kimono instead. So the war ends.
The militarist Japan is defeated. Tanizaki has
survived the earthquake, the personal scandals,
and the government censorship. He emerges in
the post -war period as a legend. He becomes
the grand old man of Japanese letters, a living
treasure. He wins the prestigious Asahi Prize
in 1948. He receives the Order of Culture from
the Emperor in 1949. In 1964, he becomes the
first Japanese writer ever elected to honorary
membership in the American Academy and Institute
of Arts and Letters. So logically, this is the
part of his life where he settles down, acts
dignified, and writes gentle memoirs about his
grandkids, the respectable elder statesman. You
would think so. That would be the logical progression.
But this is Kanazaki. He did not mellow with
age. In fact, in some ways, he became more biologically
explicit. He became the mad old man. This is
my favorite twist in his whole story. Just when
you think he's become the shadow man forever,
the old demon from his youth comes roaring back.
The demon comes back, but he's old now and he's
frail. And that's what he writes about in the
1950s and 60s. Tanizaki starts exploring sexuality
in old age, and he is unflinching about the often
grotesque realities of the aging body. He writes
the key. Or Keggy in 1956. Yes. And this novel
shocked people all over again. It's a psychological
thriller told through the diaries of a husband
and wife. The husband is an aging professor who
is losing his sexual vitality. He can't perform
anymore. So he comes up with this twisted plan.
He arranges for his wife to commit adultery with
a younger man, their daughter's fiance. Why?
What's the end game there? He wants to make himself
pathologically jealous. He finds that the jealousy,
the humiliation gives him a spark of energy.
It's the only thing that can arouse him anymore.
He literally feeds off his own humiliation to
feel alive. That goes right back to the voyeurism
and manipulation we saw in his 20s with the wife
swap. It's the same psychological mechanism.
It is. It proves that the core obsessions never
left him. He just adapted them to the circumstances
of his aging body. And then there is his final
major work, Diary of a Mad Old Man, or Food and
Roja Nikki, published in 1961 -62. The title
is pretty upfront about what you're getting into.
It is. In this one, the protagonist is a wealthy,
sick old man. He suffers from all kinds of ailments,
nerve pain, high blood pressure. And early in
the novel, he actually suffers a major stroke.
And what causes the stroke? An excess of sexual
excitement. He gets too worked up while watching
his beautiful daughter -in -law, Satsuko, perform
a traditional dance. He literally strokes out
from voyeurism. Yes. And as he is recovering,
or rather as he is slowly dying, his diary records
his efforts to bribe this daughter -in -law.
She is a total modern girl type. She likes boxing
matches. She wears Western clothes. She is Naomi
all over again 40 years later. The modern girl
returns to haunt his final days. she returns
and the old man knows he can't have her sexually
so he bribes her for small favors he wants her
to let him kiss her foot or just show him her
legs and in exchange for these little thrills
he buys her things what does he buy her this
is the amazing part He buys her Western baubles,
a distinctively Western handbag, an expensive
cat's eye ring, all these imported luxury accessories
from Paris or New York. Wait, really? So we've
come completely full circle? Completely, totally
full circle. In his final years, the West returns
to his work. But notice the difference. In his
youth, the West was an ideal. It was a philosophy,
a lifestyle he wanted to live. Now, at the end
of his life... The West is just a fetish object.
It's a shiny toy that a dying man uses to buy
a fleeting moment of sensation. That is such
a cynical yet perfect ending to his thematic
arc. The West starts as a religion, becomes a
ruin after the earthquake, and ends up as a bribe
for a foot fetish. It's Tanizaki in a nutshell.
He was cynical, but he was also deeply honest.
He wrote about his own health issues directly
in that book. He really did suffer from paralysis
of his right hand starting in 1958. He really
did have angina pectoris. He used his own physical
decline as raw material for his fiction. He cannibalized
his own life until the very end. There is a tanka
poem he wrote in 1963, just a couple of years
before he died, that I think captures his mindset
perfectly. Yes, I know the one. This heart of
mine is only one. It cannot be known by anybody.
but myself. He lived a life that was so public
in so many ways. The scandals, the awards, the
essays. But internally, he remained a complete
enigma. He died on July 30, 1965, of a heart
attack in Ugawara. He was buried at Hunan -in
Temple in Kyoto. A very traditional temple, I
assume. A beautiful, quiet temple known for its
moss and its deep shadows. A fitting resting
place for the author of In Praise of Shadows.
And his legacy is completely cemented. The Tanizaki
Prize was established that same year, 1965, and
it's still one of the most prestigious and sought
-after literary awards in Japan today. When you
look back at the whole trajectory, it's just
astonishing. He starts with the spider tattoo
body horror. He moves to silent film scripts
and western suits. He survives the great Kanto
earthquake, which shatters his entire worldview.
He retreats to the Kansai region to write the
high art of the Makioka sisters. And then he
ends his career staring unflinchingly at the
grotesque realities of elderly desire. What a
ride. It's an incredible artistic journey. So
let's wrap this up. What is the so what here?
Why does Tanizaki matter to us sitting here today?
I think he matters because he didn't just choose
East or West. He embodied the violent, messy
struggle between them, Japan in the 20th century,
and really the whole world was trying to figure
out how to be modern without completely losing
its soul. And Tanizaki's life and work show that
it's not a clean transition. It involves pain,
confusion, contradiction, and loss. And he showed
us the value of the shadows we've lost. He taught
us that tradition isn't just about museums or
history books or tea ceremonies. It's about a
way of seeing the world. It's about shadows,
darkness, and nuance. He warned us that when
we turn on the bright lights of modernity, whether
that's literal electric lights or just the constant
glare of the Internet and global culture, we
lose something profound. We lose the mystery.
We lose the mystery. We lose the ability to see
the gold leaf glowing in the dark. That brings
us to a final thought for our listeners. We talked
a lot about the earthquake. Tanizaki hated earthquakes.
He was terrified of them his whole life. They
were his trauma. And yet the Great Kanto Earthquake
was the very thing that forced him to move to
Kansai. It forced him to pivot. It arguably forced
him to become the great writer he became. It
destroyed his house, but it built his legacy.
A terrible paradox. Exactly. So here is a provocative
question for you, the listener, to think about.
Is destruction sometimes necessary for true reinvention?
Can we only truly value our culture or even our
own lives once we've seen the ruins of what we
thought we wanted? It's a terrifying thought,
but perhaps a necessary one. Sometimes the ground
has to shake before we can find our footing.
Something to mull over. That's it for this deep
dive into the shadows and spiders of Junichiru
Tanizaki. Thanks for listening. Thanks.