Customer Reviews

Naomi: A Novel

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When I first picked up "Naomi", known as "Chijin no Ai" in Japanese, it was in a Japanese literature class at my University. My first exposure to Tanizaki came in reading a short story called "The Tattooer" ("Shisei", which can be found in another collection of his short stories called "Seven Japanese Tales" in English), so I knew he was a good writer with some perverse ideas. Little did I know what I was in for with "Naomi".

We were to read it in a week, which is quite the task with a full schedule. I finished it in three days and reread it a week later. I was amazed at its intricacies.

The story is set in early 1920s Japan, a period when the import of Western fashion, style and culture was at its height and every Japanese person found him or herself enamored with imported American and European literature, dance, clothing and people.

Naomi is a young Japanese waitress with a Western look that a man named Joji finds himself obsessing over at first sight. Even her name, he remarks, resembles Western names. He adopts her and begins to mold her into his perfect woman. The story follows his continual perfecting of her behavior, and her treatment of him. The question soon arises, however, as to who is truly the dominant force in their fragile relationship.

In what I've now come to find is Tanizaki standard, all is never as it seems, and the relationships established throughout the story are rarely as simple as they first appear.

"Naomi" serves as a primer to Tanizaki's entire body of work, being one of his earliest full-length novels and coming before his shift from an obsession with the West to a love of his own traditional Japanese culture.

Since reading it, I've had the opportunity to read much of the rest of his work, and I'm thankful I started with "Naomi". Tanizaki is cited as shifting his views of the West soon after the Great Kanto Earthquake in 1923 and "Naomi", published in 1924, is his work at that tipping point. Although on the surface it seems to praise a Western infatuation, it throws into question what damage it's doing to the Japanese mind and culture.

A powerful work of perverse fiction, and a great introduction to the twisted, cerebral world of Jun'ichiro Tanizaki, I highly recommend "Naomi" to readers tired of the typical stories that are so prevalent in our modern literature and as an introduction to the world of one of the greatest 20th century Japanese authors.

Tanizaki's theme is obsession. Almost all of his works revolve around obsession in some way, usually a consuming devotion to something that others find revolting. Rarely does a Tanizaki character worship something beautiful, or worthy. Rarely does this obsession result in happiness.

"Naomi" ("Chijin no Ai" or "A Fool's Love") showcases these themes in a typical Tanizaki style, showing the weakness of devotion and the soullessness of beauty. His writing style is what keeps his stories from being stomach turning, and he manages to keep the reader going through the very darkest pits of self-loathing. Beautiful prose and ugly people.

In "Naomi," the aging salaryman Joji seeks to build himself a toy, a fascinating pet with bright plumage and sophistication to color and decorate his drab and mundane existence. The foundation for this masterpiece, which he will sculpt and paint, is a 15-year old bar maid named Naomi. She is a low girl, of no station or wealth, but her unusual name sets her apart from others, and he moves her into his house and begins her training.

Joji fancies himself Pygmalion, sculpting and pruning his caged bird, primping her and spoiling her. He encourages her fantasies and wraps her in Western clothes (an extreme rarity at the time) and outrageous kimonos. Her whims are his directives, and their games become more and more sexual in nature. But rather than Pygmalion, Joji finds himself in the role of Dr. Frankenstein, soon to be destroyed by his monstrous creation. Naomi grows soulless and spectacular, a hollow beauty who is fully aware of her power over Joji. She is manipulative and without morals, but Joji's investment in her is so great, and his ego so wrapped up in her, that he cannot let her go even when he discovers the horrible truth. It is a vicious whirlpool that he finds himself dragged into.

When considering "Naomi," one must understand Japan of the 1920's. A slowly emerging country, Western contacts were still rare, and the charade of Western culture was the ultimate in daring fashion. Women were assigned specific roles, and the idea of a woman choosing her male lovers was a scandalous concept. The "Modern Girl" represented by Naomi was an undefined thing, where women were attempting to create something new, with no role models and fewer inhibitions. Such was the power of this novel at the time that "Naomis" followed in its wake, and "Naomi-ism" became the word to describe their new sub-culture. Hated as she is in modern times, she was an idol to oppressed girls seeking freedom.

Sometimes a hard novel, with no heroes and no admirable characters, "Naomi" is still an important Japanese novel and a good read to boot. It launched Tanizaki's career in many ways, setting the stage for more obsession and repulsion to come.

Unlike the other reviewers, I have a different take on this book. Although admittedly disturbing, it is a book about love. What might disturb the other reviewers is to me the expression of true love.

We've all grown up hearing that Love is kind, Love is pure, Love is innocent. What this book illustrates is that Love is none of these! Love is possessive, Love is controlling, Love is needy. And to top it off, Love has no pride.

Tanizaki has masterfully drawn the reader in to show that indeed, with Love, you do not set up a schedule and a plan ... you do not control Love. Love controls you.

it's hard to imagine this book being written over 75 years ago. tanizaki writes with great clarity and precision, and like many japanese novels the use of language is wonderful.

but the subject! naomi is the most vile, cruel, manipulative, evil creature he could have imagined. joji, her hapless benafactor and husband, starts of being somewhat sympathetic, but in the end it's tempting to strangle him just to put him out of his misery.

this is all done with great style. at turns creepily erotic, hilarious and pathetic, it's difficult to come away from this novel feeling anything less than defiled.

a scathing indictment of the 1920's japanese obsession with things western, i've trouble understanding why government censors briefly terminated newspaper serialization in 1924; it shows nothing even remotely appealing about western culture or lifestyle.

a good tonic for this was peter mccarthy's "little bunny on the move".

This is the first Tanizaki novel I've read, and I enjoyed it a greay deal, but I hate both of the main characters. The story starts off with Joji a 28 year old bachelor who falls for a pretty, quiet 15 year old girl named Naomi. Many things attact Joji to Naomi: her beauty, her Eurasian features, but the main thing is her name: Naomi. The name is written with three Chinese characters and it could also be a western name. Joji finds this very attractive. He starts to hang out with the girl going to Western restaurants and going to see Western movies. He eventually takes the girl in, wanting to make her a prop lady. He pays for her to take English and music lessons. This is when things start to go downhill. Naomi's english is very poor, and Joji makes her work very hard calling her an idiot when she doesn'yt understand passive voice. Naomi gets angry and very obstinate. As time goes on Joji marries Naomi, but keepos it secret from everyone else. He enjoys washing her body and playing horse with her, treating her like a play thing. They eventually go out and study dancing together, but this leads to more problems because of some of the men Naomi meets. I'm not going any further. Read the book and experience how a weak-willed man acts when the woman he loves cheats on him constantly, but can't get enough of her. See how a respectful business man is reduced to a submissive husband to his teenage wife. Very disturbing, but a good read nonetheless.

A fine novel. The premise may seem simple, but Tanizaki has an excellent ear for dialogue and an engaging style that'll pull you in and make you read the whole book before you know it. Said style is often ironic, witty and amusing, but the author always knows better than to engage in small-minded mockery of any of his characters. The point isn't to get you to hate Naomi, it's to get you to understand and sympathize with the hapless Joji, whose travails are depicted in such droll and realistic detail that one gets the impression that there's something of Tanizaki's own life in here. The photograph of him on the back cover of my edition, at any rate, could have been the spitting image of Joji. Anyway. Even if this isn't my favourite book or even my favourite Japanese book, it's still a great, bittersweet read. You should probably purchase it.

'Naomi', Tanizaki's first major novel, starts off simply: a relatively young middle-class man discovers an even younger woman, who he sees as both exotic (starting with her western-sounding name 'Naomi' and Mary Pickford-esque looks) and an exciting work-in-progress, a Japanese Pygmalion. She ends up living with him, and (to no great surprise) they end up as man and wife. This is where the fun begins.

Joji begins to see the sarcastic and nasty side to Naomi, who, with his nurturing, has turned into a full-fledged 'modern girl' (or 'Moga' as the Japanese referred to them). Interested in avant-garde clothing and modern dancing, red flags go up as Joji meets her large number of intimate male friends and gradually recognizes her manipulative ways. Still, he has decided that it is not that women deceive men; rather, men enjoy being deceived by women. The rest of the story progresses as an ever-deepening spiral of manipulation and masochism as Naomi fully exploits her role as Joji's Lolita-like object of obsession.

Although this story was so shocking that its serialization was briefly halted, the idea of sexually-dominant women and submissive men is a theme repeated often in Tanizaki's works (perhaps the pinnacle of this theme in Tanizaki's work is the early short story 'The Tattooer' or 'Portrait of Shunkin').

While it's easy to generalize and say that Naomi represents the West, Joji the East, I think that might be an oversimplification and miss Tanizaki's more immediate point. First and foremost, Naomi represents the Japanese 'modern girl', an increasingly powerful and liberated creature with even more weapons to make men submit to her. This story is as much modernity vs. tradition as it is West vs. East. After all, despite Joji's casual interest in dance and even his pseudo-western name (Joji/George) he is no match for the fully modernized Naomi. When things start to go wrong, Joji tries to run for traditional safety nets (a traditional house, clothes, family structure), but Naomi doesn't let him. Modernity allows Naomi to fight back on equal (if not more powerful) footing, and permits her to be realized as an object of loathing, obsession, and desire in ways not yet seen in Japan.

No matter how you interpret the story, 'Naomi' is a sexy, humorous, and ironic tale of "a fool's love", as the original title suggests. It's a memorable book and a great introduction to the master writer Tanizaki.

This translation of the original Japanese title "Chijin no Ai" (A Fool's Love), can be interpreted as Tanizaki's skewed portrayal of the East versus West culture clash of the 1920s, during the Taisho Period.

The principle female character, Naomi, is Tanizaki's exaggerated depiction of a victim of the "moga"
(modern girl) / "mobo" (modern boy) phenomenon. Starting as a young and innocent café waitress, she meets Joji, an independent, frugal, commonsensical engineer who introduces to her several Western ideas, like piano, the English language and Western-style dining. She easily integrates these aspects of Western culture in her life, but soon becomes enormously fascinated. As a result, she develops into a frivolous, egocentric, manipulative, and crass woman. With Naomi's transformation, Joji must learn to compromise between his moral integrity and her demands.

The principle male character, Joji, can be seen as Tanizaki's depiction of the struggles between the culture of traditional Japan and the fierce invasion of the cultures of the West. He too undergoes a sort of transformation that may shock readers at the end.

Having read many of Tanizaki's other novels, I have discovered this work to be one of his more milder ones in terms of sexual themes. Unlike some of his other novels, readers will not find foot fetishism, physical sadomasochism, or worship of excreta in Naomi. And surprisingly, this novel was still a controversial work in 1920's Japan. Nevertheless, I recommend this novel to readers interested in Japan's prewar Westernization, works of Tanizaki or social satire.

It is surprising that this first appeared as a newspaper serial. It had a reasonably long run (16 chapters) before it was cut or censored. I wonder how it would fare as a newspaper serial in western cultures of the time, especially with the cultural references were reversed.

The first person protagonist, Joji, is a salary man who has moved from the countryside to Tokyo to a boring job with an electric company. He is very conscious of being short and having bad teeth and seems to be socially awkward. He is enchanted with the west and falls for a western looking girl. His goal is to raise her to be his ideal woman. Joji becomes obsessed with his creation. As she matures, he loses his grip on her. Losing her is so painful he will do anything to avoid it.

Besides the psychological drama, Tanizaki provides glimpses of Tokyo in the 1920s. There is an unabashed fascination of with the west marking a time when most of the living population would not remember the seclusion and only the elderly would bear scars of the process of ending it.

I was surprised about the mosquitoes and the need for mosquito netting in Tokyo.

This short book is very different from Tanizaki's epic, The The Makioka Sisters which covers a different strata of society about 15 years hence. In both, the author introduces realistic characters and brings them alive with detail.

This is my first time reading a novel by Tanizaki Junichiro and I think I picked a good one to start with. In the novel, Tanizaki creates a realistic character in Joji. I think that Joji mirrors aspects of Tanizaki life as well. Tanizaki was infatuated with the West and then suddenly he only wanted to be Japanese and immerse himself in Japanese culture. Joji is so preoccupied with the West that he chooses a young girl because of her Western sounding name. Then he pays for English lessons, takes her to American movies, goes out with her to trendy restaurants to indulge in steak, and buys expensive Western clothes. It almost as if Joji is pruning a bonsai tree as he carefully molds her into his ideal. But this tree has a wild root that grows up into his own worst nightmare. I do feel sorry for Joji always giving in to Naomi's seemingly endless demands. I actually think he should run off and start a new life anywhere else but Naomi has other twisted plans for whomever she decides to get involved with. I don't fault Naomi due to her background that is revealed as the story gets going. Actually, I think that the whole novel is a satire of all things Western by Tanizaki. Even for someone like me who spent time in Japan because I loved Japanese culture, there comes a period where you become disillusioned by whatever country that you think you love. The Japanese often tell Americans living in Japan that after 3-years you either love Japan or hate it and never want to go back. I had mixed feeling after the 3rd year too. I think this novel was written during Tanizaki's disillusion with the West and knowing that I'm not judging him for it. In fact, this novel was probably a way of allowing Tanizaki to express himself in a way to create a comparison between the West and Japan and how people view each other, stereotypes and all. I do the same thing myself. Sometimes I get so wrapped up in Japanese movies that when someone asked me about an American movie like Iron Man, I don't want to talk about it. So I'm looking at it from the prospective of a Japanese fan. Also, in order to explain Japan to other people, I often pick American pop culture because I know about it and it makes some things easy to explain. Nothing always translate so smoothly between east and west and that's where problems start.
Anyway, I found Naomi to be an enjoyable read by a master storyteller who knows his characters with all their glorious faults intact. Truly great characters should have quirks and faults or the story isn't interesting. I will probably read The Key or The Makioka Sisters next.