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The Reed Cutter and Captain Shigemoto's Mother: Two novellas

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Tanizaki's later works continued to look back at a Japan which was being enveloped by the necessities and temptations of the West, militarism, and false [and conservative]myths about feudal Japan. I love Tanizaki's The Makioka Sisters (I think that book is his masterpiece) but I very much like these two stories, particularly Captain Shigemoto's Mother. The story of a man trying to understand how his mother came to be lost to him is intriguing and moving. I hope the Japanese never forget Tanizaki; unfortunately, Americans barely know who he is.

My reading of both these novellas is heavily influenced by having recently read Tanizaki's Naomi: A Novel, a story of obsession. Both stories in The Reed Cutter (and) Captain Shigemoto's Mother: Two Novellas are similarly about men obsessed with a certain woman.

While Naomi has a personality, a rebellious streak and likes to have a good time, the objects of affection in these two stories have no personal characteristics. They are admired and pampered for their beauty. With no personality elements are ascribed to either of them, they are totally passive and show little to no feeling for others. They have no work, no defined interests, and I could not help but wonder what they did with their time.

In these two novellas, there are social barriers that restrain communication and divide families. These are accepted, and seem to add to the mystic of the obsession.

Like Joji, who accepts whatever crumbs of a relationship Naomi will give him, the men in these novellas are prepared to accept the longing, loneliness, drudge and/or humiliation that results from their obsession. In "Reeds", the Father gives up his life for what appears to be no more than an image. While the "Mother" title suggests this is about a mother-son relationship, there is more text and drama (the chamber pot and Contemplation of Impurity scenes are most memorable) devoted to those who are romantically obsessed with Shigemoto's mother than to Shigemoto's (also obsessive) relationship with her.

Knowledge of The Tales of Genji, other Japanese classics and geography would enrich the reading of these stories. Knowledge of Japanese culture would be helpful too. Westerners can relate to the pedestal aspect of the stories since the adoration of female beauty as portrayed can be considered an extreme variation of the European tradition of courtly love. The last scene in Mother" has an unmistakable western counterpart.

Tanizaki is known for his modern translations of The Tales of Genji. Very different from this work and these stories is his longer work The Makioka Sisters which must be a classic defining Japanese life just prior to WWII.

"Gai Jin" literally means 'Outside Person", but it's a more explicit indictment of "otherness" than the English words 'foreigner' or 'stranger'. I've been a Gai Jin in Japan, despite having some functional knowledge of the language, a more-than-passing knowledge of the country's history and literature, and quite ample knowledge of its pre-modern music, easily more than that of 99.9% of the Japanese themselves. But the more I mastered the language, the more "other' I obviously became, until I calligraphed the two 'kanji' - gai & jin - on a T-shirt that I wore outrageously on the streets of Kyoto. One sees, by the way, far more T-shirts with English words on them in contemporary Japan than with kanji (the word means 'Chinese character).

Aside from learning to play the shakuhachi, my chief goal in studying Japanese was to read the literature, especially the novels of Tanizaki Junichiro, in the original. That goal eluded me, or I should say that I gave up. Japanese is devilishly difficult, as the early Christian missionaries learned, and its literary writing system is so arcane that very many modern Japanese fall short of ever reading 'elegant' literature like the works of Tanizaki. Manga comic books fill a need for adults in Japan. But have you, dear reader, ever looked at a manga, even one translated into English, in bafflement about the sensibilities it presents? Perhaps you've had my experience: the closer you embrace Japanese culture, the more your "otherness" conceals it from you, like the rice-paper screen that concealed a man's wife from his male guests at a moon-viewing party in pre-modern times.

An autumnal "moon-viewing" is the setting for the story "The Reed Cutter", written in 1932. A middle-aged man from Tokyo, presumably Tanizaki-san himself, is living in the Kansai, the region of Kyoto and Osaka. He often takes long, thoughtful walks in the evenings, exploring the historical sites of the region, especially the sites associated with the most ancient literature of the 11th-15th Centuries, of which he is a devoted scholar. The first 20 pages of this story, in fact, amount to a reflective survey of the literature, and I'm quite certain that a casual English reader will find them unintelligible and tedious. Then one evening, as the pensive solitary scholar sits drinking saké and viewing the full moonrise, he encounters a stranger, a man his own age, who tells him the bizarre tale of his parentage, involving an obsessive love-triangle, tantalizingly unconsummated by any Gai Jin standards.

The longer story, "Captain Shigemoto's Mother", written after the War, also draws its narrative from ancient sources, from the Heian period prior even to the Shogunate. The story is replete with allusions to those sources; haiku and other poetic forms are quoted profusely. (Believe me, if you think you can grasp the essence of haiku from English translations, you are mistaken; haiku is as much a visual as a verbal art.) The story in itself isn't so difficult to follow; it concerns a handsome philandering 'prince' who slyly absconds with the beautiful wife of his septagenarian uncle. In a characteristic Japanese manner, the wife remains nameless; she's Captain Shigemoto's Mother, and the latter parts of the tale concern her reconciliation with her son by the first husband, whom she abandoned.

The translations of these two 'linked' narratives, by Anthony Chambers, read quite smoothly. Entertainingly, if the reader can tolerate all the feudal allusions. Nevertheless, as a self-labeled Gai Jin, I have to wonder what other "outside" readers can possibly make of Tanizaki. The easiest perception is of an elegant, salacious old man obsessed with smut and inclined to sado-masochism. That perception isn't entirely false, but it's "outside" of any relevance. Tanizaki is not a-moral, not a purveyor of titillations only. These two essay-stories in particular express his real theme, his nostalgic defense of pre-modern Japanese values. There's a huge irony, of course, in his employment of Western literary styles and conventions to explore pre-Meiji/Showa values. Don't doubt for a moment that Tanizaki was aware of his own ambiguous reactionary position. What he expounds, if my Gai Jin reading is close to correct, is a worldview in which aesthetics were the truest basis of morality; where pleasure - even amorous dallying - was an aesthetic imperative; where decorum was the most inviolable expression of this aesthetic morality. Western concepts of Sin and Guilt need not apply, though Shame is always employable. Don't get too comfortable with this apparent "floating world" sensualism, however! Out of nowhere, the abandoned boy Shigemoto observes his desolate father turn to Buddhist renunciation of Beauty and Pleasure as deceptions, snares that entangle the spirit in mortality. As the old man staggers into the dark fields to meditate over the decomposing corpses of smallpox victims (!!!), Tanizaki flips the picture over; from the same sources, the Heian scrolls, he extracts and expounds the Buddhist ethics of austerity and indifference to the Things of This World. The two value structures unquestionably are incompatible, yin and yang, yet Tanizaki seems to uphold both full-heartedly.

And now I have to ask myself: even if I'm correctly interpreting Tanizaki, is Tanizaki truly an accurate interpreter of Japanese culture and history? Would a young Japanese reader of 2010 accept his worldview as a representation of his own cultural past, or merely as the perverse expression of an eccentric old sensualist? See how frustrating it is, being a Gai Jin?

Have you seen the great cinema Babel, set partly in an 'inscrutable' modern Japan? Or better yet, have you read recently the account of the Tower of Babel in the Bible?
Here it is, from Genesis 11:1-9, as translated in the King James Versions:

"1 And the whole earth was of one language, and of one speech. 2 And it came to pass, as they journeyed from the east, that they found a plain in the land of Shinar; and they dwelt there. 3 And they said one to another, Go to, let us make brick, and burn them thoroughly. And they had brick for stone, and slime had they for mortar. 4 And they said, Go to, let us build us a city and a tower, whose top may reach unto heaven; and let us make us a name, lest we be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth. 5 And the Lord came down to see the city and the tower, which the children built. 6 And the Lord said, Behold, the people is one, and they have all one language; and this they begin to do; and now nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do. 7 Go to, let us go down, and there confound their language, that they may not understand one another's speech. 8 So the Lord scattered them abroad from thence upon the face of all the earth: and they left off to build the city. 9 Therefore is the name of it called Babel; because the Lord did there confound the language of all the earth: and from thence did the Lord scatter them abroad upon the face of all the earth."

Wow! What a dirty trick for a supposedly Loving Father to pull! So much for Aspiration! Take that, ye seekers of knowledge! Wallow in strife and incomprehension forevermore! Free Will is okay, so long as you don't will more than "I" am willing to allow! This is obviously a 'just so' story, a myth intended to explain the evident diversity of languages and cultures. But the implication of the myth is that our diverse languages are a 'punishment' for our effort to elevate ourselves. To me, it's a disgusting parable, the capricious cruelty of a jealous egotistical Tyrant, a kind of Celestial Stalin. There's another irony: surely few human cultures have been as isolated, historically and by language, as the Japanese, yet I doubt that Tanizaki or any other Japanese writer would deign to justify the Lord as portrayed in the myth of Babel.

An acquaintance and interest in Japanese classical literature may be necessary to fully appreciate these novellas, but Tanizaki's refined prose and his subtle exposition of the various permutations of love, and its persistence beyond death, will haunt the sensitive reader.

In "The Reed Cutter" a chance meeting by a riverbank on a moonlit night serves to recount the story of a tangled love affair that happened decades before.

"Captain Shigemoto's Mother," set in the Heian period, will reward those who have read "The Tale of Genji." It tells of the love affairs of a renowned playboy, but also of an "abandoned" child whose longing for his mother colors his whole life.