Tanizaki and the Enjoyment of Japanese Culturalism

Abstract

Most ofwhat novelistTanizaki Jun’ichirō (1889–1965)wrote as nonfiction in the late 1920s and 1930s hewrote as zuihitsu, or “following the brush” essays. A classical literary form, the zuihitsu seemed appropriate for his “return to the classics” (koten kaiki) period, when he is supposed to have abandoned his youthful interest in crimefiction, stageplays, cinema, andnovels about sexual perversion in favor of traditional Japanese genres, allusions, and settings. “When we are young we are interested in imported art and literature,” he wrote, “but in the long span of a lifetime such a period can last ten or twenty years at most [and ] . . . with the onset of old age I have gradually returned to Eastern tastes.”1 Describing these tastes in odes to Japanese architecture and food, the classical language, and the traditional culture of western Japan, Tanizaki made regular contributions to journals such as Chūō kōron [Public debate] and Kaizō [Reconstruction]. His “return” coincided with a larger