Tanizaki Jun’ichirō’s A Fool’s Love and the fetishism of ‘daily life’

Abstract

Tanizaki Jun’ichirō’s A Fool’s Love (1924) has been a rich text to explore the possibilities of social critique inherent in formalist novels because of the deep nexus it exhibits between its narrative discourse and the social discourses of print media in the 1920s. In bringing the critique of artistic fiction to bear more closely upon socio-historical events, however, the scholarship to date has tended to sanitize the novel, or sublimate its fetishistic elements into strategies for social liberation. Such arguments, while keeping engagements with art safely within the bounds of liberal ideals, simplify history and fail to grasp the full depths of the novels artistic critique. In this article, I integrate close readings of the novel’s narrative with a close empirical survey of the language of ‘daily life’ in the print media of the early twentieth century to show how the novel did more than expose the contradictions, hypocrisies, and disciplining imperatives of social ideology. It revealed the motives of pleasure that undergirded it.