The deformation of the modern spectator: synaesthesia, cinema, and the spectre of race in Tanizaki

Abstract

In order to complicate the opposition between Western modernity and Japanese tradition that is often said to characterize the works of Tanizaki Jun'ichiro, this essay explores the logic of synaesthesia in some of his works from the early Taisho period such as ‘The mermaid's lament’, ‘The present and future of motion pictures’, and ‘The tumor with a human face’. Synaesthesia in Tanizaki involves not only a decomposition and recombination of different perceptual modalities but also an erotic encounter with the foreign. It affords an intensification of the procedures of Japan's Orientalist history (tōyōshi), by allowing artifacts and ethnographic detail to swarm into the story as spectacle rather than fact. With its emphasis on the hybrid, the awkward and misplaced, synaesthesia calls attention to the corporeality of perception, to what Jonathan Crary calls ‘the emergence of the body as a productive physiological apparatus’. In Tanizaki, the emergence of such synaesthetic, corporeal modes of perception is also intimately linked to questions of race. It is in this way that Tanizaki's use of synaesthesia reminds us that viewers and readers are already deformed, already inscribed in fictive ethnicities.