Uneven space of everyday modernity: the colonial logic of the suburb in Tanizaki Jun'ichiro's A Fool's Love

Abstract

Tanizaki Jun'ichiro's A Fool's Love (1924–1925) has been widely studied as a representative text of the modern popular culture of the Taisho period. This article treats the work as a key text that reveals the colonial relations embedded in everyday modernity of Japan's interwar years, and examines the articulations of colonial relations in three registers of the text. It first investigates the protagonists' unrestrained embrace of cosmopolitan culture as a manifestation of Japan's ambiguous imperialist consciousness, shaped in the interstices between Western and Asian others. The second and third registers concern a particular kind of space dominant in the story: the modern suburb, which became a major symbol of Japan's modernity in the 1920s. In its subordinate relationship with the city, the suburb exemplifies colonial relations. The second register explored in the article is the overlap between the text's exoticism and suburban topography. A key scene on a resort beach is examined for its reference to Hawai'i and the setting's suburban nature in relation to Tokyo. The last register is the suppression of the story's suburban setting. The article analyzes the disappearance as a manifestation of the anxiety about the unevenness of capitalist development that the suburb represents.