I read this book for the Japanese Reading Challenge 17.
Sino-Japanese character Manji 卍 is a symbol for the four lovers in the novel - 谷崎 潤一郎
Quicksand – Junichiro Tanizaki
Twisted up love, symbolized in the swastika, is felt between Sonoko and her husband Kakiuchi and Sonoko’s beloved Mitsuko and Mitsuko’s BF Watanuki. Despite her history of infatuation, Kakiuchi married Sonoko and kept silent in response to her odd moods and behavior. In a frequent mistake of patient honest people when dealing with deceitful people, he goofs when for too long he pretends nothing is bugging him though he feels unsettled by Sonoko’s friend Mitsuko. It seems as if Tanizaki is taking the stance that when facing so much deceit, honest people don’t know where to turn and deceptive people get so lost in their lies that even their perception of doing wrong dies.
Sonoko and Mitsuko met at shabby art school for bored women with nothing to do. The two become intimate with Mitsuko posing in the nude for Sonoko’s rendering of Kannon the Goddess of Mercy. The sensual, crafty, reckless Mitsuko drags Sonoko into dangerous love quicksand, with endless intrigues and a tragic ending, which can be sensed from the beginning of the novel.
Sonoko, the paragon of the untrustworthy narrator, tells a story in which everybody is deceiving everybody else. In a narrative of time shifts in the modernist manner, the tangled story is unwound as Sonoko’s unreliable confession to a famous writer who may or may not be Tanizaki, a Tokyo guy commenting on the gaudy unrestrained ways of these wacky Osakans in the late 1920s. Tanizaki is also a modernist in the way he opens boxes usually sealed: decadence, nihilism, eroticism, sadism, and the “I hate myself for loving you” kind of masochism a la Of Human Bondage and A Portrait of Shunkin.
Tanizaki liked to write couple stories as in the shocking Naomi or in A Fool's Love or in the disturbing novel The Key. The female characters are always the strongest elements, if only because of all their whims or attractions with which they hold their male and female slaves in a tight grip. Tanizaki liked to show women lost to dark forces and weird passions and men totally at a loss in the face of quirks and impulses, irrationality and obsession. The reader gets the feeling that Mitsuko is way out of control, way beyond doing terrible things just for fun. Somehow a reader feels if one understood the nature of Mitsuko’s fantasies, one would feel grubby and defiled.
As to cultural background, what is just taken for granted in this novel? What feels Japanese about it? For one, sapphic love is treated as no big deal. As in lots of old melodramas, there is a vindictive servant who steals letters. Desperate couples talk of suicide pacts and people mull doing away with themselves in order to apologize to everybody. The cops raid disorderly houses looking not only for gamblers but cheating couples. The scandal sheets sniff around for salacious gossip that will bring dishonor down on prominent families with wild offspring. Politically radical but culturally conservative, people in Kyoto, Nara, and Osaka pay much attention to the social conventions and take pains to avoid doing what can tarnish one's reputation and bring on shame. Recall how Sachiko and Teinosuke worried about Taeko’s antics getting into the papers in The Makioka Sisters.
In conclusion, short, tangled, readable, shocking, and well worth it if one likes Tanizaki.
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