Rating: 
Summary: The primer to Tanizaki's works, a must-read.
Review: When I first picked up "Naomi", known as "Chijin no Ai" in Japanese, it was in a Japanese literature class at my University. My first exposure to Tanizaki came in reading a short story called "The Tattooer" ("Shisei", which can be found in another collection of his short stories called "Seven Japanese Tales" in English), so I knew he was a good writer with some perverse ideas. Little did I know what I was in for with "Naomi".We were to read it in a week, which is quite the task with a full schedule. I finished it in three days and reread it a week later. I was amazed at its intricacies. The story is set in early 1920s Japan, a period when the import of Western fashion, style and culture was at its height and every Japanese person found him or herself enamored with imported American and European literature, dance, clothing and people. Naomi is a young Japanese waitress with a Western look that a man named Joji finds himself obsessing over at first sight. Even her name, he remarks, resembles Western names. He adopts her and begins to mold her into his perfect woman. The story follows his continual perfecting of her behavior, and her treatment of him. The question soon arises, however, as to who is truly the dominant force in their fragile relationship. In what I've now come to find is Tanizaki standard, all is never as it seems, and the relationships established throughout the story are rarely as simple as they first appear. "Naomi" serves as a primer to Tanizaki's entire body of work, being one of his earliest full-length novels and coming before his shift from an obsession with the West to a love of his own traditional Japanese culture. Since reading it, I've had the opportunity to read much of the rest of his work, and I'm thankful I started with "Naomi". Tanizaki is cited as shifting his views of the West soon after the Great Kanto Earthquake in 1923 and "Naomi", published in 1924, is his work at that tipping point. Although on the surface it seems to praise a Western infatuation, it throws into question what damage it's doing to the Japanese mind and culture. A powerful work of perverse fiction, and a great introduction to the twisted, cerebral world of Jun'ichiro Tanizaki, I highly recommend "Naomi" to readers tired of the typical stories that are so prevalent in our modern literature and as an introduction to the world of one of the greatest 20th century Japanese authors.
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