Seven Japanese Tales

Rating:
Summary: a master storyteller
Review: First published in 1963, this collection of five stories and two novellas offers a sampling of Tanizaki's work over the span of fifty years. It is a remarkable collection, and may serve as an introduction to one of modern literature's greatest storytellers.

Make no mistake: Tanizaki was a brilliant writer in the modernist tradition, of the caliber of de Maupassant, Chekov, or Stefan Zweig. Like those European masters, he explored the sexual and emotional dynamics at play in intimate relations. More specifically, Tanizaki was fascinated by subtle sadistic/ masochistic powerplays in long-term relationships between husband/wife, teacher/student, parent/child.

Each of these stories exhibits a mastery of the form. The novellas ("A Portrait of Shunkin," "A Blind Man's Tale") reveal an easy facility with the story-within-a-story form. Even the earliest and shortest narrative in this collection, "The Tattooer" (aka "The Tattoo Artist"), demonstrates Tanizaki's ability to delineate character and obsession deftly and succinctly. Like many of Tanizaki's works (most notably, "The Makkioka Sisters"), it was later adapted successfully for the screen.

Fiction will always be subject to individual tastes. Some might prefer the restraint of a Kawabata, the tortured homoeroticism of a Mishima, or Murakami's hallucinatory surrealism. But more than any of these modern Japanese masters, Tanizaki exhibits a virtuoso's finesse with narrative structures, and a profound understanding of sexual obsession.

This is an extraordinary collection. I recommend wholeheartedly not only to students of Japanese and modern literature, but to anyone hoping to write short fiction.

Rating:
Summary: Another Delightful Book by Tanizaki
Review: However, as with all short story collections it seems, there are hits and misses.

1. A portrait of Shunkin: This is the most recent of the stories collected in this volume. Written in 1959, A Portrait of Shunkin tells the story of Shunkin, a beautiful woman who became blind early in life. Shunkin because of her blindness had to give up dancing, but in order to kill time she started playing the koto and the samisen, and soon became a master. Enter Sasuke, a young man who is under tuteledge of Shunkin's father to become a pharmacist. He becomes Shunkin's personal servent, and out of his deep respect and love for her he begins to teach himself samisen, but he is eventually found out by the family. However, when it is discovered that he is actually skilled at the samisen, Shunkin herself teaches him in a very sadistic way. The story continues and tells how Shunkin and Sasuke live together. An interesting story that shows how far some people go to show their love to someone else.

2. Terror: A very short story written in 1913 about a young man who is terrified to go on trains.

3. The Bridge of Dreams: The story of a young man who loses his mother at a very young age, but soon has her replaced by a woman who looks almost exactly like his deceased mother. A very disturbing story about the obsessions some folks can have about making the living their dead loved ones. Also this story has a highly erotic mother/son incest storyline. The narrator who basically grows up accepting his step mother as his real mother suckles at his step mother's breasts when he is a high school student.

4.The Tattooer: A story written in 1910 about a tattooer who wants to create a work of art on the body of a beautiful young woman, and loses his soul in the process

5. The Thief: The story about a young man who is a theif in a dormhouse who does all he can to let his friends know that he is the thief.

6. Aguri: A strange tale of a man slowly wasting away from overindulgence, and the young girl he over indulged in. Probably the strangest story in the collection.

7. A Blind Man's Tale: A story told by Yaichi a blind masseur and his devotion to his mistress the sister of the warlord Nobunaga Oda. This is a fascinating tale, and it shows off quite well Tanizaki's love for Japanese History.

A good. Check it out.

Rating:
Summary: Memorable yes. . . but not for quality
Review: Let me start by saying that I found every story in this work fun to read and enjoyable. I enjoyed Tanizaki's style and the ideals I felt he upheld in his stories. On the other hand, it was not these ideals or the actual style I find sticks in my mind, it is the twits, turns, and totally unexpected that remain with me. In "Bridge of Dreams" it is not the faulty memory I remember, but a man having sexual desires for his mother, or step-mother, or both. Many of the stories have a strong sexual overtone to them. They are still great works, and most definately not any type of literary porn, but Tanizaki often uses shock and sudden turns to gain and keep his readers attention.

Rating:
Summary: Interesting Stories
Review: Nice short stories, but very little of the Japanese culture.

Rating:
Summary: interesting but not enough
Review: These stories were too narrowly focused to give us Westerners a picture of Japan or of Japan that was (they were written before world war ll). On the other hand they were not interesting enough to be universal. The first story, a novella was the best but held interest primarily because of the bizarre relationshios described. Perhaps there are certain subtleties that went past me and would have been picked up by someone more specialized in Japanese literature.

Recommended for real afficionados of things Japanese to expand their knowledge

Rating:
Summary: Compelling In That Stark And Desolate Japanese Author Way
Review: This book at times had me sitting on the edge of an emotional chair. Tanizaki in these tales has managed to communicate every emotion simply but clearly. For me at times it was like looking into a deep crystal clear lake, so clear every detail of the lake, to its bottom was vividly visible. It was quite a different reading experience. Sensuality is combined easily with prudence, and art, making for a simultaneously strong emotional and intellectual experience. I would definitely recommend this book to serious readers.

Rating:
Summary: Different Facets of a Gifted Writer
Review: This collection of stories was my first exposure to Tanizaki, and I admit I was pleasantly surprised by the stories I read in "Seven Japanese Tales." Given the time period that he did most of his writing in (pre-war and wartime Japan), I did not anticipate the highly controversial subjects that appear in his stories. I was also surprised to find out that many of these stories were set in periods in Japanese history decades and sometimes centuries before his contemporary time. After seeing Tanizaki's obvious passion for stories such as "The Bridge of Dreams" and "A Blind Man's Tale" I can see how he would undertake the massive task of "translating" the ancient Tale of Genji into modern Japanese.

Getting back to this collection of tales, what impressed me most about Tanizaki's writing was his ability to completely immerse the reader in these tales, and to calmly narrate the intense and often abnormal passions of his characters. What interested me was that time and time again, the women in his stories had complete control over the men. In "A Portrait of Shunkin", an older man blinds himself for the sake of a blind musician so that she is not shamed by her disfigurement. In "The Bridge of Dreams", the narrator is devoted to his mothers (yes, mothers!) to the point that it seems as if he has aged without ever really growing up: he continues to dream about his mother and try to breast feed from his mother far after it is appropriate to do so (it is suggested that he goes even farther than this ... Freud would've loved this tale). The men in "The Tattooer" and "Aguri" seem to have their souls leeched from them by their women. "A Blind Man's Tale" is another obvious example of a man being dominated by a woman. These extremes of pain and beauty are probably accentuated the most in "The Tattooer", my favorite story of the seven.

Domination is not achieved just by the fact that they are women, but also by their intense beauty. A tattooer falls in love with a girl after just seeing her foot. Tanizaki is gifted enough to be able to describe the foot in such a manner that the reader also falls in love with the girl, by just reading about the foot. For me, this was what made Tanizaki's writing compelling: despite (or perhaps because of) a straight-forward, precise writing style, his stories were extremely passionate and sensual. Sensual is the best word I can think of. These aren't racy, graphically sexually oriented stories where the men are simply out to sleep with the women, but stories that emphasise and highlight the amazing beauty of women (and the cruelty and pain that often accompanies that beauty). In a world with a lot of sex and a lot less beauty, reading about the reverse was surprisingly refreshing. "Terror" and "The Thief" are obvious exceptions to the motif of beauty, as they deal with internalized fear and guilt, but the stories are no less powerful than his more sensual ones.

Reading these seven tales, which are amazingly diverse, and incredibly, completed in a span of time that covers nearly fifty years, and I now hope to have the chance to read a full length novel of Tanizaki's to see how he treats these themes that occur so frequently in his short stories in a novel. I have a feeling that the result could be spectacular.