Page:Japanese Literature (Keene).pdf/114

102 vulgarities he can find ways to excuse her to himself. Eventually he discovers that she is unfaithful to him, attempts to break away but cannot. The novel ends with his abject surrender to her. He agrees that she can have whatever male friends she chooses, can live as she pleases, and need only remain as his wife. In Maugham’s novel the emphasis was on the sensitive young man and his struggles to discover some way of surmounting a passion which completely possessed him. In Tanizaki’s version of what is essentially the same story, the emphasis is rather on the terrible results of a fondness for Western things. What attracts the hero to the waitress is first of all her European features, which make him think of Mary Pickford’s, and her curiously un-Japanese manners. When he asks her if she would like to go to the films, she replies in Mildred’s words, “I don’t mind if I do,” instead of with the usual polite protestations. The hero is captivated by her unusual behaviour and encourages her to be modern—that is, European. This accentuates her naturally wayward inclinations. At the end of the novel, we find them married, living in a Western-style house, and his wife’s new friends are European men.

Tanizaki’s novel thus represents a rather subtle return to the didactic works so scorned by Tsubouchi. Of Human Bondage does not, as far as I am aware, seek to impart any moral lesson, but contents itself with describing a hopeless love-affair and its eventual resolution. But in Tanizaki the hero is condemned for his adulation of the West. He is represented as being ashamed of his shortness, dark complexion, protruding teeth—all typically Japanese features. He feels it somehow an honour even to be insulted by his European-looking mistress, and the thought that he possesses her fills him with pride, even when he sees her coarsely made up, and looking for all the world