Page:Japanese Literature (Keene).pdf/117

Rh little to suggest that the author was aware of the Japanese literary traditions, and only inadvertently, as it were, does he betray in his use of imagery or in his descriptions the non-European aspects of his writings. But some writers continued deliberately to use the traditional styles, even when the subjects were dictated by the new tastes, and other writers who had at first gained celebrity for their works in the modern vein turned back to the old classics for inspiration. After Tanizaki had written A Fool’s Love, with its condemnation of the mania for Western things, he himself began to show in his works a more active interest in traditional writing. This tendency culminated in 1938–41 with the publication of his modern-language translation of The Tale of Genji. During this period he began also to plan the writing of a novel which would bear the same relation to the present time as The Tale of Genji did to that of Lady Murasaki. But with the advent of war in 1941 and the adoption of increasingly repressive measures by the Japanese Government in an effort to eliminate all traces of what they considered to be decadent culture, The Tale of Genji itself fell into disfavour, and Tanizaki’s projected novel had to be put aside.

During the war itself little literature of importance was published and the production after the war at first promised to be extremely sickly. In the terrible years of 1946 and 1947, when most of the people were forced to devote their entire energies to the one question of staying alive, there was little interest shown in literary production. Certain left-wing writers who had been imprisoned or exiled returned to write memoirs, and their books, together with translations of foreign works, especially American, took up a large part of the booksellers’ lists. But of genuine literary production there was very little. Pornographic novels, detective stories, and other types of escapist