Page:Japanese Literature (Keene).pdf/119

Rh meaninglessly, without pleasure and without hope of better. And it is always raining.

I can think of few gloomier books than The Drifting Cloud. As an evocation of the Japan of 1945–7 it was extremely successful, and in its tone it sometimes suggests the Japanese medieval accounts of the sorrows of this world. But such a book is too close to the facts which inspired it to permit any real literary quality.

Above the mass of Japanese post-war literature, with its cheap pornography and its masochistic recollections, stands one work to which I have several times referred already, Tanizaki’s The Thin Snow. In Japan it has been acclaimed as a masterpiece, and perhaps it is one, of a kind, but to a Western reader it never quite comes off, although at its best it approaches greatness. As far as I am aware, Tanizaki has not divulged the theory which he was following when he wrote this work, but if one compares his monumental trilogy with, say, Jules Romains’ Les Hommes de Bonne Volonté, one can see his methods quite clearly. Romains, in attempting to portray a whole society, rather than one or two individuals, declared his dissatisfaction with the usual methods employed in long novels—having an entirely unlikely number of events happening to the hero or perhaps to one or two families. He instead preferred to take a large number of people, some of whom will never know each other in the course of his work, because only in this way could a great variety of experiences be naturally furnished. Tanizaki’s method is the exact opposite. He takes a few people and allots to them only the number of experiences which they could normally have been expected to have in the course of five years, which means of course that there is almost no plot. The Thin Snow is as exact a recreation of life as exists in fiction, and Tanizaki, in choosing so photographic an approach,