Page:Japanese Literature (Keene).pdf/120

108 deliberately sacrificed all dramatic possibilities. How great a change this represented from his earlier work may be seen when we recall that his reputation was built as a writer of gruesome stories, and his middle period deals chiefly with highly theatrical monomaniacs. In The Thin Snow, Tanizaki is at pains to make everything exactly and completely true to life. His naturalism does not consist merely in the presentation of commonplace or unattractive details, although the book does contain a remarkably complete account of an attack of dysentery; Tanizaki sees to it that every dramatic moment is followed by its natural let-down, that the continuous movement of life is not interrupted by the ends of chapters. Here, then, is a true roman fleuve, a slow and turbid river of a book, which moves inevitably and meaninglessly to its close.

It is difficult to give even an outline of the plot of the novel, so rambling and diffuse is it. The central figures are four sisters, and the most important single theme is that of finding a husband for the third of these sisters. But The Thin Snow is not really a novel in which the plot is of great importance. It is an effort of memory to recreate what must have seemed to Tanizaki in 1947 to be a vanished world. Here we have a prosperous family living in the Japan of 1936–41, and Tanizaki lovingly recalls each detail of their lives, as some Roman historian might have done five years after the fall of Rome under the Barbarians. The people in the novel never go merely to a “restaurant”, but always to the “Oriental Grill” or some other specific place, and when they go to meet their friends or lovers, we are told the number of the bus that they take. At first the precision of Tanizaki’s reporting is likely to puzzle us, for accustomed as we are to the Proustian method of sounding faintly leitmotivs that must be retained in our minds until the moment of their full development, we feel sure that there must be some reason,