The eminent novelist Jun'ichiro Tanizaki was celebrated for his ambivalence toward the West and the modernism it was perceived as harboring. Before his celebrated return to traditional values during the prewar and wartime years, however, Tanizaki was positively enthusiastic about things viewed as foreign to Japan. Among these was the cinema.
It offered a useful paradigm to the Japanese position in the modern world of the 1920s. As one of Tanizaki's characters sums it up: "The more he thought about it, the less sure he was about where the world inside the film ended and where the world outside the film began." Movies thus offered a new relation to the real -- just what Japan needed.
This relationship was much on the minds of many Japanese intellectuals of the time. Hideo Kobayashi, the famous literary critic, upon seeing the sound-film "Morocco," wrote that it "generated a sense of intimacy, so that we feel closer to the Moroccan desert we have never seen than to the landscape of Ginza before our eyes."
Tanizaki, typically and energetically, decided to investigate. By 1917 he publicly announced his desire to write photoplays, and by 1920 he was employed as literary consultant for the newly formed Taikatsu Studios. He also worked on filming itself -- whole scenes of "The Night of the Doll Festival" (1921) were filmed in Tanizaki's residence in Odawara, with his daughter Ayuko playing the lead, some of the scenes directed by himself.
He wrote and worked on (assistant director, set designer) four films -- all with the director Thomas (Kisaburo) Kurihara, recently returned from Hollywood. They were, in addition to the film referred to above: "Amateur Club" (1920), "The Sands of Katsushika" (1920), and "The Lust of the White Serpent" (1921). None of them survived to this day, although their scripts do. Just how much is really the work of Tanizaki is open to some doubt. He himself, it is said, often gave the impression that he was a sort of concept man, developing ideas and doing rough drafts, and that Kurihara transformed these into shooting scripts.
Included here are the scripts of "Night of the Doll Festival," and " Lust of the White Serpent," those he is more likely to have written himself. (The script of "Amateur Club," and parts of "White Serpent" are included in Joanne Bernardi's admirable "Writing in Light" [2001], along with a more concise covering of Tanizaki's accomplishments in film.) He has also been credited with a few screenplays that were unproduced, several novels about films and filmmaking and a large amount of critical writing on the cinema.
As for the two novels that derive from film-production experience, "A Lump of Flesh" (1923) is here excerpted, and his 1924-25 "Naomi (Chijin no Ai)" exists in a very fine translation by Anthony Chambers (1986).
Among the several stories inspired by filmmaking activities is "Tumor with a Human Face" (1918) and "Mr. Aozukas's Story." (A more polished translation of the latter is that of Paul McCarthy [2001], which predates this one but is unaccountably missing from the bibliography.)
Most of the essays that Tanizaki devoted to film are included in this collection. Here the noted author reviews "The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari," meditates on the closeup ("A Woman's Face"), dilates on the subject of "Love and Sexual Desire."
All of this material is presented in a manner that mirrors Tanizaki's own interest in film. "This book is more about the cinematic than about cinema . . . . At stake in his interest in cinema was the invention of a Japanese modernity." Thus the uses that Tanizaki discovered for film are equated with his accomplishments. The aim is not to establish Tanizaki among the pioneers of Japanese cinema, but to demonstrate how he imagined cinema in Japan.
Film always offers a new relationship to the real. This thenbenefited "emerging" Japan as well as the surfacing young Tanizaki. Film contributed to him just as much as he contributed to it.
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