Tanizaki's Vision of the "West"

Tanizaki's Vision of the Author: Ken Kenneth Ito
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : East and West in literature
Languages : en
Pages : 334

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Book Description

Tanizaki's Vision of the "West"

Tanizaki's Vision of the Author: Ken Kenneth Ito
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : East and West in literature
Languages : en
Pages : 334

Get Book Here

Book Description


Tanizaki's Vision of the "West"

Tanizaki's Vision of the Author: Ken Kenneth Ito
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : East and West in literature
Languages : en
Pages : 614

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Book Description


Naomi

Naomi PDF Author: Jun'ichirō Tanizaki
Publisher: ببلومانيا للنشر والتوزيع
ISBN:
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 232

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Book Description
A hilarious story of one man’s obsession and a brilliant reckoning of a nation’s cultural confusion—from a master Japanese novelist. When twenty-eight-year-old Joji first lays eyes upon the teenage waitress Naomi, he is instantly smitten by her exotic, almost Western appearance. Determined to transform her into the perfect wife and to whisk her away from the seamy underbelly of post-World War I Tokyo, Joji adopts and ultimately marries Naomi, paying for English and music lessons that promise to mold her into his ideal companion. But as she grows older, Joji discovers that Naomi is far from the naïve girl of his fantasies. And, in Tanizaki’s masterpiece of lurid obsession, passion quickly descends into comically helpless masochism.

Visions of Desire

Visions of Desire PDF Author: Ken Ito
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 080476607X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 320

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Book Description
No Japanese writer was more obsessed with desire than Tanizaki Jun'ichiro (1886–1965). Over a career that spanned half a century, he explored, with both joyful fascination and ruthless insight, the dazzling varieties of sexuality, the complementary attractions of exoticism and nostalgia, the human yearning for mastery over others, and the tense relationship between fantasy and the exterior world. His fiction is filled with portrayals of desire in all its violence, irony, pathos, and comedy. In one of Tanizaki's novels, a young engineer fascinated with the West sets out to transform a Japanese bar girl into his very own version of Mary Pickford. He succeeds to such an extent that the girl, growing tired of his immutable Japaneseness, begins to take foreign lovers. Cuckolded and humiliated though his is, the engineer is unable to leave his fantasy-come-to-life and resigns himself to enslavement. In another novel, a Westernized Japanese finds himself gradually drawn to the past. Specifically, he is attracted to his father-in-law's companion, a young woman who has been trained and costumed to play the part of an old-fashioned mistress. Though this woman is no more a flesh-and-blood embodiment of tradition than a bunraku doll, the protagonist contemplates a life with someone like her, a life defined by the pursuit of abstract, dehumanized cultural ideals. Visions of Desire locates such novels in the shifting discourse on cultural identity and cultural aspiration that permeates Japanese life. Ito argues that Tanizaki's novels do not merely end in the reification and contemplation of cultural ideals but rather problematize the desire behind such ideals. He finds in the writer's fiction a subtle understanding of cultural aspiration as a process riddled with subversions, influenced by patterns of mediation, and circumscribed by the lonely efforts of individual subjectivity. He discovers in Tanizaki's fables about the male effort to transform women into cultural icons a clear awareness of the sexual and class hierarchies that make such transformation possible. Visions of Desire is the first book in English on a writer who is possibly modern Japan's greatest novelist. Ito has written for both the specialist and the general reader, setting his argument in a discussion both of Tanizaki's times and of the life of a writer who believed in living out the fantasies that fueled his fictions.

Tanizaki in Western Languages

Tanizaki in Western Languages PDF Author: Adriana Boscaro
Publisher: U of M Center for Japanese Studies
ISBN:
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 104

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Book Description
An important research tool for those interested in one of the greatest writers of the twentieth century.

Longing and Other Stories

Longing and Other Stories PDF Author: Jun'ichirō. Tanizaki
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231554419
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 111

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Book Description
Jun’ichirō Tanizaki is one of the most eminent Japanese writers of the twentieth century, renowned for his investigations of family dynamics, eroticism, and cultural identity. Most acclaimed for his postwar novels such as The Makioka Sisters and The Key, Tanizaki made his literary debut in 1910. This book presents three powerful stories of family life from the first decade of Tanizaki’s career that foreshadow the themes the great writer would go on to explore. “Longing” recounts the fantastic journey of a precocious young boy through an eerie nighttime landscape. Replete with striking natural images and uncanny human encounters, it ends with a striking revelation. “Sorrows of a Heretic” follows a university student and aspiring novelist who lives in degrading poverty in a Tokyo tenement. Ambitious and tormented, the young man rebels against his family against a backdrop of sickness and death. “The Story of an Unhappy Mother” describes a vivacious but self-centered woman’s drastic transformation after a freak accident involving her son and daughter-in-law. Written in different genres, the three stories are united by a focus on mothers and sons and a concern for Japan’s traditional culture in the face of Westernization. The longtime Tanizaki translators Anthony H. Chambers and Paul McCarthy masterfully bring these important works to an Anglophone audience.

In Praise of Shadows

In Praise of Shadows PDF Author: Junichiro Tanizaki
Publisher: Random House
ISBN: 1446475573
Category : Antiques & Collectibles
Languages : en
Pages : 128

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Book Description
A fully illustrated, beautifully produced edition of Junichiro Tanizaki's wise and evocative essay on Japanese culture. ‘We find beauty not in the thing itself but in the patterns of shadows, the light and the darkness, that one thing against another creates... Were it not for shadows, there would be no beauty.’ This book is in fact a portal. Reading it, you will be led by Junichiro Tanizaki’s light touch into a mysterious and tranquil world of darkness and shadows, where gold flashes in the gloom and a deep stillness reigns. If you are accustomed to equate light with clarity, the faded with the worthless and the dim with the dreary, prepare for a courteous but powerful realignment of your ideas. In Praise of Shadows is a poetic paean to traditional Japanese aesthetics – in a free-ranging style that moves from architecture to No theatre, and from cookery to lighting, Tanizaki teaches us to see the beauty in tarnished metal, the sombre dignity in unglazed pottery, the primacy of organic materials that bear witness to the regular touch of human hands. It is also astonishingly prescient, offering a gentle warning against the quest for airbrushed perfection, and reminding us that too much light can pollute and obscure our natural world. In this special edition, the text is accompanied by specially selected images to complement Tanizaki’s reflections and further illustrate the pattern and beauty of shadows.

The Grand Old Man and the Great Tradition

The Grand Old Man and the Great Tradition PDF Author: Luisa Bienati
Publisher: U of M Center For Japanese Studies
ISBN: 1929280556
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 177

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Book Description
In 1995, on the thirtieth anniversary of Tanizaki Jun’ichiro’s death, Adriana Boscaro organized an international conference in Venice that had an unusally lasting effect on the study of this major Japanese novelist. Thanks to Boscaro’s energetic commitment, Venice became a center for Tanizaki studies that produced two volumes of conference proceedings now considered foundational for all scholarly works on Tanizaki. In the years before and after the Venice Conference, Boscaro and her students published an abundance of works on Tanizaki and translations of his writings, contributing to his literary success in Italy and internationally. The Grand Old Man and the Great Tradition honors Boscaro’s work by collecting nine essays on Tanizaki’s position in relation to the “great tradition” of Japanese classical literature. To open the collection, Edward Seidensticker contributes a provocative essay on literary styles and the task of translating Genji into a modern language. Gaye Rowley and Ibuki Kazuko also consider Tanizaki’s Genji translations, from a completely different point of view, documenting the author’s three separate translation efforts. Aileen Gatten turns to the influence of Heian narrative methods on Tanizaki’s fiction, arguing that his classicism, far from being superficial, “reflects a deep sensitivity to Heian narrative.” Tzevetana Kristeva holds a different perspective on Tanizaki’s classicism, singling out specific aspects of Tanizaki’s eroticism as the basis of comparison. The next two essays emphasize Tanizaki’s experimental engagement with the classical literary genres—Amy V. Heinrich treats the understudied poetry, and Bonaventura Ruperti considers a 1933 essay on performance arts. Taking up cinema, Roberta Novelli focuses on the novel Manji, exploring how it was recast for the screen by Masumura Yasuzo. The volume concludes with two contributions interpreting Tanizaki’s works in the light of Western and Meiji literary traditions: Paul McCarthy considers Nabokovas a point of comparison, and Jacqueline Pigeot conducts a groundbreaking comparison with a novel by Natsume Soseki.

Touching the Unreachable

Touching the Unreachable PDF Author: Fusako Innami
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
ISBN: 0472054988
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 253

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Book Description
How can one construct relationality with the other through the skin, when touch is inevitably mediated by memories of previous contact, accumulated sensations, and interstitial space?

In Black and White

In Black and White PDF Author: Jun'ichirō. Tanizaki
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231546254
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 183

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Book Description
Jun'ichirō Tanizaki's In Black and White is a literary murder mystery in which the lines between fiction and reality are blurred. The writer Mizuno has penned a story about the perfect murder. His fictional victim is modeled on an acquaintance, a fellow writer. When Mizuno notices just before the story is about to be published that this man’s real name has crept into his manuscript, he attempts to correct the mistake, but it is too late. He then becomes terrified that an actual murder will take place—and that he will be the main suspect. Mizuno goes to great lengths to establish an alibi, venturing into the city's underworld. But he finds himself only more entangled as his paranoid fantasies, including a mysterious "Shadow Man" out to entrap him, intrude into real life. A sophisticated psychological and metafictional mystery, In Black and White is a masterful yet little-known novel from a great writer at the height of his powers. The year 1928 was a remarkable one for Tanizaki. He wrote three exquisite novels, but while two of them—Some Prefer Nettles and Quicksand—became famous, In Black and White disappeared from view. All three were serialized in Osaka and Tokyo newspapers and magazines, but In Black and White was never published as an independent volume. This translation restores it to its rightful place among Tanizaki's works and offers a window into the author's life at a crucial point in his career. A critical afterword explains the novel's context and importance for Tanizaki and Japan's literary and cultural scene in the 1920s, connecting autobiographical elements with the novel's key concerns, including Tanizaki's critique of Japanese literary culture and fiction itself.