Naomi – Jun’ichirō Tanizaki

We’re going back in time slightly now, as I’ve abandoned any attempt at chronologising my reviews after just one post, to pre-war Japan and the first, tentative steps that accompanied the end of the Meiji Period.  As with many of his generation, Jun’ichirō Tanizaki was deeply affected by the onset of the Japanese industrial revolution and the subsequent embedding of Western culture and ideas.  Naomi, originally serialised in 1924, is the definitive literary product of this transitional phase, wherein Western influences came flooding across the pacific, dramatically altering the accepted rules of Japanese social engagement.

Set in Tokyo, it is the tale of one man’s infatuation with Naomi, a girl of poor stock who begins the novel serving as a waitress in a cafe.  Her admirer, Joji, is a country-born, white-collar office worker immediately drawn to her distinctive, Eurasian looks.  He vows to transform her into a cultured and glamorous woman, in the vein of Mary Pickford, a famous movie star from the silent era.  Taking her under his wing in a bizarre quasi-adoption, they begin living together.  At the time, Joji is twenty-eight, whilst Naomi is fifteen.

As their relationship blossoms, parallels with Nabokov’s Lolita become evident, particularly in terms of the purity of the object of desire, and the paradoxical requirement that it necessarily remain untouched.  However, I think it is unfair to draw too close a comparison between the two, not least because Tanizaki’s novel came first.  Joji’s passion for Naomi in the initial instance is more akin to that of a father and daughter, albeit an irrepressibly lavish father, who wants nothing more than to socially advance and refine his child.  At first this is achieved through paying for her English tuition, but it quickly extends to the purchasing of countless obis and kimonos.

The relationship becomes tentatively sexual, and the two are married following Naomi’s sixteenth birthday.  Professing his infatuation in a confessional light to the reader, there is a recurring scene in which Joji bathes his treasure, slowly noticing the femininity exuded by her limbs, whilst becoming more enamoured with every inch she grows.  They begin attending evening dances at Naomi’s behest, as she believes it to be the height of Western civility.  Here, Joji is introduced to several men her age, and the extent of her virility gradually becomes apparent to him.  During the twilight of her teenage years, Naomi’s taste in men evolves as quickly as her fashions, with a chain of suitors left trailing in her wake, all whilst she continues to live with, and be supported by, her hapless benefactor.

The novel concludes in Naomi’s twenty-second year, and what we are left with is a tragi-comic cycle, wherein every night brings Joji fresh betrayal at her hands.  Whilst he experiences a degree of satiety, in as much as he is aware that only he can provide Naomi with the material goods she covets, this fleeting happiness comes at a price: namely the horror of knowing that he cannot exist without her, despite the almost demonic persona she has taken on.  He is in love with her, as he so frequently assures the reader, despite the acts of betrayal.  That fact alone affirms his hapless masochism, and is an affecting satirical take on the dangers of rapid Westernisation.

They ultimately move to grander accommodation on the outskirts of Yokohama, sleeping in separate rooms at her insistence, and it is here that we can perceive the duel suffering inflicted upon him by each of her transgressions.  It is not only a lover’s heart being broken again and again, but also that of a father who has devoted his best years to the fostering of virtue in a child, only to see it eroded and inexorably carried away before his very eyes.  For Joji, his only love being tainted and destroyed repeatedly in the next room, there is nothing but purgatory ahead.  She will always be tantilisingly out of reach, hidden behind a thin veil of paper and wood as he lies alone, breathless and unable to tear his thoughts away.

Sam