Childhood Years: A Memoir (Japan's Modern Writers) - 3150

Tanizaki was, in his own words, "spoiled rotten" as a child; and his early gift for getting his own way extended to his career as perhaps Japan's greatest modern novelist. From the first, he ignored the autobiographical Naturalism that was the current literary orthodoxy and declared his devotion to "Art for Art's Sake." In his maturity, he still insisted on the value of true fiction, the pleasure of a good story told for its own sake rather than to make a point, either personal or ideological. Unaffected by shifting fashions, he went on writing, dealing with a few great central themes in a startling variety of styles, from the classical to the modern, and of tones, from the profoundly dark to the comic. The genres he worked in were also extremely varied: the short story, the novella, the long novel, the drama, and the essay. Within the last category, Tanizaki produced several notable collections of reminiscences--it was as if, after establishing the right of an author to be unrepentingly fictional, he then felt free to train his talents on his own life. Especially in his later years, as he entered his seventies, he looked back on the world of late nineteenth-century Japan--focusing on that modest, close-knit section of Tokyo, with its small shops and family businesses, in which he grew up--and Childhood Years is the result. The main themes of his fiction are echoed in this memoir, with its central figure of his mother, and its foreshadowings of other, more ambiguous feminine presences--murderesses and victims, geisha and "archery-booth girls," and (most ambiguous of all) the male actors who play female roles on the Kabuki stage. If the well-known Kabuki is here, so too are forms that will be less familiar to Western readers: the sacred kagura dances and the burlesque chaban. Japanese literature is represented, from age-old, half-legendary chronicles through medieval warrior tales, and on to the political novels of the turn of the century. Above all, though, the men and women of Meiji Japan are here, the little known, the famous, and the notorious. All are depicted with the acute observation and vividness of expression so characteristic of Tanizaki. The result is a nostalgic record of great beauty and power, shot through with flashes of the author's rather macabre humor and delight in the grotesque.
ASIN: 4770023227
VSKU: DBV.4770023227.G
Condition: Good
Author/Artist:Tanizaki, Junichiro
Binding: Paperback