Wrapping the hole in the middle of it all: Tanizaki's narrative packages

College Literature, Summer 2003 by Atkinson, William

What finally came pouring out was a flood of figured paper: all those letters were in envelopes adorned with coquettish, brilliantly colored woodblock designs. The envelopes were small, only big enough to hold a sheet of women's letter paper folded in four, and they were decorated with evening primroses, lilies of the valley, tulips, portraits of beauties in the manner of Takehisa Yumeiji, printed in four or five colors. I was somewhat taken aback at the sight. . . . In my opinion, the decorative aspect of the letters is sometimes even more revealing than their content. (Tanizaki, Quicksand)

Tanizaki Jun'ichiro has a mixed reputation. Although he is widely regarded in the West as one of the major figures of modern Japanese fiction, critics from his own country are ambivalent about a man who wrote so freely of sado-masochism, incest, and the erotic fantasies of elderly men1-many in Japan were no doubt relieved when he died before he could be awarded the Nobel prize for which he had been so strongly tipped. Tanizaki first gained fame in 1910 with a short story called "The Tattooer" and continued to dismay a portion of the reading public until the end of his writing career. He died in 1965.2

Students of Tanizaki variously regard him as a Japanese decadent-a Poe or Wilde of the East-in search of an "unattainable ideal beauty"3 or as a man intent on creating worlds apart.4 While not dismissing these approaches, I propose to look at Tanizaki from a rather different standpoint. With some help from an anthropological study of Japan, I will examine some of Tanizaki's stories, demonstrating that throughout his career, his narrative technique parallels a Japanese preoccupation with wrapping.

In 1990, a collection of articles was published called Unwrapping Japan: Society and Culture in Anthropological Perspective (Ben-Ari, Brian Moeran, and James Valentine 1990); the figure of unwrapping appears to have originated in an article by Joy Hendry.5 Whereas the title of the collection suggests a primary concern with what is wrapped, Hendry is less interested in unwrapping than in the wrapping itself, and three years later, she published a monograph titled Wrapping Culture: Politeness, Presentation and Power in Japan and Other Societies. "I think," she writes, "we are perhaps overly concerned with 'unwrapping,' with revealing the perceived essence of things, where we might do well to examine a little further the nature of the concealment used" (1993, 5). She proceeds to discuss the wrapping of gifts and produce then moves on to explore language, clothing, and architecture as wrapping. She does not consider fiction. However, if Hendry's thesis is valid and wrapping is a key procedure in Japanese culture, we would expect to find the same figures and practices in the literature of Japan. This paper will argue that we do, and it will demonstrate the thesis through an analysis of wrapping in the work of Tanizaki. I will concentrate on four stories in particular-"The Tattooer," "Aguri," "A Portrait of Shunkin," and "The Bridge of Dreams"-because they span Tanizaki's long career and their translations are readily available in a single volume.6

In the West, we tend to regard the wrapping around a gift as a way of hiding it, of teasing the recipient. If a wrapped gift were accepted and put to one side unopened, we would be offended. In Japan, on the other hand, to open a present immediately is thought to display too much interest in the object itself rather than the sentiment which motivated it (Hendry 1993, 14). It is quite common in Japan for the recipient never to open the gift but to give it away later. Hendry argues that the wrapping and the wrapped "cannot in fact be separated from each other, so that the meaning of any particular presentation must include the importance and value of the wrapping used" (27). The purpose of the wrapping is "to refine the object, to add to it layers of meaning which it could not carry in its unwrapped form" (27). The layers of wrapping so refine the object that it is no longer what it was. In more familiar terms, we might say that the apparent signifier (the wrapping) is not pointing to the signified within, but to itself, so the signifier takes precedence over the signified.

We can see this process at the very beginning of Tanizaki's career in his 1910 story, "Shisei" ("tattoo," widely anthologized in Hibbett's translation as "The Tattooer"). The tale is set in early nineteenth-century Edo (Tokyo) and concerns a young tattooer called Seikichi, who longs to place a masterpiece on the body of a beautiful woman and searches the city for a suitable canvass. One day a maiko, an apprentice geisha, comes on an errand from her mistress. She is carrying a very characteristic Japanese parcel: a silk cloak wrapped in an ukiyo-e print, wrapped in a colored cloth. Seikichi shows her two scroll paintings depicting women triumphing over men, and the maiko reluctantly admits that these images represent her true desires. Recognizing her as an ideal medium, Seikichi gives her an anesthetic and tattoos a giant spider upon her back. Hibbett's translation calls it a black widow (Tanizaki 1994, 167),7 but Ivan Morris renders it as "an enormous female spider" (1962, 99). Both translations are making reference to jorogumo, or the courtesan spider, part of a long-standing genre of poisonous-woman literature, which was still quite lively in the late Edo period (1800-1868).8