“The Sirens Lament” features three early 20th-century stories by the Japanese writer Jun’ichirō Tanizaki.
Yet Tanizaki excelled at school, writing poems in classical Chinese and publishing his first stories while still in middle school. To afford further education, he worked as a live-in servant and tutor for a wealthy family — only to be fired for carrying on a love affair with a maid.
This brief sketch of Tanizaki’s biography suggests triple qualities — domination, virtuosity, and the erotic — that are everywhere in his writings. In one of his greatest stories, a young servant falls in love with his charge, Shunkin, the blind daughter of a well-to-do Osaka family. He leads her everywhere, and because she is a master of the Samisen, he becomes one too.
Tanizaki came of age during a buoyant time in Japan’s history, when the young empire had won wars against China and Russia and the importation of western culture was at a high. For a period he was a fervent advocate for westernization, dressing in European-style suits, moving his family to Yokohama’s western quarter, and devouring great quantities of foreign food.
Many of Tanizaki’s best works keep his characters at a distance, yet that very quality opens a rich space for both writer and reader, suggesting a character’s complicated inner life by how each performs their particular role, whether teacher or pupil, master or servant, and finding irony in the gaps. Unfortunately, none of the stories in this volume approaches the heights of his best work.
Robert Rubsam is a writer and critic whose work has been published in the New York Times Magazine, the Atlantic, the Baffler and the Nation.Pushkin Press. 190 pp. $18, paperbackDelivered to your inbox every Friday, a selection of publishing news, literary observations, poetry recommendations and more from Book World writer Ron Charles.
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