Visions of Desire

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No Japanese writer was more obsessed with desire than Tanizaki Jun'ichiro (1886–1965). Over his half-century career, he explored the dazzling varieties of sexuality, the attractions of exoticism and nostalgia, the human yearning for mastery, and the complex relationship between fantasy and reality. His fiction portrays desire in all its violence, irony, pathos, and comedy. In one novel, a young engineer, captivated by the West, attempts to transform a Japanese bar girl into his ideal version of a Western actress. However, as she grows tired of his unchanging Japaneseness, she seeks foreign lovers, leaving him humiliated yet unable to abandon his fantasy. In another story, a Westernized Japanese man is drawn to a young woman trained to embody an old-fashioned mistress. Though she is no more than a cultural construct, he contemplates a life defined by abstract ideals. The work situates these narratives within the discourse on cultural identity and aspiration in Japan. Ito argues that Tanizaki's novels challenge the desire behind cultural ideals, revealing a nuanced understanding of aspiration as a subversive process influenced by individual subjectivity. Through Tanizaki's tales of male attempts to transform women into cultural icons, he highlights the sexual and class hierarchies that enable such transformations. This book is the first in English on a writer regarded as modern Japan's greatest novelist, catering to both special