Book Notes: Naomi by Junichiro Tanizaki

Junichiro Tanizaki (1886 – 1965) published prolifically in the 1920s and 1930s, and most of his novels have been translated either to English or to Spanish. Still, I never heard of him until I came across his name in Rafael Chirbes’s diaries. The discovery of Tanizaki has been added to a long list of things for which I am grateful to Chirbes. He is an exceptionally talented author. Naomi (1925) is a sort of a rewriting of Somerset Maugham’s Of Human Bondage (1915) in a way that both honors the English author and makes the result completely Japanese. I haven’t had any time to research this, so I don’t know if Tanizaki’s indebtedness to Maugham is mentioned anywhere, but it’s very clear once you start reading Naomi.

The main character of Naomi is Jōji Kawai, an engineer and a dutiful son who is bored with his straitjacketed existence of idealized Japanese righteousness and wants to experience Western culture. He picks up Naomi, a fifteen-year-old girl from a miserable, neglectful family and projects onto her his fantasy of Western life. To Kawai, Western means dissipated, whorish, uncontrolled, wasteful, and utterly irresistible. The novel shows how he is demolished by his shuddering, painful love of this imaginary West.

I highly recommend this author, but I have to warn you that a new and very unpleasant phenomenon has arisen as a result of AI. Shitty, dishonest people publish AI summaries of Tanizaki’s novels on Kindle Unlimited. If you download such an AI version by mistake, please don’t think that the author is terrible. Tanizaki was seriously talented. His writing is irresistible. If you are reading something that claims to be by Tanizaki and it’s complete garbage, this means that you have stumbled upon one of those nasty AI retellings.

I love Somerset Maugham and it’s an extraordinary gift to read a book by a Japanese writer who was so inspired by one of Maugham’s novels that he based his own on it.