For some, it is tempting to view Tanizaki’s move to Kansai following the Great Kanto earthquake as a strategic retreat away from the modern reality of Japan. However, to Tanizaki the terms East and West and the values they implied were never polarised. The works that came to fruition in this period suggest instead that he had found a precarious balance between the two, never quite daring to envisage the existence of one without the presence of another. Following on this strand, his 1928 serialised novel Tade kū mushi (‘Some Prefer Nettles’) tells the tale of the ennui in a marriage caught between the final throes of a dying Edo culture and an increasingly ever-present modernity. In the novel, protagonist Kaname is faced with the decision as …show more content…
Rather, it is disguised as a “nagging uneasiness felt by his characters”. As the protagonist, Kaname is the foremost example of this uneasiness. He is torn between embracing the modernising Taisho world with its Western liberalism, and his inner self which is progressively more drawn to traditional martial bondage. Kaname’s ambivalence towards informing his son of crisis of his marriage and the numerous excuses he offers for his inaction is evidence of the discrepancies that exist between what he wants to do and what he should do. For example, he references the prospect of his son losing composure at school as a reason to forego informing him whilst he is at school, “he [the son] may be breaking into tears right in the class”. Tanizaki situates this passivity as cultural friction which fundamentally occurs between a traditional Japanese value set which demands familial ties take precedence over self, and a Western brand of individualism which would have Kaname inconvenience others at his own expedience. His daily events are further laid out in a manner which exemplifies this inability to completely follow Western affectations nor shut out his traditional heritage. He judiciously reads the exotic tales in the English translation of the Arabian Nights brought for him by his cousin Takamatsu, in order to find the more lewd passages for which the novel is regarded controversial: “Kaname had abandoned himself to a search for the passages that had given the Arabian Nights its dubious reputation”. His house is home to a ‘foreign wing’ and veranda which mirrors Western aesthetics: “Kaname seemed to be sitting in a rattan chair on the veranda of the Western-style wing. He had a teacup in his hand and was flicking over the pages of a large book.” And he claims to dislike the old man’s antiquated dark