The Grand Old Man and the Great Tradition by Luisa Bienati & Bonaventura Ruperti

Author:Luisa Bienati & Bonaventura Ruperti
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Michigan Center for Japanese Studies
Published: 2020-02-15T00:00:00+00:00

Tanizaki’s Tanka

AMY V. HEINRICH

The great twentieth-century novelist Tanizaki Jun’ichiro (1886-1965) wrote poetry all his life, although he published very little of it. He was born and educated in Tokyo, and his early fiction demonstrated deep interest in Western literature and culture. He had an early interest in cinema, and wrote screenplays for the Taish5 Katsudo Shashin (Taikatsu) studio in 1920 and 1921.1 His renewed interest in traditional Japanese culture, following his move to the Kansai (Kyoto-Osaka-Kobe) region after the Great Earthquake of 1923 in the Kanto (Tokyo) region, is well known. His first translation into modern Japanese of Genji monogatari (The Tale of Genji) was made between 1935 and 1938, and was published in 1940.2 It should not be surprising, then, that he was also interested in waka—or, to use its more common modern name, tanka—the traditional five-line, thirty-one-syllable poetic form.

A short poem sequence, “Ishdan jushu” (Ten poems on Ishoan),3 was published in Sat5 Haruo’s journal, Kototama, in March 1932.4 The poems were playful and elegant, printed entirely in kana, with plays on the meanings of Sumiyoshi, both a place name and words meaning “good to live in,” and on matsu, meaning “pine tree” and also an element in the name of his wife-to-be, Nezu Matsuko. The word iro, meaning “color,” used below to refer to the color of the pine, matsu no iro, also means sexual love:

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