THE GOURMET CLUB: A Sextet
By JUN'ICHIRO TANIZAKI
Translated by Anthony Chambers and Paul McCarthy. New York: Kodansha, 2001 pages, $24

Susan J. Napier

In describing the writing of Tanizaki Jun'ichiro (1886-1965), one of Japan's greatest twentieth-century authors, the expression tour de force comes immediately to mind. Tanizaki's body of work is unique. It includes historical writing, fantasy, and sometimes even scatological realism, but virtually all of Tanizaki's writing possesses an inimitable combination of sensual elegance mixed with sumptuously earthy and often humorously grotesque detail.
Fortunately, Tanizaki has been well served over the years by his English-language translators. This is certainly true of The Gourmet Club, which contains a "sextet" of stories from across Tanizaki's career that have been translated by Anthony Chambers and Paul McCarthy with all the care and panache that the author himself would have appreciated. Tanizaki's playful but essentially straightforward narrative technique comes across effectively in the stories set in the contemporary period. The book's one piece of historical fiction, "The Two Acolytes," is ably translated by McCarthy in a more suitably plangent style.
The quality of the stories themselves is more varied. None of them quite approaches the heights of Tanizaki's greatest work, such as the ethereal beauty of his elegiac novella "The Bridge of Dreams" or the psychological probing of his dazzling historical piece, "Portrait of Shunkin." What the stories do offer is a superb introduction to the rich variety with which Tanizaki presented his key obsessions: secrecy, aberrant sexuality, and obsession itself. Even by twenty-first-century standards, some of these stories still retain the power to shock through the originality and directness with which they explore obsessive desires.
The collection's first piece,"The Children," begins relatively innocently with an invitation to a young boy to come and play at the house of his aristocratic classmate, Shin'ichi, and Shin'ichi's bullying older sister. Typical of a Tanizaki work, the "play" soon escalates into sadomasochistic games of an erotic or scatological nature in which the protagonists participate wholeheartedly. The basic narrative structure-that of a female character tormenting her willing male partners-is typical of Tanizaki, but the story adds two interesting dimensions, its use of children as protagonists and its decadent aristocratic setting. In particular, Tanizaki manages to evoke the sometimes unwholesome pleasures of childhood in a way that may stir the reader with an uncanny frisson of familiarity.

Similar to "The Children" in their descriptions of obsessions that grow ever more bizarre and extreme are the three stories "The Gourmet Club," "Mr. Bluemound," and "The Secret." "The Gourmet Club" explores the increasing desires of a group of young hedonists for ever more unusual food. A less accomplished writer might have ended the story with a simple example of cannibalism, but Tanizaki's gourmet pleasures, ranging from a woman's fingers seemingly floating freely within a man's mouth to the deep-fried batter in which a living woman has been coated, are far more creative and memorable. More sinister, but equally memorable, is "Mr. Bluemound." This story traces the erotic obsession of a man (who nowadays would be likely to become a celebrity stalker) as he avidly follows the celluloid traces of a famous film actress in order to create his own grotesque homage to her beautiful body. The most poignant of the three stories, "The Secret," relates how a man's pleasures in cross-dressing ultimately reveal to him a more profound secret-that it is imagination and artifice that give pleasure in a fundamentally quotidian world.
Somewhat less typical of Tanizaki are the stories "The Two Acolytes" and "Manganese Dioxide Dreams." Set in medieval Japan, "The Two Acolytes" embodies in its two eponymous protagonists the tension between the "floating world" of earthly delights and the ascetic world of religious training. The story ends on a surprising and rather austerely beautiful note as one of the acolytes rejects the pleasures of the flesh in a scene whose chilly images of snow and birds seem more evocative of Kawabata or even Mishima than the sensuous warmth of Tanizaki's usual descriptions. Far more prosaic but still insidiously fascinating is "Manganese Dioxide Dreams," an autobiographical work from Tanizaki's old age. The story, a rambling tale of a visit to Tokyo, initially seems to lack the erotic and grotesque elements that are so much Tanizaki's signature, but these elements appear in somewhat disguised form by the end: in one case, in the protagonist's avid retelling of the plot of a French horror film, and, in another, (and this could only be in a Tanizaki story) in the vision of the French actress that the old man sees embodied in his own feces as he gazes with pleasure into the Western-style toilet.
For fans of Tanizaki, this collection will be a pleasure. For new readers, it is a chance to see a master writer in all his original and idiosyncratic luster.

Susan J. Napier, professor of Japanese literature and culture at the University of Texas, is the author of Escape from the Wasteland: Romanticism and Realism in the Works of Mishima Yukio and Oe Kenzaburo; The Fantastic in Modern Japanese Literature: The Subversion of Modernity; and the recently published Anime from Akira to Princess Mononoke: Experiencing Japanese Animation.