Power Relations and Battle of the Sexes in Naomi by Junichiro Tanizki

Power Relations in Junichiro Tanizaki's Naomi

The most powerful and lasting contributions to the literature of a given era are invariably penned by bold thinkers struggling to comprehend the ever changing world in which they live. Spanning the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the Japanese Meiji Restoration period, which was propelled by the fusion of industrialized economy and Western culture, and personified by the authorial brilliance of authors such as Jun'ichir? Tanizaki, shaped and inspired a momentous political and social transformation within one of the world's most ancient civilzations. The toppling of previously infallible Shoguns and the sudden distribution of democratic ideals across boundaries of gender and class forced many traditional Japanese to recalibrate their worldview instantly, and the result is a wealth of material, including novels, plays and works of critical nonfiction, all of which focuses intently on the crumbling conventions of age-old gender roles. With the external foundations of the preexisting social order irrevocably shattered by the Meiji movement, young writers like Tanizaki focused their intellectual insight on the shifting structure of Japanese society itself, analyzing the evolution of concepts like fidelity, femininity, and power in a patriarchal society that has suddenly seen that power dynamic shift. Tanizaki's most renowned work of social analysis through fiction was Naomi, a novel written in simple yet searing prose that manages to cast a scathing lens on the conventional roles assigned to women in a male-dominated system, and the ramifications for both genders when these roles are reversed. By applying a feminist reading to Naomi, the modern reader can begin to surmise the ultimate import of Tanizaki's work, which stands today as a lasting testament to ability of literature to capture the essence of a historical era.

Tanizaki immediately establishes the thematic direction of Naomi in the novel's opening lines, as the narrator J-ji explains "I'm going to try to relate the facts of our relationship as man and wife just as they happened, as honestly and frankly as I can ... it's probably a relationship without precedent" (1), before opining eloquently on Japan's increasingly cosmopolitan nature and the associated consequences. With this single, simply written but immensely powerful passage, Tanizaki positions the relationship between J-ji and his eventual wife, who he later compares in reverential tones to "the motion-picture actress Mary Pickford" by noting breathlessly that "there was definitely something Western about her appearance" (1), as an allegory for the collision of cultures occurring throughout Japan as Western ideals gained greater acceptance. The first chapter of Naomi ostensibly portrays the period of lovelorn longing every suitor experiences during the courting process, as J-ji clumsily proffers his affection through dinner dates and trips to the theatre, but Tanizaki subtly imbues the entire proceedings with an air of masculine superiority that the novel's narrator seems to simply accept as a matter of course. This rhetorical strategy employed by Tanizaki is especially evident when J-ji ponders his desire to make Naomi his wife. When he absently envisions this eventual state of matrimony, J-ji thinks about how he might "decorate the rooms, plant flowers, hang out a birdcage on the sunny veranda, and hire a maid to do the cooking and scrubbing," before revealing "and if Naomi agreed to come, she'd take the place of both the maid and the bird," (Tanizaki 3), the implication is that this young woman is meant to serve the traditional gender roles that J-ji and millions of his fellow Japanese men believed was their birthright. In his inimitable style of applying intense satirical insight to social norms, Tanizaki soon shifts this preexisting power dynamic on its proverbial head, with the young and seemingly timid Naomi emerging as a potent symbol of the liberated femininity enveloping Japan during the era.

As Naomi slowly ingratiates herself into J-ji's life through her subtle form of submissive seduction, Tanizaki explores the traditional conception of power relationships through the prism of this singularly modern union of two individuals who are emblematic of very different aspects of Japanese culture. Just as he began the first chapter of the novel with a direct insight into the fragile psyche of J-ji, Tanizaki opens the sixth chapter with an internal monologue which reveals his continually conflicted appraisal of his wife. When J-ji thinks ruefully to himself that "even while I was indulging her this way, I hadn't abandoned my original desire, which was to give her a good education and bring her up as a fine, respectable woman," the flawed logic of this statement is apparent even to him, and he concludes painfully, "but I was so befuddled by my love for her that I couldn't see such an obvious inconsistency" (Tanizaki 21). By this point in the novel, J-ji has come to suspect that his apparent conquest of this young, beautiful woman, who stands as the pure personification of his prized Western conception of beauty, may be nothing more than a mere illusion, and yet he is incapable of extricating himself from the situation. Just as he compared Naomi to a bird in the opening chapter, thinking that his manhood granted him a supremacy over her equal to that of a hunter who captures and cages his prey, J-ji finds himself trapped by personal power wielded by another. This feeling of enforced impotence is evident during an English lesson administered to Naomi by the confident Miss Harrison, under the paternal eye of J-ji, who finds himself becoming cowed by her unexpectedly empowered attitude. When J-ji observes of his eventual submission to Miss Harrison that, "like most Japanese, I tended to feel helpless when I came into contact with Westerners and lost the courage to state my opinions clearly" (Tanizaki 23), the implications for his future marriage to Naomi, a vision of Westernized idealizations of femininity, are harrowing indeed.