Tag Archives: Buddhism

Gaudy excess: Jun’ichirō Tanizaki, Quicksand

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Jun’ichirō Tanizaki, Quicksand. Translated from the Japanese by Howard Hibbert. Vintage Classics pb 2025; first published in serial form 1928-30. 172 pp.

The title of Tanizaki’s novella Quicksand refers to the chaotic turmoil into which at least one of the characters is plunged by their passionate love affairs. It was first published in a magazine with the title in Japanese Manji, meaning the four-pronged Buddhist swastika symbol, which has nothing to do with its sinister connotations as the symbol appropriated by the Nazis; in Buddhism and other eastern religions its message is auspicious, ‘conducive to well-being’. Here it also signifies the four lovers at the centre of the (dizzily complicated) plot.

It took me a while to get to grips with this strange novella, and at first I found it bordering on tiresome. Then I started to get into what the author was up to with his literary smoke and mirrors.

It’s difficult to say much about the plot without giving too much away. Let’s just say it’s an account of the amour fou of a married middle-class Osaka woman, Sonoko (aged 23) for a beautiful fellow art class student called Mitsuko (she’s 22). They start a passionate affair, then it all gets very messy when Mitsuko’s male lover enters the picture, then Sosoko’s husband gets involved.

This heady, erotic mix is narrated in a brilliantly unstable, shifting modernist manner. The main narrative voice is that of Sosoko, supposedly addressing a well-known novelist, presumably Tanizaki himself. She breathlessly and with apparent ingenuous honesty tells him of the tangled love…what is it: quadrangle? that she’s become part of. But how reliable is her account?

Sosoko is at pains to provide the novelist, who several times steps into the narrative himself to comment on aspects of her testimony, with documentary evidence to support her version of the story: photographs, letters and so on. It’s about these items that his rather sardonic, critical comments first appear.

Of the photo of herself with Mitsoko in their matching kimonos described as early as p. 8 he wryly says they are ‘of the gaudy, colorful sort that is so much to the Osaka taste’ (if he is speaking as Tanizaki he would be snootily referring to what his urbane Tokyo sensibility would find as provincial and unsophisticated). This not only calls into question the reliability of Sosoko’s narrative, but also breaks the fourth wall and introduces a tricksy metafictional element of playfulness into things. Nothing here is at it first seems, including this author-figure’s snobbishness, which elbows aside Sosoko’s giddy outpouring of emotions, and places his own, in his view more sophisticated, sensibility centre stage.

Sosoko then is perhaps a bit too eager to provide ‘evidence’ for her far-fetched account of steamy passionate infatuations, betrayals, jealousy and partner-swapping and -sharing. Of the face in the photo of her lesbian lover he suggests ‘she was very beautiful…But whether her face was in fact suitable for the benign features of the Willow Kannon was perhaps another matter’.

This needs explaining. Sosoko has been attending a third-rate art school for women, where her painting of the Buddhist deity Kannon (often depicted holding a willow branch, with which she sprinkles compassion on her needy devotees) closely resembles the lovely face of Mitsuko. She has subconsciously used the features of her would-be lover to portray the Buddhist goddess of mercy, associated (ironically, given what we later learn about heartless, manipulative and unfaithful Mitsuko) with peace, the relief of suffering, and protection for those in peril. Mitsuko, OTOH, seems to be selfishly devoted to causing it, according to Sosoko.

A little later, p.28, she produces for her interlocutor a bundle of letters written by the two women to each other; again she’s over-keen on providing this spurious authority for her unlikely story, and this evokes another sardonic commentary from the ‘author’ framing this whole tangle of narrative perspectives: the envelopes, he writes, were

adorned with coquettish, brilliantly colored woodblock designs [decorated with images of flowers]. I was somewhat taken aback at the sight. Doubtless no Tokyo woman would choose such garish envelopes. Even for a love letter, she would prefer something plainer. If you showed her such things, you may be certain she would disdain them as hopelessly vulgar…the taste for that sort of gaudy excess is indeed typical of Osaka women.

These author’s notes hint at a destabilising critique of Sosoko’s stories: he claims to find what Sosoko says lurid, tasteless and hysterical, and possibly exaggerated or distorted. How do we know for sure that anything she says actually happened, or, if it did, how accurate is she being? She’s a very partial narrator, keen to give her own side of things as the innocent, put-upon victim of the scheming duplicity of the other three involved in this ‘fervid emotional situation’, as the author describes it with what is surely an arched eyebrow. It’s a palimpsest of stories within stories that’s been likened to Fatal Attraction and Dangerous Liaisons; I find parallels with the metafictional arch humour of Tristram Shandy.

Things end with a melodramatic twist that calls into question not only what Sosoko claims was the ending of the multiple affairs, but also everything else that she says happened beforehand that led up to the denouement. Whatever on earth is going on in all this, it’s great fun, composed with panache by a highly accomplished modernist author.

The book was a birthday gift to me earlier this month from my stepson, over in the UK on a visit from Catalonia. My thanks to him for a thoughtful and entertaining present.

J. Slauerhoff, Adrift in the Middle Kingdom

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J. Slauerhoff, Adrift in the Middle Kingdom. Translated from the Dutch by David McKay. Handheld Press (Bath, England), 2019: Handheld Classic, 9. Introduction by Arie Pos and Wendy Gan. 19341

I posted on another Dutch classic, Max Havelaar, by Multatuli, back in May. Its co-translator, David McKay, offered review copies of his newest translation – today’s subject – via the GoodReads/NYRB Classics online group discussion, and he kindly arranged for this small westcountry imprint to send me a copy.

Jan Jacob Slauerhoff (1898-1936) served as a ship’s doctor in south-east Asia, experience on which he drew for Adrift in the Middle Kingdom. This is its first English translation. The narrator is an Ulsterman called Cameron, a radio operator on cargo ships plying between Indonesia and other Asian ports and China. The cargo often includes contraband, including opium, which brings him and his ship into abrasive, dangerous contact with criminal smugglers and dealers.

They also transport exhausted migrant workers, their health shattered by working in slave-like conditions in the plantations of Java, returning home for whatever short time remains of their lives. They’ve hoarded what little capital they might have scraped together in the long years of toil.

Slauerhoff Adrift in the Middle Kingdom coverUnlike some other novels by westerners at this period, the picture given of the inhabitants of these oriental countries is not patronisingly exotic and romanticised. This is largely the sinister, darker side of the far east, a place of seedy opium dens and sordid dockside brothels and bars catering for the sailors and merchants intent on indulging their sensual appetites after long suffering and voyages, or lucrative deals (‘whooping and shouting to drown out your own despair, your shame and your transgressions, for the sake of mere survival’, as Cameron wearily characterises it).

But most of the indigenous inhabitants endure a life of hardship and deprivation. The treatment they receive from westerners as well as their own people is often heartless and exploitative.

Here is Cameron’s sardonic view of Taihai, China’s ‘largest port’:

where out of three million people at least two don’t know if tomorrow they’ll eat or die.

We also see the unnaturally opulent side, especially the French concession, occupied by the western entrepreneurs and colonialists, and also some wealthy Chinese who are essentially gangsters or drug lords and gun-runners. It was a zone notorious for its hedonism and criminality, according to the writers of the useful Introductions to this edition.

At that decadent, multinational port of Taihai (a thinly disguised version of Shanghai) Cameron jumps ship, intent on losing himself in the ‘middle kingdom’, a literal translation of the ancient Chinese name for their country. His quest can be seen as an oriental equivalent of Marlow’s journey into the Congo’s heart of darkness, but Cameron resembles not so much stolid, judgemental European Marlow as a less demonic Kurtz figure, attracted by this alternative culture as superior to or more enlightened than the atrophied, stultifying version offered by the west.

Cameron is an intriguing figure. He’s Melville’s Ishmael in reverse. He’s grown to hate the life of a seaman, and seems to be suffering from a Sartrean identity crisis. In this sense the novel is a strange amalgam of Buddhist fantasy-allegory – a quest for spiritual enlightenment – and an existential quest for some kind of authenticity in a meaningless world, an escape from ennui and terror.

The quest takes Cameron, after a relatively fulfilling time with a simple but starving watchmaker’s family, on a long trip across the forbidding hinterland of China at the bidding of an obese, amoral boss of a crime syndicate. Their cargo is modern European guns and munitions, carried in a bizarre camel train to the distant city of Chungking. Along the way Cameron had fallen in (and out) with a range of marginal, corrupt characters, symbolically representative of Russian, French and other decadent European cultures.

At Chungking, a traditional Chinese city whose rulers detest and resist modern western influence, the clash between western industrial capitalism and militarism with Zen Buddhism comes to its climax. It’s expressed in terms of a modernist European alienation narrative, and comes to its hallucinatory, mystical conclusion in a kind of Chinese-Elysian poppyfield of earthly-heavenly delights. Cameron desperately seeks to join the enigmatic, alluring figure of Buddhist Tibetan monk Wan Chen, beckoning him from a shifting, distant mountain peak.

This possibly sounds a bit of a dog’s dinner, but it somehow works. The novel’s tone and style reminded me weirdly of the prose and poetry of the 19C French Symbolists and decadents, and the Beats – who discovered the attractions of drug-enhanced mystical escape a couple of decades later. But the tendency towards self-indulgent egotism by the likes of Kerouac is tempered by a moral seriousness more reminiscent of Kafka and Camus.