Tanizaki Jun’ichirō, or photography

as violence
AT S U K O S A K A K I

Abstract: This paper investigates Tanizaki Jun’ichirō’s effective use of photog-

raphy in his narratives from the 1930s to the 1960s to destabilize the perceived
continuity and order of time and space in everyday life. By focusing not on the
objects within the frame or any message encoded in the image but instead on
the functions of the camera and the prints as material entities that are present
in the environments occupied by photographer and spectator, Tanizaki challenges
the authenticity of photographs, which he suggests contest rather than confirm
our memory and question rather than verify the portrayed person’s identity. The
reproducibility of prints allows fetishistic desire to grow in private and beyond,
while complex manoeuvres of the camera and other photographic and developing
equipment resist the reduction of the photographer’s corporeal presence to the
eye. The materiality of photographs and the corporeality of photo-taking and
photo-viewing, which proliferate in Tanizaki’s narratives, effectively foreground
the politics of representation, wherein object and subject, sight and meaning, body
and mind, image and text, now and then, and here and there are streamlined as
oppositional and yet complicit. Tanizaki encapsulates photography’s ambiguation
of everyday assumptions about time, space and the body.

Keywords: photography, Tanizaki Jun’ichirō, corporeality, materiality,

fetishism, voyeurism

Many readers of Tanizaki Jun’ichirō would agree, following the lead of Kōno
Taeko (1976), that he uniquely and compellingly represents physical sensations
produced by sensory stimuli, to the end of promoting a fulfilling and fulfilled
life. This estimation of his work can be simultaneously verified and contested
by considerations of photography represented in his fiction. While his charac-
ters value photographs as both visual images and material objects, pictures and
their production processes in the stories often contribute to a destabilization of
present reality, leaving the viewers disoriented rather than satisfied. Photographic
images mentioned or described by Tanizaki’s narratives and yet not shown on the
printed page often seem inauthentic or incongruous with the viewer’s memory or
expectation. They thus do not serve to confirm the portrayed person’s identity but
Japan Forum 22(3–4) 2010: 381–404 ISSN: 0955–5803 print/1469–932X online
Copyright

C 2010 BAJS DOI: 10.1080/09555803.2010.534839
382 Tanizaki Jun’ichirō, or photography as violence

rather instigate the viewer’s interest in the reconfiguration of personal or familial

history.
Photographers have a strong presence in Tanizaki’s stories. They do not stay
behind the scenes or out of the frame to function as eyes for observation. His nar-
ratives encapsulate the intense bodily intersection between photographs’ objects
and observers. He elaborates the material details of photographic equipment and
technical manoeuvres that are often obliterated by the perception of photographs
as finished, flat and framed. This paper shall measure the effects of photography in
Tanizaki’s fiction that urge us to complicate our understanding of three elements
of his work: his textual representation of the visual and material; his handling
of time, space and corporeality; and his positioning of representation (textual or
otherwise) vis-à-vis the desire for life or death.
In this paper ‘photography’ refers to the acts of taking pictures; developing film;
modifying, framing and archiving prints; and viewing and accounting for images.
Consequently, my engagement with photography focuses on various agents in-
volved in the making and remaking of the photographs, who may not be visible
in the end product. While the photographic image is conventionally taken to be
‘dead’, I propose to restore the scenes that took place outside the frame, or in the
‘space-off ’, in Teresa de Lauretis’s terminology reapplied by Marianne Hirsch:
‘the ‘space not visible in the frame but inferable from what the frame makes
visible’ (de Lauretis 1987: 26; quoted in Hirsch 1997: 198). The materiality of
photographic prints is also important in my study. Photographs are not only about
what they represent or what they mean but also, and more importantly, about how
they exist in the time and space shared with their viewers – the space-time that is
not shared with the photographed objects.
When Tanizaki’s narratives engage photography, they characteristically elab-
orate material details of the photographs along with the corporeality of the acts
surrounding their production and reproduction. Characters who take or view pho-
tographs are engaged in fetishism and voyeurism, to the extent that they let pho-
tography disturb their quotidian lives, which are predicated upon the conventional
perceptions that time is linear (with the past neatly archived as intact) and space is
geometrical (where each person’s identity and place of origin/residence/profession
are discretely defined). Even though Pierre Bourdieu (1990) has rightly labelled
‘photography as middle-brow art’, it does not necessarily follow that photography
is always the acquiescent servant of bourgeois family life. Rather, its complex and
ambiguous exploitation of time, space and the body can contest assumptions of
the everyday world.
As Thomas Lamarre (2005) extracted the cinematic from the genre of cin-
ema, I would like to isolate the photographic parameters of photography as they
are manifested in Tanizaki’s texts. I will, of course, work my argument around
passages that specifically reference photography. But my intent is to go beyond
simply locating references to photography and annotating them, to account for
the ambiguous and dynamic relationship between image and text that Tanizaki
 Atsuko Sakaki 383

brings to our attention, by way of talking about (or around) photographs. My

procedure will be informed by theories of photographic relations expounded on
by Christian Metz, Mieke Bal and Victor Burgin among others. I will discuss one
narrative at a time in a given section and arrange the texts in the order of historical
time represented rather than publication date.

The significance of photography vis-à-vis cinema in early

twentieth-century Japan
The present work will further articulate visuality and its role in everyday life in the
specific historical space of the early twentieth century (the era of the advent of fully
fledged modernity for Japan) up to the late 1950s (often conceived as the end of
the postwar period and the beginning of Japan’s re-emergence in the global market
economy). A significant series of changes occurred in Japan during that span of
time covered by Tanizaki stories to be examined below; these changes are not
unrelated to the proliferation of mechanically mediated images, most significantly
in pre-video cinema and pre-digital photographs. As I shall show below, Tanizaki
not only experienced the dynamic development of visual culture as a producer
and a consumer of media output, but also strategically and conceptually took
advantage of it as a storyteller in the textual register.
The above-stated period also witnessed the process in which photography was
transformed from a professional art/medium (a thing of rarity) to a relatively
common practice in the middle-class Japanese household. This transformation
of course involved changes in technology, commerce, aesthetics and lifestyle: the
camera became more compact and manageable; it became more affordable; and
the act of posing for the camera became less limited to the entertainment industry
(still photos, star portraits) and permeated the quotidian space of middle-class
urban consumers of images. Thus, an examination of the role of photography
in Tanizaki’s fictional stories set between the 1900s and the 1950s shall reveal
varying relations between private and public spaces, between artistic production,
mechanical reproduction and material possession, between art connoisseurship
and family rituals, and between the remote time-space and the everyday.
It is no coincidence that these changes occurred while preoccupation with
subjectivity accentuated, a process that has been elaborated in the study of the
shishōsetsu, the quasi-confessional narrative, which corresponded to the changing
relationships between author and reader taking place in the development of mass
publication and distribution industry. Acute interest in self-representation, man-
ifest in proliferation of (auto)biographical discourse, is also evident in the excess
of the private and everyday in visual representation.
Tanizaki, far from being immune to the essential complicity of photography in
all of these changes, appears to have strategically engaged the media to articulate
coercion of vision and body, body and space-time and subjects and society. As
the ‘society of the spectacle’ (Debord 1995) matured in Japan, ordinary people
384 Tanizaki Jun’ichirō, or photography as violence

had to come to terms with the changing notion of the visibility of their bodies
in public and in the visual media: they had to learn how to look and how to be
present in images. The intensifying gaze upon one another immersed everyday
life in theatricality.
Tanizaki’s involvement in cinema has been well-documented in historical and
biographical studies. Joanne R. Bernardi (2001) has provided us with a detailed
and informative account of Tanizaki’s activities in the film industry, mainly as a
screenwriter. Eric Cazdyn (2002) has discussed not only Tanizaki’s involvement
in the movie industry but also his response to materialized and unmaterialized
cinematic adaptations of his narratives. Some of Tanizaki’s critical writings on
cinema have been translated into English by Thomas Lamarre (2005), in a book
that also serves to enlighten us about the aesthetic stance of Tanizaki. Lamarre’s
work teaches us that this aesthetic should not be reduced to a reinforcement of
the East-West or tradition-modernity binary, and that instead it should be under-
stood in the context of modernity informed by cinematic visual representation
and Orientalism. Tanizaki’s processing of visual culture in his writing is deftly
elaborated by Akira M. Lippit (2005) and Greg L. Golley (2008) in works that
productively complicate our conventional understanding of vision and blindness,
light and darkness and the visual and other senses.
The consideration of photography rather than cinema in Tanizaki’s fiction re-
veals important dimensions of the human relations of power and desire, and the
reasons for this are multifold. In the pre-video reception of film, the viewer of cin-
ema was granted affordable and yet limited access to images. The size of screen
as well as the dark space of the cinema helped to create otherworldliness, another
‘Orient,’ while in photography, the small screen of the camera and the small prints
allowed the viewer easy access to images well within everyday life. From the outset
of production to the long-term ownership of prints, photographic processes took
place in the consumer’s hands, not in some remote place. In terms of the produc-
tion and distribution of images, the viewer of photography could enjoy a much
greater sense of involvement than the cinema spectator; it was much easier and
much more common to produce, pose for and possess photographs than cinema.
Photography was a technology to live with, not a technology to take one away
from the everyday.
Drama unfolds in private space in many of the celebrated works of Tanizaki’s
fiction, such as Chijin no ai (trans. Naomi), which Jordan Sand discusses in the con-
text of his examination of the historical significance of the private space (2003).
In it, the reader can easily find cameras and photographic prints. Many of his
characters are preoccupied with the visual representation of faces and bodies,
which helps to materialize desire and power relations with utmost precision. The
strategic use of photographic rhetoric in articulation of the dynamics between
characters, between their past and present and between their bodies and social
positions is to be revealed in my examination of instances of photographic pro-
duction and consumption.
 Atsuko Sakaki 385

Limits of photographic authenticity: ‘A Portrait of Shunkin’

His nostalgia is directed at the time when he was not blind, which is why these
photographs of him [just before he lost his sight] are particularly important to
him. He can no longer see pictures of himself in his childhood. Is the face in
these pictures the same as the one in his memory? Or does he reconfigure a
distinct face of a boy every time someone describes it for him?
(Minato 1997: 77)
The story’s historical setting (1829–1907) accounts only partly for the paucity of
photographic images in ‘Shunkin shō’ (‘A Portrait of Shunkin’, Tanizaki [1933]
1963b). The only reference to a photograph in this story, which I quote in trans-
lation below, problematises the relationship between portrait and biography, or
between visual and textual representation of someone’s life. First of all, Victor
Burgin’s ‘fourth look’ – which the photographed person ‘may direct to the cam-
era’ (Burgin: 2003: 134) – is missing from this photograph of Shunkin. The
object’s gaze returned to the camera could disturb the viewer’s gaze upon the
photographic image, as the viewer wants to look at it without being looked at.
The spectator’s superiority, or purported neutrality, is contested if the eye of the
photographed person looks back at him/her. The lack of such a threat grants the
viewer complacency with which to interpret the image freely.
The closed eyes of the photographic object parallel her ignorance of her bi-
ography being written posthumously. The temporal distance and consequential
lack of counter-response from Shunkin or anyone involved in her life grants the
narrator the liberty of submitting his interpretive version of her story (the original
title literally means ‘an abbreviated account of Shunkin’), based on the preceding
biography (the cited and partially quoted putative source, ‘Mozuya Shunkin den’
[Biography of Mozuya Shunkin]). The English translation’s title encapsulates the
complicity of biography and portrait in their claim of authentic representation of
a person, while also qualifying the completeness of any portrait or biography:
On the ground of the viewer’s superiority, the narrator muses:
. . . she merely looks like a woman who has closed her eyes. . . . we are so
accustomed to seeing the half-closed ‘merciful eyes’ with which Buddha and
the Bodhisattvas gaze on all living things that closed eyes seem more benevolent
to us than open ones – may even seem awe-inspiring. And Shunkin is such a
meek, gentle-looking woman that one feels a sense of compassion in her veiled
eyes, as one would in those of the merciful goddess Kannon.
(Tanizaki [1933] 1963b: 9)
The narrator, who claims to have seen Shunkin’s only extant portrait, does not
fault her closed eyes, as we might in everyday photo-taking; they make her look
like a Buddha, he says. The impression of spiritual superiority he observes con-
tradicts her selfish and sadistic orientation, which the narrator’s own account is
about to reveal. The incongruity suggests that photographic representation can be
386 Tanizaki Jun’ichirō, or photography as violence

deceptive rather than faithful, as conventional wisdom holds, and perhaps more
importantly that our visual perception is not neutral but rhetorical. We are so
accustomed to the visual rhetoric that it may escape our attention that it dictates
the way we interpret images. In the present case, the physical similarity between
Shunkin’s and Boddhisatva’s eyes misleads the spectator to believe Shunkin is ‘an
exceptionally gentle lady’:

As far as I know, this is the only photograph ever made of Shunkin. . . . Thus
we have only one dim reflection of her to help us imagine her appearance. No
doubt I have given a vague, inadequate impression of how she looked. Yet the
photograph itself is perhaps even vaguer than the impression which my words
convey.
(Tanizaki [1933] 1963b: 9)

This passage reveals – or rather conceals – an important message as to the rela-

tionship between image and text. Even though he says that ‘we’ (wareware) need
to rely on the photograph to ‘imagine her appearance’, it is in fact not the case:
the narrator does not share with his reader the photograph that he had access
to – the photograph is not inserted into the narrative, a fact that the narrator
acknowledges with the hypothetical clause ‘even if the reader looked at the actual
photograph’ (kari ni jissai no shashin o mirare te mo; Tanizaki 1967b: 499; not in
the published English translation). While he can ‘imagine her appearance’ from
‘only one dim reflection of her’ or ‘the only photograph ever made of Shunkin’, his
reader has only his description of the photographic image from which to ‘imagine
her appearance’. That the narrator possesses more knowledge than the reader is
less important in our context than the fact that the narrator invites the reader to
compare the visual with the textual and tentatively concludes, counter-intuitively,
that the visual is no more definitive of an image than the textual. The narrator
thus disputes photography’s claim to absolute truth.
The narrator further ambiguates visual representation, speculating on images
of Shunkin entertained by her disciple turned lover, Sasuke, who goes blind later
in the very year the photograph was taken:

It occurs to me that in the year Shunkin’s picture was taken – when she was
thirty-six – Sasuke himself became blind; the last time he saw her she must have
looked rather like this. Was the picture of her which he carried in his memory
in old age as faded as this photograph? Or did his imagination make up for a
gradually failing memory? Did he create an image of another lovely woman, of
one altogether different from the woman in the photograph?
(Tanizaki [1933] 1963b: 9)

In this passage the narrator compares the image captured by a naked eye with the
photographic image, then memory with photography and finally memory with
imagination. These images are not considered interchangeable with one another
 Atsuko Sakaki 387

but instead are imagined to be comparable, complementary or completely dif-

ferent. Photographs are not given the ultimate authority in visual representation.
Photography’s archival function is limited or compromised. Also, the fact that
the blind man retains a remembered image in his mind and possibly modifies
it, or lets it change in his imagination, suggests that the visual is not necessarily
equated with the optical. If a naked eye is not essential to construction of the
visual, then the camera is not either. Photographs thus do not authenticate visual
representation in the final analysis. It may be up to what Marguerite Duras calls
‘photographie absolue’, or ‘the photograph that was never taken but could have
been’, which bestows upon the image ‘the virtue of representing . . . an absolute’
(Duras 1986: 10).

Images that blur memory: ‘The Bridge of Dreams’

I believe photographs promote forgetting. That’s how it tends to work now.
The fixed, flat, easily available countenance of a dead person or an infant in
a photograph is only one image as against the million images that exist in the
mind. And the sequence made up by the million images will never alter. It’s a
confirmation of death.
(Duras 1987: 89)
. . . as hard as I stared at her photograph, which stood beside the tablet on
our Buddhist altar, I never had the sudden poignant feeling that this was my
own mother – the woman who had suckled me at her breasts.
All I could tell from the picture was that she wore her hair in an old-fashioned
style, and that she seemed even plumper than I had remembered. It was too
faded to re-create in my mind the way she actually looked.
‘Papa’, I asked, ‘is that really Mama’s picture?’
‘Yes, of course it is’, he said. ‘It was taken before we were married, when she
was about sixteen’.
‘But it doesn’t look like her, does it? Why don’t you put up something better?
Don’t you have another one?’
‘Your mother didn’t like to be photographed, so this is the only one I could
find of her by herself. After we were married we had some pictures taken
together, but the man did such a bad job retouching them that she thought
they spoiled her face. Now this one shows her when she was a very young girl,
and she may seem different from the way you remember her. But that was how
she really looked at the time’.
I could see then that it did bear a certain resemblance to her, though by no
means enough to bring the forgotten image of my mother back to life.
(Tanizaki [1959] 1963a: 159)
The episode recollected by the narrator-protagonist of ‘Yume no ukihashi’ (‘The
Bridge of Dreams’, Tanizaki [1959] 1963a) reveals more than photography’s
388 Tanizaki Jun’ichirō, or photography as violence

failure to represent the image to the viewer’s satisfaction. The singularity of the
mother’s portrait defies the ‘mechanical reproducibility’ (Walter Benjamin 2002)
of photographs. Even the professional photographer’s well-intended intervention,
in itself the interface of the mechanical and the artistic (the photograph dates from
the first decade of the twentieth century, deducing from the narrative ending
in 1931), results in the rejection or withdrawal of his output, rather than its
proliferation. The rarity of the photograph, however, does not save the ‘aura’ of
the model. This story makes it obvious that the protagonist remembers his mother
in tactile terms rather than visual. Flat, framed and enshrined in the niche, the
photographic print literally and figuratively makes the viewer lose touch with the
person in the image and fails to convey the recollection of the person felt and
experienced by the viewer.
The passage renders the relation between memory and the photograph with
further ambiguity. It remains unclear whether the boy is troubled by the incon-
gruity between the image represented in the photograph and those in his memory
(in his father’s words, ‘the way you remember her’ [omae ga oboeteru kao]; in
the narrator’s retrospective words, ‘my vague remembrance’ [watashi no oboro-
gena kioku] [not represented verbatim in the translation]), or by the photograph’s
failure to restore the lost image of her (‘the forgotten image of my mother’ [wa-
suresatta haha no sugata] or ‘the way she actually looked’ [arishi hi no haha no
eizō]) (Tanizaki 1968c: 159). Is the boy struggling to make sense of two discrete
images of the same person, or of the gap between an excess and an absence of
image? Is photography meant to help one forget what the person really looked
like, by foregrounding one image as definitive against others in the viewer’s mind,
as Marguerite Duras (1987: 89) suggests in the earlier quotation, or does it simply
hit or miss the mark that is more or less verifiable by the use of memory? The
ambiguous phrasing in the passage quoted above suggests that photography by
default confounds the viewer as to the state of his or her remembrance of the
photographed and further erodes the ground on which one establishes a memory
archive.
This episode illustrates the incommensurability of the photographic image with
the remembered (or forgotten and sought-after) appearance of the deceased, in
much the same way as in the famous ‘winter garden’ photograph (or, to put it
precisely, the absence of the said photograph) that Roland Barthes speaks of in
Camera Lucida, as the photograph was taken when the mother was a maiden,
before the viewer (the son) was born. The person whom one should be most
familiar with presents herself as least familiar, as never having been met, while
the image of the irrecoverable past is restored to the present use. Identity and
temporality reveal contradiction in the printed photograph, which one might
conventionally assume is supposed to restore the archived past straightforwardly.
As has been phrased by Barthes, ‘photography [is] never, in essence, a memory,
but it actually blocks memory, quickly becomes a counter-memory’ (Barthes
1981: 91).
 Atsuko Sakaki 389

The voyeur’s body, the viewer’s hand: Naomi

In the Pygmalion narrative of Chijin no ai (‘Naomi’, Tanizaki [1924] 1990), against
the historical backdrop of 1918–26 (Chambers [1985] 1990: x), the narrator-
protagonist Jōji reminisces about the beginning of his relationship with his wife,
Naomi. At two moments in the narrative he turns to a photo-diary that he has
kept and still looks at in the narrative present:
‘Naomi Grows Up’ was the title I gave my diary. Of course I only wrote about
Naomi. Before long, I bought a camera and photographed her face, which was
looking more and more like Mary Pickford’s, in different lighting and from
various angles. I pasted the photos here and there among the diary entries.
(Tanizaki [1924] 1990: 33–4)
The above description of this ‘image-text’ hints at the materiality of photo-taking
as well as that of photo-archiving. Jōji’s engagement in staging the scenes and
framing the prints is distinctly technical and material. As we shall see later, he
also developed the films. While he says that he ‘only wrote about Naomi’ in his
diary, the reader of his narrative rather than the diary is given access to the physical
involvement of the photographer, who arranges the equipment meticulously and
keeps prints in order, noting the time he took and the complex movement of his
body across the space of the bathroom or elsewhere in their house in search of
the best location. During this process his body has occupied the shared space
with Naomi’s – a fact clearly registered in his consciousness. In a diary entry he
describes the skin of Naomi’s body as fairer than his own and thus revealing a
more striking contrast between the tanned parts and the parts hidden under the
swimsuit:
At 8 p.m., I bathed her in the washtub. She still has her tan from the beach. She’s
very dark, except under the bathing suit. I’m dark, too, but Naomi has such a light
complexion, the contrast is sharper.
(Tanizaki [1924] 1990, 33; italics original)
This comparative description subtly and yet distinctly reminds us that Jōji’s body
existed adjacent to Naomi’s and was neither transparent nor reduced to the eye.
We must remember the body of the photographer so as to remind ourselves of the
space beyond the frame, the ‘space-off ’.
The photo-journal is only described and partially quoted (in a few entries),
without the images referred to being inserted into the pages of the printed text. Jōji
as the intra-diegetic narrator might have ‘pasted the photos here and there among
the diary entries’, but Tanizaki as the author has not followed suit. He might
have designed the images as voids, to the calculated effect of enticing the reader
to imagine Naomi’s body. In our context, however, the alleged ‘erasure’ of the
images helps to keep the reader from a wrong impression, as though photography
were all about the object (in this case, Naomi) whose images were printed.
390 Tanizaki Jun’ichirō, or photography as violence

The narrative surrounding the diary suspends, until many chapters later, verbal
description of most of the images, while quoting a few diary entries. The delay,
however, does not necessarily suggest the photography’s irrelevance to the text. In
the first reference to the photo-diary, the text without image nonetheless exhibits
a visual orientation that seems informed by photography. Jōji’s eye is fortified by
the use of the lens of the camera, even when his hands do not hold the apparatus.
The act of diary-keeping – both quotidian and private, banal and secretive – is
itself comparable to photography. ‘Up close and personal’, the diary registers what
might escape one’s consciousness as one lives one’s life – just as the camera can
restore what the naked eye cannot register instantaneously, for use at a later (any)
time (Metz 2003: 139). Elaborating Walter Benjamin’s notion of ‘unconscious
optics’, Marianne Hirsch tells us:
‘The camera introduces us to unconscious optics as does psychoanalysis to
unconscious impulses’. The camera is like psychoanalysis. There are optical
processes that are invisible to the eye: they can be exposed by the mechanical
processes of photography. The camera can reveal what we see without realizing
that we do, just as psychoanalysis can uncover what we know without knowing
that we do: what is stored in the unconscious. The camera can expose hidden
dimensions of making strange (‘its lowerings and liftings, its interruptions and
isolations, its extensions and accelerations, its enlargements and reductions’),
just as psychoanalysis can reveal unconscious content through the formal and
precise techniques of the therapeutic encounter.
(Hirsch 1997: 118, with a quotation from Benjamin 1968: 237)
The camera, like the diary, is an effective weapon of the voyeur and fetishist who
fixates upon the detail of the object. Since Jōji has tried out different lightings
and different angles as he photographs Naomi, he becomes closely acquainted
with the texture of her skin – its grain, undulations, contour, shades, etc. Only a
photographer is granted such proximity as this. The photographer might abuse
the right to indulge in voyeurism. He learns how to look – as if his eye were the
camera.
The visual intimacy, however, leads to the ultimate disconnection of the subject
of observation from his object. As Mieke Bal notes:
The fundamental characteristic of photography is that the bond between sub-
jectivity and vision is broken. This break is primarily temporal, but it is also
visual. It enables one to see not only what was and is no more, but also the
‘coarse grain’ that cannot be seen by the naked eye. It casts an uncanny gloom
over what we know to be inescapable reality; the close-up gaze, like the photo-
graph, separates the subject from the object.
(Bal 1997: 203)
Jōji as the photographer acquires intimate knowledge of Naomi the object, and
yet his relationship with her, facilitated by the camera, is overwhelmingly visual,
 Atsuko Sakaki 391

turning her into an image and him into a voyeur. Though Jōji and Naomi con-
summated their relationship around the time represented in the excerpted diary
entries, their sexual intercourse is hardly described, while Jōji’s observation of
Naomi’s skin proliferates in the narrative beyond the diary entries. The camera
lens as a magnifying glass replaces the naked eye: once Jōji becomes a photog-
rapher, he cannot but observe Naomi with the camera eye, even when he is not
manoeuvring the equipment. This photography-inspired process of transforma-
tion anticipates the later scene wherein Naomi, trying to tantalize Jōji with the
imposition of the relationship of ‘only friends’, makes Jōji observe the nape of her
neck and her underarm up close, within camera-eye proximity and with camera-
eye intensity. The photographic as rhetoric is thus manifest in scenes without
references to photography.
Like the camera the photographic prints that Jōji contemplates facilitate his
transformation into a voyeur-fetishist. As the prints are ‘pasted’ into the journal,
it is likely that the pictures have not been blown up in size. This is a prototype
of the fetishistic intimacy with the small objects that photographs are, which
Christian Metz articulates as follows:
The photographic lexis, a silent rectangle of paper, is much smaller than the
cinematic lexis. . . . In addition, the photographic lexis has no fixed duration
(= temporal size): it depends, rather, on the spectator, who is the master of
the look, whereas the timing of the cinematic lexis is determined in advance
by the filmmaker. . . . Thanks to these two features (smallness, possibility of a
lingering look), photography is better fit, or more likely, to work as a fetish.
(Metz 2003: 138)
Until the delayed revelation of the reservoir of photographic images, the narrative
only states that Naomi’s face was photographed. Its comparison with Mary Pick-
ford’s hints that the photographs may have been modeled after close-up portraits
of film stars’ faces. Though Jōji as the narrator confesses early on in the narrative,
‘I still leaf through it [the diary] now and then’ (Tanizaki [1924] 1990: 33), it is
only after a long pause, as he throws Naomi out in a fit – and thus in her physical
absence from his immediate environs – that he turns to the photo-diary, where
the reader is faced by images of Naomi’s body parts for the first time:
Remembering that I’d pasted in photographs of Naomi’s various expressions
and of every change in her form, I pulled the dusty, long neglected volume
from the bottom of the bookcase and leafed through the pages. They were
photographs that I’d developed and printed myself; I could never let anyone
else see them. Apparently I hadn’t rinsed them thoroughly, because they were
dotted with tiny freckles. Some of them were as indistinct as antique portraits;
but this only served to increase the sense of nostalgia, and I felt as though I
were reaching back ten years, twenty years, to distant dreams of my childhood.
(Tanizaki 1990: 175)
392 Tanizaki Jun’ichirō, or photography as violence

The lapse of time between photo-taking and photo-viewing is clearly indicated by

‘[r]emembering’, ‘long neglected’ and the ‘dust’. Despite the temporal distance
between the viewer and the photographer, there are distinct traces (‘freckles’) of
physical involvement (e.g. rinsing of the solution) in the process of film develop-
ment. The fact that they catch Jōji’s attention before Naomi’s images do suggests
his acute awareness of his own body and the environment surrounding Naomi.
Then he opens the door to his prized possessions for the reader:
As I went on turning the pages of the diary, there were more photographs of
every description. Gradually they came to dwell on minute details, and there
were enlargements of certain parts: the shape of her nose; the shape of her eyes;
the shape of her lips; the shape of a finger; the curve of her arms, her shoulder,
her back, or her leg; her wrist; ankle; elbow; knee; even the sole of her foot –
all treated as if they were parts of a Greek statue or a Buddhist image in Nara.
As I gazed at the photographs, I even felt a deep, religious sense of gratitude
well up in me. Why on earth had I taken such detailed photographs? Had I felt
a premonition that one day they’d become sorrowful reminders?
(Tanizaki [1924] 1990: 176)
As strikingly and unabashedly fetishistic as the abundance of images of Naomi’s
body parts might be, the narrator’s attention is eventually drawn to his own
involvement in the act and the effects of photographic reproduction. Greg Golley
articulates the effects of photographic reproduction on the photographer’s body
in this narrative as follows:
Jōji’s photo montage penetrates Naomi’s physicality in ways that would have
been impossible with the unaided eye. With its close-ups and surreal juxtaposi-
tions, the narrator’s graphic memory book employs the tricks and accidents of
photography together with its ancillary processes – development, cropping, as-
sembly – in order finally to release Jōji from the limits of his own body. And this
may be the fundamental irony of the novel’s eroticism. For the very apparatus
that emancipates the narrator from his organic senses produces an artifact that
. . . becomes itself the object of a deeply sensual experience.
(Golley 2008: 114)
While Golley rightly emphasizes the extension and eventual ‘release’ of Jōji’s
bodily limits through his engagement in the stages of mechanical and manual
reproduction, his body may well be envisioned as entrapped in the material and
environmental constraints of his activities, emerging out of the transparency in
which he as the observer and narrator has hidden himself. For the tasks of photo-
taking and ‘its ancillary processes – development, cropping, assembly’, his body
had to occupy specific locations and assume specific postures, which made him
a spectacle. Indeed, though without explicitly recalling the laborious process of
photo-shooting, Jōji’s thought rightly turns to his own acts of photographing and
photo-viewing at the end of the above quotation.
 Atsuko Sakaki 393

‘Why on earth had I taken such detailed photographs? Had I felt a premoni-
tion that one day they’d become sorrowful reminders?’ (Tanizaki [1924] 1990:
176). These two sentences from the earlier quotation highlight the conjunction
of photographing and photo-viewing, two acts conducted by the same individual,
only at different times. The process of transformation of the photographer into
the consumer of photographs is articulated as not continual but continuous, with
a rupture. The narrator’s remorse that he lacked foresight and failed to predict
the anguish of viewing the pictures he took at a later time constitutes and yet
destabilizes his self-history. The disparity between physical and mental activities
and between past and present effectively questions the autonomy and integrity of
Jōji’s selfhood, which is a focus of his attention that might appear to be projected
solely onto Naomi’s body. ‘That which was there’ is not limited to the object
within the frame of photographs: the photographer reminds us that he also had
been on site and had left a trace of his presence that could be recognized after the
context of photographing was dissolved.

Peace disturbed: The Makioka Sisters

The photographic image is the object itself, the object freed from the conditions
of time and space that govern it. No matter how fuzzy, distorted, or discolored,
no matter how lacking in documentary value the image may be, it shares, by
virtue of the very process of its becoming, the being of the model of which it is
the reproduction; it is the model.
Hence the charm of family albums. Those gray or sepia shadows, phantom-
like and almost undecipherable, are no longer traditional family portraits but
rather the disturbing presence of lives halted at a set moment in their duration,
freed from their destiny; not, however, by the prestige of art, but by the power
of an impassive mechanical process: for photography does not create eternity,
as art does, it embalms time, rescuing it simply from its proper corruption.
(Bazin 1980: 242)

Photography does not endure any lacunae in Sasameyuki (‘The Makioka Sisters’,
Tanizaki [1948] 1957), a novel about bourgeois family life in 1930s Japan. ‘A
middle-brow art’, as dubbed by Pierre Bourdieu (1990), bears a loaded role
of registering, complementing and disrupting the affluent life of the Makiokas,
consisting of four adult sisters. Photographs in this narrative are no longer for
religious or biographical commemoration. Neither are they the result of an obses-
sive curiosity. Characters may still take pictures only on special occasions, but the
camera is more conspicuously in use among the family (by the husband who has
a Leica, at annual cherry blossom viewings, for example) or by hired professional
photographers (in studio or on site). Prints are filed in family albums, sent to
friends and families in remote places, and framed and displayed in homes.
394 Tanizaki Jun’ichirō, or photography as violence

The most conventional use of photographs for familial purposes involves ar-
guably the least conventional character, Katarina Kirilenko, a Russian refugee
in Japan who takes doll-making lessons from Taeko, the fourth daughter of the
Makiokas. Katarina keeps photographs of her ex-husband and daughter, who
lives with him in England, in a family album and shows them to Taeko, her sister
Sachiko and her husband Teinosuke. Katarina’s family also frames and hangs
formal portraits of both Russian and Japanese emperors and empresses, to pay
respect to them. Having moved to Europe in search of a new life, Katarina sends
her mother, who has stayed behind her in Japan, a photograph of the mansion
in which her new husband lives. In her daily life, which is anything but stable or
mundane by the Japanese bourgeois family’s standard, photographs help her to
keep in touch with physically, temporally or existentially distant people, including
those who are no longer. It does not seem that the possession (and sharing) of
these photos suffers from incongruity, disconnect or rupture, as in the case of
migrant families discussed by Marianne Hirsch. While Hirsch relates how the
portrait of the lost elder daughter of a husband and wife, who fled Europe and
now live in the United States, presents a rupture within the family for another
daughter of theirs, born after the migration, Katarina’s family pictures seem to
restore and declare the continuity of her life with her Japanese guests as witnesses.
Some photographs have specific purposes for being taken and distributed.
‘Miai shashin’, or portraits of eligible males and females in search of spouses,
are handed to and circulated through matchmakers at their discretion. These
pictures nonetheless remain the property of those photographed and could be
requested for return if the prospective spouses keep them beyond an appropriate
time, which indicates their lack of respect or serious interest. The weight of the
artefact can overwhelm the entrusted viewers of portraits, if they are not ready to
take the proposition seriously. These incidents, both involving Nomura, a candi-
date for a husband for Yukiko, the third daughter of the Makiokas – who is by
the social standards of 1930s Japan becoming an old maid – suggest that even
those pictures professionally taken (most likely in studios), mechanically repro-
duced and distributed can be invested with the aura of the portrayed persons and
demand due respect. Publicized photographic portraits thus acquire presence in
people’s emotional lives.
The portraits of the deceased, displayed typically on the Buddhist altar, also
play an important role in the middle class family and social lives. While the
narrator does not make a theoretical inquiry comparable to the one in ‘A Portrait
of Shunkin’, Yukiko is displeased as Nomura complacently lets her and her sister,
brother-in-law and mediator see the portraits of his deceased wife and children
during the brief visit of Yukiko, her family and the mediator to his house; she takes
Nomura’s lack of embarrassment at that moment as evidence of inconsiderateness
and a revelation of how seamlessly his previous marriage continues into his present
life in his mind. To the contrary, the mediator, touched by the respect Nomura
continues to pay to deceased family members, interprets the incident as a proof of
 Atsuko Sakaki 395

his sweetness. Evidently spectators invest meaning in the way that family portraits
are displayed and relate to the lives of the family. As Susan Sontag (1977: 106)
tells us, the issue at stake is not what the contents of photographs mean but what
their use means. To Tanizaki, too, what one sees within the frame matters less
than how the photographs function in the photographers’ and spectators’ lives.
As we saw, Tanizaki not only is keen on what lies outside the frame when
the pictures are viewed but also highlights what was in the ‘space-off ’ when the
pictures were taken. Again, the body of the photographer becomes prominent
in his narrative. The following passage offers the first appearance of Itakura the
photographer, who later becomes Taeko’s lover. Taeko is in the makeshift green
room, in the upstairs of the Makiokas’ family house, all made up and dressed in
costume in preparation for her dance performance to come:
‘Photographer’, Etsuko called to a young man, twenty-six or twenty-seven, who
stood looking in at Taeko. Only his head showed over the stairs. ‘She says for
you to come in’.
‘Please, Etsuko. It is rude to call the gentleman ‘Photographer.’ Say ‘Mr.
Itakura.’
Itakura was already in the room. ‘Stand exactly as you are, Koi-san’. He knelt
down in the door and aimed his Leica at her. He took five or six pictures in
quick succession, from the front, the back, the left, and the right.
(Tanizaki [1948] 1957: 164)
The physical spaces that Itakura occupies are significant: first, he is ‘standing on
a stair, midway between the ground floor and upper floor’, ‘only with his head
above the hallway upstairs’, ‘peeping into the room’ and then he ‘kneels on the
threshold’ between the hallway and the green room (Tanizaki 1968b: 267). Both
positions are transitory and in-between, encapsulating both his physical mobil-
ity and social ambiguity. The latter is also evident in the forms of address that
Etsuko, Sachiko’s daughter, and Taeko use for Itakura. Etsuko defines him by
his profession, the only reason for his admission to the strictly private space of
the second floor, which, even in this unusual setting, cannot be trod upon by
an unauthorized person. Itakura overcomes the barrier only in his capacity as
photographer, reduced to the camera eye, with his body rendered transparent,
virtually absent from the scene. Itakura accepts the invitation promptly, without
waiting for the conversation between Taeko and Etsuko to be over. He is like a no-
mad, commanding space as ‘smooth’, rather than as ‘striated’ (Deleuze-Guattari
1987). Articulating his itinerary, the narrator observes the photographer’s body
and its movement, far from absent from the ‘in-frame’ pictures. The text thus
restores the ‘space-off ’ of the photographs and reconfirms the corporeal presence
of the photographer.
Ironically, while Itakura exploits the professional advantage to access Taeko’s
space, he also transgresses the boundaries of his capacity. Taeko chides Etsuko for
speaking inconsiderately, suggesting that she should instead call him Mr. Itakura,
396 Tanizaki Jun’ichirō, or photography as violence

as a respected individual. He thus capitalizes on the rigidity and paucity of the

social barrier to the effect of increasing intimacy with Taeko – in contrast to
Jōji, who exchanges the husband’s physical intimacy with Naomi for the pho-
tographer’s privilege of optical proximity. It is explained that Itakura has been
commissioned to take promotional pictures for the dolls that Taeko profession-
ally produces and sells by her long-time boyfriend Okuhata, whose elder brother
funded Itakura’s business after his trip to Los Angeles for an apprenticeship in
photography. As we shall soon see, Itakura’s association with Okuhata is also
double-edged, both advancing and delimiting his access to Taeko.
The narrator explains that Itakura has been to the Makiokas and has become
acquainted with Teinosuke as well as female members of the household. Itakura
tells Teinosuke that the pictures he is taking of Taeko are ‘to remember the
occasion by’ and offered free of charge (Tanizaki [1948] 1957: 166), again am-
biguating the nature of his position vis-à-vis the family. As Teinosuke suggests that
Itakura take a family portrait, Etsuko regrets Yukiko’s absence. Sachiko suddenly
looks saddened, which only two persons notice: Teinosuke, who often acts as an
attentive observer in the narrative, and Itakura: ‘Itakura looked up startled. He
was sure that as he turned his range-finder toward them he had seen tears in
Sachiko’s eyes’ (Tanizaki [1948] 1957: 167). It is one of the few moments when
the narrator represents the interiority of a character other than the members of
the Makioka family and grants him/her subjectivity. This narrative slip captures
not only Itakura’s perceptiveness but more importantly the power of the camera
that allows the photographer to see what escapes the naked eye, with the help
of Benjamin’s (1968) ‘unconscious optics’ that we recognized earlier in Jōji. In
this case, however, Itakura’s increased perceptiveness reaches subtle reflections of
private emotions that are inaccessible to others.
This chapter ends in the midst of Taeko’s performance and does not disclose
the fact that Itakura stays behind and takes more pictures after the recital, a fact
that is introduced to the reader a few chapters later, as Sachiko looks at the four
photographs from the recital that have been selected, framed and displayed in
Taeko’s room:

All through the dance, Itakura had clicked his shutter industriously, and in
the evening, before Taeko changed clothes, he had had her pose before the
gold screen for several more pictures. Taeko picked these as the four she liked
best, and had them enlarged. All four belonged to the specially posed group.
Itakura had been extremely particular about the lighting and the effects, and
Sachiko was much impressed to see how carefully he had watched the dance.
He would ask for certain passages – ‘There was something about “a freezing
bed”, I believe, Koi-san’, he would say, or, ‘How about the passage where you
listen to a hailstorm at night?’ – and he even remembered particular poses well
enough to demonstrate them himself.
(Tanizaki [1948] 1957: 188)
 Atsuko Sakaki 397

This passage reveals not only that Itakura has been a keen observer of Taeko’s
dance, but also that his own body is being looked at, by Sachiko and the narrator,
who stands close to her viewpoint. The photographer’s body has become much
more prominent than in Naomi, the earlier, quasi-confessional narrative, as the
third-person narrative of The Makioka Sisters, with multiple focalizers, manages to
let Itakura exude corporeal presence that is in sync with his photographic object’s
body, as his assimilation of her performance suggests.
The framed photographs are from the post-performance re-enactments of
scenes, not from the recital itself. The images are multiply staged, first, because
their object was performing a traditional dance with a costume, wig and specific
make-up on; second, because the scenes were reconstructed under the photogra-
pher’s direction; and third, because the pictures were selected by Taeko, enlarged
at her request and framed for display. Taeko not as the model but as the client
chose the staged images rather than others as the best representations of her.
Photography involves and evolves around a dynamic process, despite the common
perception of photographs being static and stagnating. In the process, the myth of
authenticity and transparency in photographic representation is contested, while
artistic perfection in enactment of prototypes is privileged.
Despite the multiple staged-ness, however, the prints are not for public viewing
but end up in the private space of Taeko’s room, where Sachiko is absorbed in
personal thoughts as she worries about Taeko’s whereabouts during the flood.
In the private viewing of these pictures, appropriate for fetishism in a bourgeois
household, Sachiko feels as though they had anticipated something inauspicious
– she feels a negative aura is being cast from the images:
The photograph of herself and Etsuko and Teinosuke with Taeko in the middle
– might it not become a horrid memorial? Sachiko remembered how moved
she had been at the sight of Taeko in her other sister’s wedding clothes, how
ashamed she had been of her tears; and it had been her prayer that she would
soon see this younger sister dressed with similar care for her own wedding. Was
the prayer then to come to nothing, and had that in fact been the last time
Taeko would put on festive dress? Trying to fight back the thought, Sachiko
found the photograph a little frightening. She looked down at the shelf beside
her.
(Tanizaki [1948] 1957: 189)
The pictures’ commemorative function is projected toward the future, wherein
the present will be past. In this prediction of nostalgia, photography’s potential for
complication of temporality is anticipated if not yet fulfilled. The family portrait
that is meant to archive a memorable moment for future viewing turns out in
Sachiko’s interpretation (though proven wrong later) to be an inadvertent predic-
tion of a future tragedy, that is, Taeko’s untimely death. A statement of Roland
Barthes’s – ‘I observe with horror an anterior future of which death is the stake.
By giving me the absolute past of the pose (aorist), the photograph tells me of
398 Tanizaki Jun’ichirō, or photography as violence

death in the future’ (Barthes 1981: 96) – can account for the premonition that
assaults Sachiko in this scene. The anticipation of death effectively reverses the
trajectory invested in photographs, from analepsis to prolepsis, which rightly shifts
the locale of photographs from that of taking them (to be flashed back to) to that
of viewing them (to be flashed forward). The transformation is made possible as
photographs are, as Christian Metz suggests, in the hands of the viewers who look
at the pictures at later times, and taking as much time as they can afford to, which
changes the pictures from the products of instantaneous operation to a fetish that
possesses loaded temporality (Metz 2003: 138).
As it happens, Itakura rescues Taeko from her teacher’s flooded house. After
that he takes even more liberty to explore the Makiokas’ domestic space, on his
frequent visits to the area to document the aftermath of the flood, making use of
the leisure created by the temporary decline in requests for his work. In contrast
to Itakura’s enhanced presence in the Makioka household, Okuhata is even more
estranged from the house, even though he had been unwelcome since his failed
attempt to elope with Taeko many years earlier. Okuhata’s cool reception after
the flood ironically involves his possession of a camera. He surprises Sachiko by
visiting her on the day of the flood to ask after Taeko, when Sachiko witnesses him
carrying a camera around. Sachiko speculates that Okuhata must be embarrassed
by it as he hides ‘a Leica or a Contax’ from her eye quickly (Tanizaki [1948] 1957:
187). As observed in 1926, the fashionably sensitive folks of the time would ‘carry
a camera in lieu of a walking stick’ (Ise 2008: 177). Perhaps not unexpectedly
for a son of a jeweller, Okuhata sports it for its aesthetic appeal and to display
social status. The camera, like a fashion article, becomes a part of his body, rather
than the photographer’s eye. Okuhata’s desire to become a spectacle rather than
a spectator is fulfilled, albeit in an unexpected and inconvenient way. The sole
observer of Okuhata’s camera, Sachiko, must have shared Taeko’s later reflection
on Okuhata’s prioritization of his grooming over her safety. The lack of urgency
and sincerity in the possession and display (even though it is inadvertent) of the
camera disqualifies him as a person to be trusted. In this sequence of events, the
camera is not an eye to fetishize objects of representation but a fetish in itself.
Itakura on the other hand takes advantage of his possession and use of the
camera to approach the inner circle of the Makiokas. However, Itakura interposes
himself into the family, not only spatially and for limited purposes and time,
but also socially and then emotionally: he becomes involved with Taeko, and the
Makiokas can no longer ignore the presence of his body in their space. Itakura’s
privileges make Okuhata jealous enough to prohibit him from taking Taeko’s
pictures, commercial or personal. Despite the order, however, Itakura secretly
takes photos of Taeko on stage at another dance recital, this time in public space.
In this scene, the photographer’s body becomes spectacle: it is no longer reducible
to the eye pressed against the viewfinder. Teinosuke, who is in attendance at
the recital, recognizes Itakura taking pictures. Itakura’s camera being a Leica,
whose operation is ‘famously quiet’ (Pasi 2003: 26), the noise of the shutter is not
 Atsuko Sakaki 399

the reason for Teinosuke to notice Itakura. Ironically, the gaudy overcoat he wears
to hide his face catches Teinosuke’s eye. He then witnesses Okuhata confronting
Itakura in the lobby, patting down Itakura’s overcoat in search of the camera,
producing it from underneath and smashing it on the concrete floor.
This incident illustrates the corporeality and materiality of photo-taking relent-
lessly and consequentially, a dimension on which Yukiko sheds further light. As
Sachiko reports the incident to her later, Yukiko’s first reaction is a question: ‘Was
the Leica broken, then?’ (Tanizaki [1948] 1957: 286). With ‘the first thing Yukiko
asked was a question to that effect’ (Tanizaki 1968b: 472), the narrator reveals
a slight surprise at her attention not to the fact that the love triangle involving
her sister was played out in public, but to the state of the camera. Relieved by
Yukiko’s calm, Sachiko replies that at least the lens must have been damaged, in
response to which Yukiko speculates that the film must also have been damaged,
which is Taeko’s reason for taking out the costume for photographing a few days
after the recital. While Yukiko’s response evidences her taking the whole incident
in her stride on the level of the plot, it also reminds the reader of the rarity of a
Leica camera in 1930s Japan, and of the firmly material presence of the camera.
It is visible, tangible, and susceptible to violence. What this suggests is that the
camera does not remain a transparent medium for photographing objects but can
become a spectacle and an object itself, and that it can be intrusive to the space
of quotidian life.

Accomplices in staging of fetishism: The Key

While Jōji’s fetishistic fixation on Naomi’s skin and photographic prints is in-
herited and expanded by the unnamed husband in Kagi (‘The Key’, Tanizaki
[1956] 1991), who engineers secret photo-shooting and archives and/or displays
the photographs with elaborate care, the physicality of the photographer is much
more acutely represented in this later narrative than in Naomi. During her (ac-
tual or faked) loss of consciousness, he takes pictures of his wife’s naked body,
which he cannot penetrate because of his impotence, initially to satisfy his desire
to scrutinize it in a way that her sense of decorum would normally not allow.
Surface-oriented, photography suits his need. In the ostensibly non-consensual
photographing, he imposes on her unconscious body unusual contortions, consol-
idating the voyeuristic and fetishistic orientation of his engagement in photogra-
phy. The clandestine activity in the bedroom then dissolves into a ménage-à-trois
by way of implicit sharing of the images with a third man in another dark room –
Kimura, the wife’s potential lover, whom the husband asks to develop the films –
with the aim of instigating Kimura’s sexual desire for her. Unlike Jōji, who keeps
to himself treasured prints of Naomi and laments her promiscuity, the husband in
The Key takes pleasure in sharing his wife’s images – and then her body – with the
rival designate. The distributability of photographs is central to the photographic
in The Key. The husband thus takes full advantage of the physical distance and
400 Tanizaki Jun’ichirō, or photography as violence

visual intimacy that photographic reproduction allows. The intervention of a third

party not only complicates the marriage but also, and more importantly in our
context, helps articulate the stages involved in photography, highlighting the acts
of film development and printing, mentioned only in passing in Naomi.
The husband hatches the idea of photographing his wife’s body as Kimura
casually mentions to the husband on February 14 an expensive ‘Polaroid camera’,
imported from the United States and exclusively used by photography aficionados,
and offers to rent one for the husband:

Today Kimura said something unexpected to me while Ikuko was in the kitchen.
He asked if I had ever heard of a ‘Polaroid camera’. It seems to be an American
invention – a camera that develops and prints its own photographs. They use it
to make the still pictures they show on television at the end of sumo wrestling
bouts, to help explain the fine points of the winning hold. According to him,
the camera is very easy to operate – as easy as an ordinary one – and easy to
carry, too. If you use a Strob flash, you can take pictures without a tripod.
Polaroid cameras are still quite rare in Japan, Kimura told me; even the film
itself (printing-paper superimposed on negative) has to be specially imported.
However, a friend of his happens to have one, with plenty of film. ‘If you’d care
to use it, I can borrow it for you’, he said.
As he spoke, an idea came to me. But how did he guess that I would be pleased
to learn about such a camera? That puzzles me. He does seem remarkably well
acquainted with what goes on at our house.
(Tanizaki [1956] 1991: 43–4)

Kimura’s motive remains unclear and yet it is speculated that he has taken a hint
from Toshiko, the daughter of the couple (more on her role later), that the use of
the camera might fulfil the husband’s voyeuristic potential. It is not photography
that has given rise to the voyeuristic orientation of the husband – it is the other
way around.
The Polaroid camera at this historical moment occupies an ambiguous space in
the market economy, between the manufactured and mass-distributed commodity
and the rarity possessed by only the resourceful devotees of photography. Kimura’s
voluntary mediation of the camera from a friend to the husband thus establishes
a secret bond between the two men in material terms. The camera’s function,
however, has much more serious consequences than those of the loan. It allows
the photographer to produce his image prints readily and automatically, and
thus guarantees instantaneous gratification of the desire to see the object framed,
without the delays of developing and printing. Indeed, the husband reports on
the use of the Polaroid camera as early as February 24:

I have already used the Polaroid camera twice. I’ve taken full front and back
views of Ikuko’s body, as well as detailed shots of every part of it, from the most
 Atsuko Sakaki 401

alluring angles: I have pictures of her bending, stretching, twisting, pictures of

her with her arms and legs contorted into all manner of poses.
As to why I take such photographs: first of all, I enjoy taking them. I derive
great pleasure from creating these poses, freely manipulating her while she
sleeps (or pretends to). My second reason is to paste them in my diary so that
she will see them.
(Tanizaki [1956] 1991: 52)

The husband goes on to list the third and fourth motives, which are to impress his
wife with his passion for her body and to test the limit of her guise of propriety.
However, the husband notes that the Polaroid camera fails to fulfil the second
and third desires for technical reasons: the lack of a rangefinder, the necessity of
using a flash and the unavailability of proper film to be used. The husband is not
sufficiently convinced of the aesthetic quality of the end products to paste them
into his journal. What Kimura has deemed a relative convenience is also shackled
with drawbacks: the instantaneity of the film development also deprives the pho-
tographer/spectator of the deferral between the filming time and the viewing time
– the time needed for him to switch roles from photographer to spectator, as Jōji
did in Naomi – and the pleasure accompanying the process.
With the decision to replace a Polaroid with a Zeiss Ikon, the usual developing
process becomes necessary, including a facility and an agent for the operation.
The couple’s house lacks a space to serve as a darkroom, and the husband would
not risk the wife’s discovery of his ‘secret’ engagement, so he must seek an outside
venue. The husband chooses Kimura for the developer, as he has already seen
the wife’s naked body (having helped her to the bedroom when she was intoxi-
cated), and the room he rents has access to a bathroom where water is abundant,
a material and technical condition of film developing. This process thus comes to
involve a travel of the film out of the hands of the photographer (the husband) to
the developer (Kimura), who is implicitly granted an opportunity to reproduce
and review the images for a reason other than the photographer’s (ostensible) re-
quest: his own voyeuristic gaze. Thus a theatrical space for shared, if temporarily
distanced, viewing of the object is created, which was absent in the use of the
Polaroid camera; the Polaroid’s mechanical reproduction of images had been too
instantaneous and private to allow any spectatorial participation of the third party.
Just as the husband drops a key to the locked cabinet to entice the wife to read his
diary ‘in private’, he invites the developer to view the photographic images of the
wife’s naked body ‘in private’. In The Key, the fetishistic gaze we acknowledged in
Jōji with the help of Metz is transplanted from the initial photographer/intentional
spectator (the husband) to the commissioned developer/incidental (or so staged)
spectator (the lover). The two accomplices share in the act of voyeurism, despite
the temporal and spatial distances involved, through the portability and repro-
ducibility of photographic prints.
402 Tanizaki Jun’ichirō, or photography as violence

Kimura then capitalizes on the flatness and smallness of the photographs and
implicitly invites Toshiko, the couple’s daughter, into the voyeuristic act, by in-
serting prints of Ikuko’s body in a book that the daughter has asked to borrow
from him. He stages a ‘startling’ revelation of the secretive act of photographing
– except that the daughter may have engineered Kimura’s involvement in the first
place. Ikuko suspects that the dazzling fluorescent lighting that the husband used
to scrutinize and later to photograph his wife’s body must have kept the daughter
from sleeping. The insomniac daughter must have slipped out of her bedroom
to take a peek into the couple’s bedroom. The use of the technical equipment
not only facilitates theatrical representation but also is in itself theatrical and col-
lapses the banal bourgeois everyday life. The act of photographing, regardless
of its objective, could interfere with the wholesome family lifestyle, wherein the
boundaries between private and public are articulated and stable.

Conclusion
In Japan’s evolving mass-market economy of the 1900s to the 1950s, fetishist pro-
clivity of photography encapsulated the private possession of images in contrast
to cinema’s public space. Photographs’ easier reproducibility and distributability
– compact, flat and affordable – were perfect for household or private use and
often employed by intense struggles for power in interpersonal relationships. Pho-
tography is most effectively instrumental to definition and articulation of human
relations in visual, physical and spatial terms.
Tanizaki shows us that photographs are not mere reproductions of reality we
register in our minds. Quite contrary to our conventional expectation, they of-
ten fail to deliver authentic images or to archive memories legitimately. Instead,
they contest our memory, question the identity of the person photographed and
embellish the portraits with meanings that vary from one spectator to another.
The photographer can manipulate the camera as an outlet for voyeuristic de-
sire, while the spectator can fondle photographic prints as fetishes. The relative
longevity of photographic film and the reproducibility of prints allow fetishistic
desire to grow, while the complex physical and material manoeuvres of the cam-
era and other equipment needed for photographing and developing film resist
the erasure of the photographer’s corporeal presence from within the frame of
photographs. The materiality of photographs and corporeality of photo-taking
and photo-viewing, which proliferate in Tanizaki’s narratives, effectively destabi-
lize the scheme of representation, where object and subject, sight and meaning,
body and mind, image and text, now and then, and here and there are neatly
differentiated in binary oppositions.

Acknowledgments
The research for this paper has been funded by the Social Sciences and Hu-
manities Research Council of Canada and the Jackman Humanities Institute at
 Atsuko Sakaki 403

the University of Toronto. An earlier version of the present paper was origi-
nally presented at the symposium ‘Tanizaki Jun.ichirō, ou l’écriture par-delà les
frontiers/Tanizaki Jun’ichirō: Kyōkai o koete’, at Institut National des Langues
et Civilisations Orientales, Paris, France in March 2007 and then delivered at
a conference ‘Entitled: The Text/Image Interface in Japan and Beyond’ at the
University of Toronto in May 2007. Its translation into Japanese by Nishimoto
Yasumasa is included in Tanizaki Jun’ichirō: Kyōkai o koete, a volume edited by
Chiba Shunji and Anne Bayard-Sakai (Tokyo: Kasama shoin, 2009). I would like
to thank Anne Bayard-Sakai, Shunji Chiba, Thomas Lamarre, Baryon Tensor
Posadas and Martin Townsend among others who helped me along the way by
offering support and valuable comments.

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Atsuko Sakaki is Professor in East Asian Studies and Comparative Literature at the University
of Toronto. She is the author of Obsessions with the Sino-Japanese Polarity in Japanese Literature
(University of Hawai’i Press, 2006) and Recontextualizing Texts: Narrative Performance in Modern
Japanese Fiction (Harvard University Asia Center, 1999), and the editor and translator of The
Woman with the Flying Head and Other Stories by Kurahashi Yumiko (M. E. Sharpe, 1998). Her
recent project on spatiality and corporeality have yielded ‘“There is no such place as home”: Gotō
Meisei, or identity as alterity’ in Mark B. Williams and Rachael Hutchinson, eds., Representing
the Other in Modern Japanese Literature: A Critical Approach (Routledge, 2007) and ‘Scratch the
surface, film the face: obsession with the depth and seduction of the surface in Abe Kōbō’s Face of
Another’, Japan Forum 17, no. 3 (October 2005). Currently she is working on a book length project
on photography and the narrative, with a grant from Social Sciences and Humanities Research
Council of Canada and a research fellowship at the Jackman Humanities Institute at the University
of Toronto. She can be contacted at atsuko.sakaki@utoronto.ca.
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Copyright of Japan Forum is the property of Routledge and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple
sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print,
download, or email articles for individual use.