- 著者
- Baykara Oğuz
- 出版者
- 国文学研究資料館
- 雑誌
- 国際日本文学研究集会会議録 = PROCEEDINGS OF INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON JAPANESE LITERATURE (ISSN:03877280)
- 巻号頁・発行日
- no.27, pp.185-207, 2004-03-01
When Satô Haruo pointed the similarity between Shunkinshô (1933) and Thomas Hardy’s Barbara of the House of Greve, Tanizaki Junichiro had no objections to it and he rationalized the situation in his own way. Looking at it now from our contemporary perspective, it would surely be considered imitation, however to appreciate the originality of a certain work of art we have to consider the conditions that gave birth to it.Tanizaki has read tremendously the fin de siecle psychologists like Krafft-Ebing and the literary works of Poe, Baudlaire, Stringberg or Gorky in an atmosphere when modernism or cosmopolitanism was at its climax.How shall we judge his work? Was it a mere imitation? Or is it an original work of art? The fact is that Tanizaki has produced his work after having read and digested the western civilization thoroughly.The artistic production is only the tip of an iceberg of the author's creative genious. Though the critics or the authors sometimes try to explain the literary works, they often neglect the subconscious which is constitutes the larger part of the iceberg.Investigating the subconscious, will enable us to grasp the multilayeredness of a work of art. We then, will be able to recognize its originality through a series of analytic interpretations, which, even the author himself might be unaware of.I examined Tanizaki’s Shônen (The Children, 1911) critically and tried to analyze the symbolism in it with a fresh insight. Tanizaki, since the early stages of his career has always been at the mercy of the censorship authorities and often resorted to symbolism in his works; but it has reached to its peak in Shônen. In this work he did not imitate the west, but he took it as a model to compare it with his own. He laid down the tools and values in two sets like “Japan” and “The West” and knitted a highly structured symbolism around four children in Shônen. It was also his earliest declaration of his aesthetic programme" and it guided him through the literary path during the whole course of his 60 years’ authorship.