Quicksand Read online

  Table of Contents

  Cover

  Copyright

  About the Author

  Also by Junichirō Tanizaki

  A Note About the Author

  About the Translator

  Quicksand

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  This eBook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

  Epub ISBN: 9781407073903

  Version 1.0

  www.randomhouse.co.uk

  Published by Vintage 1994

  6 8 10 9 7

  Copyright © Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. 1993

  This translation is based on the ChuoKoron Sha, Inc.

  edition of Manji, published in Japan in 1947. Manji was serialized in Kaizo in 1928–30.

  This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

  First published in the United States of America by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. and simultaneously in Canada by

  Random House of Canada Limited in 1994

  Vintage

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  The Random House Group Limited Reg. No. 954009

  www.randomhouse.co.uk/vintage

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

  ISBN 9780099485612

  Printed and bound in Great Britain by

  Antony Rowe Ltd, Chippenham, Wiltshire

  A VINTAGE FIRST EDITION

  About the Author

  Junichirō Tanizaki was born in 1886 in Tokyo, where his family owned a printing establishment. He studied Japanese literature at Tokyo Imperial University, and his first published work, a one-act play, appeared in 1910 in a literary magazine he helped to found. Tanizaki lived in the cosmopolitan Tokyo area until the earthquake of 1923, when he moved to the gentler and more cultivated Kyoto-Osaka region, the scene of his great novel The Makioka Sisters (1943–1948). There he became absorbed in the Japanese past and abandoned his superficial Westernization. All his most important works were written after 1923, among them Naomi (1924), Some Prefer Nettles (1929), Arrowroot (1931), Ashikari (The Reed Cutter) (1932), A Portrait of Shunkin (1932), The Secret History of the Lord of Musashi (1935), several modern versions of The Tale of Genji (1941, 1954 and 1965), The Makioka Sisters, Captain Shigemoto’s Mother (1949), The Key (1956), and Diary of a Mad Old Man (1961). By 1930 he had gained such renown that an edition of his complete works was published, and he received the Imperial Prize in Literature in 1949. Tanizaki died in 1965.

  Howard Hibbett, the translator, is Victor S. Thomas Professor of Japanese Literature, Emeritus, at Harvard University. He has also translated Tanizaki’s Diary of a Mad Old Man and The Key. He lives in Arlington, Massachusetts.

  BY JUNICHIRŌ TANIZAKI

  Naomi

  Quicksand

  Some Prefer Nettles

  Arrowroot

  Ashikari (The Reed Cutter)

  A Portrait Of Shunkin

  The Secret History Of The Lord Of Musashi

  The Genji

  The Makioka Sisters

  Captain Shigemoto’s Mother

  The Key

  Diary Of A Mad Old Man

  A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Junichirō Tanizaki was born in 1886 in Tokyo,

  where his family owned a printing establishment.

  He studied Japanese literature at Tokyo Imperial

  University, and his first published work, a one-act

  play, appeared in 1910 in a literary magazine he

  helped to found.

  Tanizaki lived in the cosmopolitan Tokyo area

  until the earthquake of 1923, when he moved to the

  gentler and more cultivated Kyoto-Osaka region,

  the scene of his great novel The Makioka Sisters

  (1943–48). There he became absorbed in the

  Japanese past and abandoned his superficial

  Westernization. All his most important works were

  written after 1923. Among them Naomi (1924), Some

  Prefer Nettles (1929), Arrowroot (1931), Ashikari

  (The Reed Cutter) (1932), A Portrait of Shunkin

  (1933), The Secret History of the Lord of Musashi

  (1935), several modern versions of The Tale of

  Genji (1941, 1954, and 1965), The Makioka Sisters,

  Captain Shigemoto’s Mother (1949), The Key

  (1956), and Diary of a Mad Old Man (1961). By 1930

  he had gained such renown that an edition of his

  complete works was published, and he received the

  Imperial Prize in Literature in 1949. Tanizaki

  died in 1965.

  A NOTE ABOUT THE TRANSLATOR

  Howard Hibbett is the translator of Tanizaki’s

  Diary of a Mad Old Man and The Key. He is

  Victor S. Thomas Professor of Japanese Literature,

  Emeritus, at Harvard University and Editor of the

  Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies. He lives in

  Arlington, Massachusetts.

  1

  DO FORGIVE ME for bothering you again, but I simply had to see you today—I want you to hear my side of the story, from beginning to end. Are you sure you don’t mind? I know how busy you are with your own writing, and if I go into every last detail it might take forever! Really, I only wish I could put it all down on paper, like one of your novels, and ask you to read it. . . . The truth is, the other day I tried to start writing, but what happened is so complicated I didn’t know where to begin. So I thought I’d just have to talk it out, and that’s why I’m here. But then, I hate to let you waste your precious time for my sake. Are you quite sure it’s all right? You’ve always been so sweet to me I’m afraid I’m taking advantage of your kindness, and after everything you’ve put up with . . . I can’t thank you enough.

  Well,
I suppose I ought to start with that man I used to talk so much about. As I told you before, what you said made me think the whole thing over, and I finally broke off with him. Still, I must have felt a strong attachment. Even at home I’d get almost hysterical when anything brought him to mind. But before long it began to dawn on me that the man was worthless. . . . My husband noticed I’d changed completely since I began consulting you. Instead of always rushing off, telling him I was going to a concert or something, I would stay in all day painting or practicing the piano.

  “You’re being more feminine lately,” he used to say. I could see he was pleased by your concern.

  But I have to admit I never said a word to him about the other man. “It isn’t healthy to hide your past mistakes from your husband,” you warned me, “and since you tell me you haven’t already gone too far up till now, why not make a clean breast of it?” And yet . . . I suppose even my husband may have had an inkling about what was going on, but somehow it was hard for me to confess. I told myself I’d just try not to make the same mistake over again, and I kept that love affair a secret hidden deep in my heart. So he didn’t really know what we were talking about, you see; he thought you were simply giving me a lot of good advice. It’s made a wonderful change in your attitude, he said.

  For a while I spent my time quietly at home. Perhaps because he felt relieved, the way things were going, he said he’d better get a little more serious himself, so he rented an office in the Imabashi Building in downtown Osaka and opened a law practice. That was early last year; it must have been around February.

  . . . Yes, that’s right: he studied German law at the university and could have become a lawyer anytime he liked. But it seems he wanted to be a professor, and he was in graduate school at the time I was involved with that other man. There was no special reason why he decided to go into practice. Probably he was ashamed of depending on my parents and felt he couldn’t hold his head up before me. He’d had such a splendid record as a student that my parents considered him a prize catch. When we were married, they took him into the family like an adopted son. They trusted him right from the start and settled some property on us so he needn’t be in any hurry about making a living. Since he wanted to be a legal scholar, let him keep on studying and be one. And we could go abroad together for two or three years, if we cared to.

  At first my husband was delighted and seemed to mean to do just that. But then maybe I began to irritate him; maybe he thought I was entirely too willful, because of my family’s position. Anyway, he simply didn’t know how to get along with people, no matter what, and he was so tactless, so blunt, That after he started to practice law he still had hardly any business. Yet he made a point of going to the office every day, and I was left to lounge around the house from morning till night. Naturally all those fading memories began coming to life again. Before, when I had time on my hands I used to write poetry, but that would only have stirred up even more memories. So it seemed to me I couldn’t go on like that; I had to take up something, find some distraction. . . .

  Perhaps you know that Women’s Arts Academy in the Tennoji district? It’s a third-rate private school, with departments for painting, music, sewing, embroidery, and all. They have no such thing as admission requirements—anyone can get in, adults or children. I’d had some lessons in Japanese-style painting and was still fond of it, though I wasn’t very good, so I began going there every day, leaving in the morning with my husband. I say every day, but of course it was the kind of school where you could always take the day off.

  My husband had not the slightest interest in art or literature, but he was quite willing to have me go to school. He even encouraged me, told me it was a fine idea, I should do my best! Although we usually left the house together in the morning, we went whenever I was ready—sometimes nine o’clock, sometimes ten—but things were so quiet at my husband’s office that he would wait for me as long as I pleased. We’d take the Hanshin train in from Koroen to Umeda, then catch a taxi and drive along the Sakai streetcar line to the corner of Imabashi, where I dropped him off. I’d go on by taxi all the way to Tennoji.

  He enjoyed our going out together like that.

  “I feel as if I’m a student again,” he’d say, in high spirits, and laugh when I remarked: “Would a student couple run back and forth to school by taxi?”

  He wanted me to call him when I was ready to leave in the afternoon too, and stop by his office, or meet him at Namba or the Hanshin station, to go to the movies at the Shochiku Theater or somewhere. That was how things stood. We were getting along very well. But then, maybe about the middle of April, I had a stupid quarrel with the director at my school.

  It’s strange, the way it happened. You know, they use models posed in various costumes for Japanese painting—you never work from the nude—and there was a so-called life class of that kind at the school. Just then they had a Miss Y, an eighteen-year-old girl said to be one of the most beautiful models in Osaka, and they had her pose in a gauzy white robe as the Willow Kannon—well, that was supposed to be close enough to naked to qualify as life study.

  So I was sketching her one day, along with the other students, when the director came into the classroom and said to me:

  “Mrs. Kakiuchi, your picture doesn’t look anything like the model. Possibly you have a different model in mind?”

  Then he gave a sort of mocking laugh, and all the rest of the students saw what was going on and began to snicker too. I was startled and felt myself blush, though at the time I had no idea why. Thinking back on it now, I’m not sure I was blushing, but somehow his remark about “a different model” struck home. Who could the model be? It seems that quite unconsciously, as I was looking at Miss Y there before me, I’d had another distinct image in my mind’s eye. That image was reflected in the drawing—my brush seemed to be sketching it all by itself, without any intention on my part.

  I’m sure you know who I mean. My model—it’s all been in the newspapers anyway—was Miss Tokumitsu Mitsuko.

  (Author’s note: The widow Kakiuchi seemed unaffected by her recent ordeal. Her dress and manner were bright, even showy, just as they had been a year before. Rather than a widow, Mrs. Kakiuchi looked like the typical young married Osaka woman of good family, and she spoke in the mellifluous feminine dialect of her class and region. She was certainly no great beauty, but as she said the name “Tokumitsu Mitsuko,” her face became suffused with a curious radiance.)

  At that time I hadn’t yet made friends with Mitsuko. She was studying oil painting—painting in the Western style, that is—so she was in a different classroom, and there was no chance for us to talk. I didn’t think she would even recognize me or would give me a second thought if she did. Not that I paid any special attention to her either, except that she seemed to be a strikingly attractive girl. Of course we’d scarcely said a word to each other, and I didn’t know the first thing about her temperament, what she was really like. I suppose you could say it was just a general impression.

  Come to think of it, though, she must have been on my mind a good deal earlier, since already, without even asking, I knew Mitsuko’s name and where she lived: she was the daughter of a wholesale woolens merchant whose shop was in the Semba district of Osaka, and now they lived out in Ashiya, along the Hankyu line—things like that. So when the director made his snide little remark, it set me thinking. Yes, the face in my sketch looked like Mitsuko, but it wasn’t something I’d done on purpose. Even if I had, why should I be expected to produce a facial likeness of Miss Y? She was posing as the goddess Kannon so that we could study her figure, the drapery folds of her white robe, and all that, and then just try to express the feeling of a Kannon bodhisattva, surely. Miss Y may have been a beautiful model, but Mitsuko was far more beautiful: as long as it enhanced the portrait, what was wrong with modeling the face after Mitsuko’s? That was what I thought.

  2

  TWO OR THREE DAYS later the director came in again while we were sketching t
he same pose. He stopped in front of me and stared at my work with his usual sneering smile.

  “Mrs. Kakiuchi,” he said. “Really now, Mrs. Kakiuchi, there’s something wrong with your picture. It’s looking less and less like the model. Who exactly are you modeling it on?”

  “Oh, is that so?” I answered sharply. “It doesn’t look at all like the model?” As if the director had anything to do with teaching art!

  . . . No, the regular painting teacher wasn’t there. That would have been Professor Tsutsui Shunko, but he came in only occasionally, to tell us this or that was bad, or to do it a different way; ordinarily the students would just look at the model and draw anyhow they pleased. I’d heard that the director taught English, one of the optional courses, but he didn’t seem to have a college degree or any real academic background; no one even knew where he had gone to school. As I found out afterward, he was no educator, just a shrewd businessman. A man like that could hardly be expected to understand painting, and he had no reason to stick his nose into it. Then, too, most courses were left to the specialists who taught them, so he rarely visited a classroom. And yet he went out of his way to come to this class and criticize my painting!

  Then he asked me in a sarcastic tone: “Now, seriously, you don’t really think you’re following that model, do you?”

  I pretended to be innocent “Yes. I’m afraid I can’t draw very well, so maybe it isn’t turning out right. But I’m trying to be faithful.”

  “No,” he said, “it’s not that you can’t draw. You’re rather talented, in fact. But look at this face—I can’t help thinking it’s somebody else.” He was back to that again.

  “Oh, you’re talking about the face, are you?” I said. “That’s to express my own ideal.”

  “And who might your ideal be?” he persisted tiresomely.

  Then I told him: “It’s an ideal, not any special person. I just want to make the face beautiful, to give the pure feeling of a Kannon. Is anything wrong with that? Do I have to make even the face look like that model?”