Tanizaki’Short Story Art Research

Junichiro Tanizaki (1886-1965) is a representative writer of modern aesthetical literature. He is a prolific writer as he has written a lot of literary works from Meiji period to Showa period. He is also an outstanding artist integrating oriental and western literature. At the beginning of his career, Tanizaki’s writing is based on western literature; since the metaphase of his literary life, he skillfully combines oriental and western literature together in literary creation. And in his late works, he further increases the proportion of oriental literature. Through his personalized aesthetic choice and filtering, he becomes versatile in narration person and narrative visual angle. In addition, he not only uses exquisite psychological description to depict the character’s inner world, but also creates excellent themes in characterization. Most impressively, his words even have an audio-visual effect. Tanizaki’s successful application of the above artistic techniques makes his short stories look very unique and ingenious.This thesis systematically interprets the artistic characteristics of Tanizaki’s short stories from four aspects-the art of theme, the art of psychological depiction, the art of narration person and the art of language. In the part of Introduction, it not only gives a brief depiction to the three key words--Tanizaki, short stories and literary technique, but also illustrates the research background, the current research status and the research thinking and approaches. The above demonstrates the feasibility of this thesis. Chapter One discusses the art of theme in Tanizaki’s short stories. Firstly, it interprets the art of depiction of female characteristics in Tanizaki’s short stories; secondly, it illustrates the art of suspense used in Tanizaki’s short detective novels; thirdly it reveals the art of choice in the theme of Chinese history used in Tanizaki’s short stories. The above three points show the ingeniousness of Tanizaki’s short stories. Chapter Two discusses the art of narration person in Tanizaki’s short stories. Tanizaki is not only good at first-person narrative, but also third-person narrative. This makes the artistic effect of his narration person more efficient The first-person narrative reveals not only the diversity of the relationship between the narrator "I" and Tanizaki himself, but also the complicated relationship between experiencing self and narrating self. And it illustrates the opening and freedom of the internal framework in Tanizaki’s short stories. In the third-person narrative, Tanizaki adjusts the distance between the narrator and the characters through the transformation of the limited view and omniscient view. Readers can get the real and aesthetic feeling while reading which helps them to have a better understanding of the theme. Of cause, the charm of narration is developed. Chapter Three discusses the art of psychological depiction in Tanizaki’s short stories. He excavates the potential deep psychological of characters through the depictions of internal monologue and dreams in order to reveal the subconsciousness and pathopsychology in particular circumstances. Thus Tanizaki’s short stories not only have strong artistic charm, but also have the characteristics of modern psychological novel. Chapter Four discusses the art of language in Tanizaki’s short stories. At first, his language in short stories is just like the rhythm of melody. As for this, Tanizaki makes full use of the unique advantage of Japanese-the application of onomatopoeia and mimicry words. Therefore it can display the audio-visual effect of language and Tanizaki’s unique aesthetic style in his emotional literary world. Moreover, the use of the infinitive form of verb, noun ending and the division of punctuation in Japanese causes a smooth and continuous musical effect for his language. Second, Tanizaki’s language is as vivid as a marvelous painting owing to the application of color words and his great artistic depiction. And this turns the non-visual word depiction into a lively visual picture. It facilitates the intertextuality of language and image in his short stories. Third, the language in Tanizaki’s short stories is also ingenious, which is reflected in the proper use of honorifics and concise dialogues of characters. In all, with his ingenious depiction, Tanizaki leads readers to an incredible audio-visual literary world. The part of Conclusion summarizes the artistic style of Tanizaki’s short stories-the delicate art of theme, the exquisite art of narration person, the elaborate art of psychological depiction and the immaculate art of language. To sum up, Tanizaki’s unique literary style, on one hand, represents the unique artistic charm of his short stories; on the other hand, it also helps Tanizaki to take an important position in modern literature in Japan.