The Body Narrative In Junichiro Tanizaki’s Fictions

It has gradually become a hot area of research on Junichiro Tanizaki and his works in the Chinese literary circles. However, for such an aesthetic writer who had kept to pursuit the beauty of female’s body all his life, papers have been rarely published on the evident body narrative as a technique of expression in his fictions.In this thesis, on the basis of the predecessors’researches on Tanizaki’s aestheticism, preliminary analysis and discussion were performed on the body of subjectivity and the body narrative in Tanizaki’s fictions. On the one hand, the body narrative and its change in Tanizaki’s fictions at different periods of time have been investigated, revealing the evolution of his aesthetic signification. During the creation of early Tanizaki, the mania of sense beauty and the indulgence of sensual were combined together. At the same time, body and soul presents a binary relation, and the soul succumbs to the body. During the medium-term creation of Tanizaki, he tried to spiritualize body in the narcissism of sensuality and pursue in the imagination of eternal body. The unity of mother and female made him the idea. During the creation of later Tanizaki, considering how to the old people survive made him to actively began the exploration of how to make oneself and beauty world integration.At different times, Tanizaki always treated the body in different approaches and rendered the body in different ways. No matter the reflecting of the physical desire everywhere in his early creation, the complex imagination of the body involved in his medium-term creation, and the breakthrough of the body instinct in his later creation, the works are featured by the intertexture of the physical instinct and the body imagination, the integration of the pleasure and the aesthetic. It is worth noting that, based on the repeated questions on the beauty connotation, the body narrative in Tanizaki’s fictions is a authentic discourse bearing the mutual body and spirit.On the other hand, a wealth of information conveyed via the typical body symbols appeared in Tanizaki’s fictions was analyzed in this thesis. It illustrates that Tanizaki used the body symbol as an aesthetic expression to render his beauty and deepen the understanding of the beauty.