Suspicion of Heterosexuality――Forms of Sexual Love in Tade-kuu-mushi(Taste differs) and Manji(Swastika)

SHIBATA Shoji

Junichiro Tanizaki is often regarded as an author who continued to describe man’s worship of beautiful woman as a central subject, but the gender relationship depicted in his works rather reveals his doubts about heterosexuality. In particular, the scheme that men and women love each other spiritually in an equal relationship, that is one of the myths of modern times, has been relativized in various ways, and the male protagonist’s worship of woman was one of them.

Tade-kuu-mushi(Taste differs) is a work in which Tanizaki cleverly satirizes the modern heterosexual myth by contrasting a couple of husband and wife just before divorce and a couple of the old man who is the father of the protagonist’s wife and his young mistress. Although it is a pre-modern gender relationship that an old man has a young mistress, they maintain close relationship. While the main character couple who should have been tied by heterosexuality is forced to failure in a short time.

iManji(Swastica) iis a rare Tanizaki’s work that described a homosexual love story between two women. But the reason why Sonoko, the narrator, is inclined to love for the same sex is because she can’t be satisfied with heterosexual relation with her husband. Both of these two works were written after author’s moving to Kansai, and the fascination of "classics" and "nature" of Kansai would accelerate further his criticism of modernity.