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A daily record of what I'm thinking about what I'm reading

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Sunday, April 15, 2018

Waiting for the narrator in Tanizaki's Naomi to get what he deserves

We continue to loathe the narrator, Joji, in Junichiro Tanizaki's 1924 novel, Naomi; we hate his snobbery, his obsession with "Western" beauty, his selection of a young and vulnerable woman (girl, actually - Naomi is15 at the start!) to be his "housekeeper," his obvious need to dominate Naomi (whom he marries), his creepy insistence that she call him Papa. And things start to turn: Naomi, as she matures, begins to chafe at the bit so to speak and seek some kind of independence, or perhaps even revenge. She begins spending recklessly, which really gets to Joji, a careful and methodical man who for the first time finds himself in debt and sees no way out - aside from asking his mother for money (which she provides - he doesn't really level w/ her, telling her he needs the money because of a higher cost of living, not because of Naomi's extravagance); she begins hanging out w/ people her age who are interested in music and dance. Joji agrees reluctantly to go to dancing lessons, and develops a crush on the instructor, an exiled Russian aristocrat (his obsession w/ Western beauty and his undue respect for the "upper" class are his undoing) and he feels his age and incompetence when N persuades him to go a dance hall, where he dances with an actress and No dances w/ an American man - and where, it seems, he ends up fronting for all the drinks. In other words, he's headed for a fall - as he indicated at the outset of this narrative -. There's a long history of this kind of plot - the duping of the old man by the young romantic hero (even in opera - think of La Boheme for ex.) - but there are many variations, which keeps us wondering how this will play out over the course of the narrative. Neither of the lead characters is sympathetic, but we can't wait to see the narrator get what he deserves.

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