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preserve his honor, Mori treated the material with modern psychological insights, and not with the conventional moralization of the old chroniclers. His style too was new (many novelists today consider Mori’s prose the finest of modern Japanese), and quite unlike the traditional literary language. Mori could return to the past only with a consciousness of the present.
This same dilemma may be traced through the writings of Tanizaki Jun’ichirô (born 1886), the most distinguished living Japanese novelist. As a young man he shocked his associates with his checked suits and gaudy neckties, and was a notorious frequenter of the foreign quarter in Yokohama. He studied English literature at Tokyo University for a time, and his readings in Edgar Allan Poe may account for the macabre intensity of his early works. His fondness for Western things did not, however, prevent him from feeling a warm nostalgia for the old Japanese literature. In 1919, for example, the same year that he translated Lady Windermere’s Fan, he published a volume of erotic stories in the style of the Japanese 1830’s, as well as two novellas in a Chinese vein. It is recorded that when Tanizaki heard of the great earthquake of 1923, he rejoiced that the city of Tokyo, which
