This major work began for me on the reading of Junichirō Tanizaki’s ‘Some Prefer Nettles’. The tale itself, highly symbolic and tinged with an unmistakable pathos, ultimately led me to select as a focus for my major work the Taisho period of Japan, a period of social, political and literary fermentation. The Taisho period was a time of literary reflection on the changes the Meiji period had brought about, it was a period where a great many authors turned their minds towards locating an authentic cultural identity distinct from Western influence. Decidedly thus influenced by this topic, my critical response was to have the purpose of illustrating the tensions that exist between modernity and traditional culture, additionally dealing with the …show more content…
I have chosen to centre it around a particular event which I accredit with being a signifiant turning point in both the modernity of Japan and Tanizaki’s literary response to it. Namely, this was the Great Kanto earthquake of 1923, which destroyed large swathes of Tokyo and thus removed many ‘traditional’ traces of its Edo past, propelling it further into the modern world. The idea in itself is credit to various papers which gave specific mention to the earthquake as being almost symbolic of a shift in Tanizaki’s representation (for example, Edward G. Seidensticker’s reference in the preface to ‘Some Prefer Nettles’), and to a greater extent symbolic of the end of a time in Japan where remnants of the past existed in an authentic cohesion with their modern surroundings. The piece’s structural focus on the traumatic force of the earthquake was prompted by a reading of the post-modern 1967 ‘Semiology and Urbanism’ by Roland Baths, which theorises that, ‘we speak our city, the city where we are, simply by living in it’. Thus the earthquake becomes symbolic of a larger break in the balance of tensions enmeshed in the phenomena of