28
embodied all that he hated in the old Japan, was at last destroyed. But in the following year he published A Fool’s Love, the story of a man whose fascination for a European-looking waitress makes him endure repeated insults and humiliation. The man is ashamed of his protruding teeth and other caricaturish Japanese features, and can only conceive of beauty in terms of an un-Japanese woman. At the end of the novel the man, willing to yield to any conditions the waitress may impose providing he can stay with her, agrees that she may live in a Western-style house in Yokohama and entertain as many foreign men friends as she pleases.
The condemnation of Japanese worship of the West implicit in A Fool’s Love takes another form in Tanizaki’s next major novel Some Prefer Neffles (1928). The hero of this work is attracted both to the new, a Eurasian prostitute, and the old, a Kyoto beauty. In the opening chapter we find him reclining in a deck chair wearing casual but well-tailored flannels, reading an unexpurgated English translation of The Arabian Nights. At the end of the novel the Kyoto lady, looking ghostly in the semi-darkness of his room, brings him an armful of books bound in the old-fashioned Japanese style. In between these two scenes we watch the
