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Tsukurareta rekishi: ‘Shunkinshô’ ni okeru kako to iu kyokô

When Tanizaki Jun’ichirô wrote “A Portrait of Shunkin” (Shunkinshô, 1933), both Proletarian Literature and Modernism no longer excited the literary imagination. Instead, the Japan Romantic School (Nihon romanha) articulated the search for a Japanese-ness in which myth and emotion predominated. Tanizaki’s story highlights some of the new cultural questions that concerned writers at this time. This paper looks in particular at emergent concepts of subjectivity. More generally, this paper attempts to explore links between history and literature in Tanizaki’s story, and considers the extent to which Tanizaki’s work articulates the rise of a conservative ‘return to Japan’ (Nihon kaiki) mentality.