In Black and White

A Novel

Jun'ichirō. Tanizaki, Phyllis I. Lyons

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780231546256
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literature General
• Index: Literature

Jun'ichir? Tanizaki's In Black and White is a literary murder mystery in which the lines between fiction and reality are blurred. The writer Mizuno has penned a story about the perfect murder. His fictional victim is modeled on an acquaintance, a fellow writer. When Mizuno notices just before the story is about to be published that this man's real name has crept into his manuscript, he attempts to correct the mistake, but it is too late. He then becomes terrified that an actual murder will take place—and that he will be the main suspect. Mizuno goes to great lengths to establish an alibi, venturing into the city's underworld. But he finds himself only more entangled as his paranoid fantasies, including a mysterious "Shadow Man" out to entrap him, intrude into real life. A sophisticated psychological and metafictional mystery, In Black and White is a masterful yet little-known novel from a great writer at the height of his powers.

The year 1928 was a remarkable one for Tanizaki. He wrote three exquisite novels, but while two of them— Some Prefer Nettles and Quicksand —became famous, In Black and White disappeared from view. All three were serialized in Osaka and Tokyo newspapers and magazines, but In Black and White was never published as an independent volume. This translation restores it to its rightful place among Tanizaki's works and offers a window into the author's life at a crucial point in his career. A critical afterword explains the novel's context and importance for Tanizaki and Japan's literary and cultural scene in the 1920s, connecting autobiographical elements with the novel's key concerns, including Tanizaki's critique of Japanese literary culture and fiction itself.

1

Mizuno always hated getting up in the morning. That day, he opened his eyes around ten, lit a cigarette and lay on his back, staring at the ceiling. Suddenly a thought floated into his head.

“Oh, wait … that’s right … did I actually use his real name?”

For a moment he didn’t even realize he’d spoken out loud. Then, even though there was no one to hear, he glanced around uneasily—not because he’d blurted out something that shouldn’t be heard but rather because he was worried that his recent habit of talking to himself out loud might be taken as a sign that he was going crazy. To be sure, it was nothing new; he’d been doing it since his twenties. But recently it had gotten quite a bit worse. His head was always fuzzy, and any kind of concentrated thinking exhausted him. One thought would lead to another, and then he would be off on all kinds of tangents, and strange, disconnected fantasies, and thoughts of an instant would suddenly appear, like the shadow of a bird falling on the screen—and before he realized it, words would pop out of his mouth. Sometimes he even cried out as if scolding himself for talking to himself.

“I’ve got to stop doing this!”—Time and again he’d tried to pull himself up short, but his control didn’t last even five minutes. Before long he’d already have forgotten, and his mind would once again be drawing up another picture on its own, and he’d erase that one and bring up another image and then extinguish it, too. It was as if his mind had a mind of its own, his heart was not his own heart. Perched on top of his shoulders was not his head, but a tank, and some horribly stinky, filthy sludge precipitated in it, and there was liquid on the surface that dripped out, drop by drop, and those were the words he spoke to himself.… That’s how he thought of it.

He couldn’t control his own mind—his brain seemed to have become a self-propelled movie projector, arbitrarily streaming out whatever goblins and evil spirits it wanted while he simply stood there with his arms folded, watching as if his own life had no connection to himself. Was this then a sign that he was crazy? No, but he was more than halfway there. He realized that he talked to himself because he was usually all alone. He had no real friends and he lived by himself, so he often went all day without talking to a single person. With no chance to talk to anyone, he felt a deep isolation within himself, although he didn’t want to think of himself as lonely. For that matter, two or three years ago, when he was still married, he wasn’t always talking to himself like this. His wife would say something, and all he had to do was grunt in response. He could hardly even remember what she looked like—she was that kind of wife. But still, they did exchange words at least a couple of times a day. She’d been the talker, even if he had no interest in chatting. But now there never was a human voice in his room, not his or anyone else’s. That’s why he talked to himself: he wanted to hear a human voice. The proof was that he spoke out loud like that—sometimes running on, sometimes just growling out sounds—only when there was no one else present.

“What difference should it make, his real name …?” he muttered to himself once again. The long, thin tower of ash poised at the end of his cigarette collapsed and fluttered down onto his lips. With a bitter grimace he crushed out the butt in the teacup beside his futon even though it was only half gone. As if ashamed to be seen, he flipped the bedclothes up over his head. And then for a long time he just lay there blinking his eyes, staring out into the darkness, not thinking of anything at all.

This “real name” he was talking about to himself was in a manuscript he’d finished writing a couple of days earlier. The story, which he’d been working on for almost three weeks, was supposed to be in the April issue of The People, and just the day before, he’d squeaked in under the deadline and handed it over to a runner from the press. The storyline was something he was particularly good at, and he’d been looking forward with quite a sense of anticipation for the magazine to come out. Although he’d been writing for fifteen or sixteen years already, he did still get excited sometimes. He’d been enjoying playing over this part or that in his mind when suddenly it hit him: in two or three places, he was sure, by mistake he’d put the real name of the man he’d used as the model for a character in the story.

“Codama, Cojima, Codama, Cojima …”—the third time, he blurted it out loud as he lay in his futon staring into the darkness. He’d done this before: once, he’d used his first girlfriend as the model for a character in a story, and he’d written her real name by mistake. Luckily that time he’d noticed it while it was still in draft and managed to take care of it before it was printed. He had imagined the mess such a slip might cause, and since then he’d been very careful about what he did with names.

The problem was one of verisimilitude. Say in this case with “Cojima” he’d changed it to something that sounded or looked completely different—he’d lose the sense of realism that had been precisely the reason he’d modeled it on a real person in the first place. And the more important the character was, the worse mixing up the names would be—it would cause the model even more trouble. That’s why he tried to figure out a name that was close enough to make the model vivid, so that it would produce a similar effect for readers. But if he made it not different enough from the real name, that might make the model recognizable. So he really worked very hard at it. If the name were too close to the real one, then he’d change the age or the appearance, anything to give him some space. This time, however, he’d not had time to go over it. It wasn’t that it hadn’t occurred to him that “Codama” would make for an easy mistake, but he was hard pressed, and as he gathered speed in the last day or two before the deadline, he’d been up practically all day and night, his pen flying. And so “Codama,” “Codama,” at some point became “Cojima,” “Cojima.”

That need not have been much of a problem, of course, but this story was one of those “diabolistic” plots he specialized in: a man gets fascinated by whether he can kill another man—any man, a stranger—without leaving a trace, and he does successfully manage to kill the man in such a way that no one will ever know he did it. The model for the killer would be the author, Mizuno himself; the man he chose as the model for the man to be killed was this Cojima.

The protagonist of the story was, like Mizuno, a literary man.… He loved no human being but himself. He saw everything in the world as random and accidental. This was the fundamental view of human life that permeated his works, but before long he felt his artistic genius begin to weaken, and eventually he got to the point where he had to try acting out his aesthetic position in real life.

There were several considerations in his decision. First of all: given that he was that kind of person, of course he didn’t have any close friends and he lived a calculating, solitary life. So if no desire to write came bubbling up naturally, his isolation left him with no way to replenish his stock of creativity. Second: whether or not he felt such a thing as the prick of conscience (even to think this way he’d have to be crazy already, but he didn’t realize it), he thought of it as a kind of nervous prostration: human nerves were quite fragile, and if one overused one’s head and was stimulated even a little bit beyond the ordinary, one would immediately become sick and exhausted, and not just from doing something immoral. And so it seemed to him that if he wanted to do something evil without feeling the promptings of conscience, either he had to find a way to trick his nerves or he could try to numb his nerves by accustoming them to evil bit by bit. And since “tricking his nerves” was in fact “to lead them rationally,” it was not something to fear at all. Rather, it meant that he should train himself to be heroically faithful to his own beliefs. In this way, while attending to the state of his nerves, and by working at it bit by bit, eventually he would be capable of performing some great act of evil with perfect ease.

Accordingly, he worked out his plan and secretly set about carrying it out. First he worked at ensnaring someone—in such a way that the man would think him a noble and kindhearted man, and even thank him. Just as he had expected, his nerves gradually became numb, and he came not to feel any of those pricks of conscience. “Look at that!” he said in his heart.…

Soon he became the embodiment of evil. How far can I go before I feel a pang of conscience? Is it here? … Here? … Gradually he was so drawn into it that he felt he had to enact the height of evil: he would have to cause harm to another human being. He thought to himself, “If I don’t try this at least once there will be something missing in my commitment to resolving the riddle of ‘conscience.’ ” Slowly he looked around and sought out a suitable victim.

His crime would be evil for the sake of evil. That was the only reason for it.… Why it should be that way is that otherwise there would be room for some moral “justification.” For that reason it would be better if the intended victim were someone he didn’t have much of a connection to. That way there would be less danger of getting caught. After all, if he managed to snare the man but were caught by the law, then there would be no point to it.…

As he looked around him to see who might fit his conditions, into his field of vision wandered—the very man. Why this man Codama caught his (the story’s protagonist’s) attention is that, just as stipulated, they had almost no connection. This fundamentally cautious criminal knew that no matter how careful he was to erase all evidence, all the same something might remain somewhere to be sniffed out, and that last trace would remain, at least in his own conscience. Even if he could erase the external footprint, he could not easily wipe away the mark left in his heart. Of course he had no worries on this point, for his conscience was already numbed. But as long as he paid scrupulous attention, inside and outside, spiritually and materially, he would be able to erase the trace completely. For the rest of it, given that he wasn’t very competent at planning things, even if there wasn’t any actual evidence there might be some vague rumor going around. If all eyes turned toward him and all fingers pointed at him and people became suspicious of him, there would be the possibility for disaster to grow from that.

Now, this man Codama had once been a reporter for some women’s magazine and had visited him two or three times, but other than that the only connection they’d had was to pass each other on the street occasionally, or see each other at the motion picture theater. All the writer knew was what he’d picked up here and there: that after quitting the magazine, the man had withdrawn to somewhere in the outskirts of Omiya off in Saitama prefecture and now was involved in compiling the collected works of some writer; that he went into Tokyo twice a week for that, Mondays and Fridays, and while he was in Tokyo, generally he had dinner and then returned by train around eight or nine. The writer just happened to hear bits and pieces of the man’s life: his house was some three-quarters of a mile or so from Omiya station, outside the town, and he had to pass along an isolated section where at night there were hardly any passers-by. He’d learned these things when occasionally he had run into the man on the Ginza or at a movie theater. It was always when he had come into Tokyo for work, and he would say something like, “Yeah, I come in on Mondays and Fridays,” and then, “Oh, sorry I have to rush off before you—I’ve got a long way to go, and if I don’t make this train …” And even if they were in the middle of a movie, he’d always get up and leave around 8:00 P.M. They’d had five or six accidental encounters of this sort, but once he’d been talking to a friend of the man, a journalist at some magazine, and the topic of living away from the city had come up. The journalist said, “You know, living off in the country is all right, but it’s pretty inconvenient,” and went on to talk about Codama’s house as an illustration of how isolated and dangerous it was to live in the hinterlands. He continued in considerable detail about what the road was like and concluded, “Well, I suppose since it’s only once or twice a week, it could be okay, but there’s no way I could live in such a place if I had to commute every day.”

This was all he knew about Codama, and none of it was the result of any special research. Given that their relationship was so tenuous, there was virtually no way that he could know anything other than this...