“Neurasthenia” (Shinkei Suijaku) and Writer Tanizaki Jun’ichirō

This article is devoted to the spread of the vogue “disease” — shinkei suijaku (神経衰弱) among the Japanese creative elite of the 20^th century. Part of it was writer Tanizaki Jun’ichirō ( 谷崎潤一郎, 1886–1965), whose artistic image of a “mad genius” was formed under the direct influence of psychiatrist Sugita Naoki (杉田直樹, 1887–1949) and the works of R. Krafft-Ebing and Otto Weininger. The strong causal relationship between “madness” and creativity was caused by the fact that European works of literature came to Japan simultaneously with biographies of their authors. This formed the belief that literature (Dostoevsky or Maupassant’s works, for instance) depended on “madness”. Due to this, the image of a “mad genius” was popularized in Japan in the first half of the 20^th century, becoming a key element of the persona of a “modern” writer. These widespread ideas were opposed to the Neo-Confucian thought of the past, Tokugawa era. Genius no longer depended on education, but mental pathologies, giving their owners a special flair and talent. The works of European philosophers and psychiatrists, biographies of writers of the 19^th century allowed the “new” Japanese artists to create for themselves a privileged position in the developing market of mass culture. Shinkei suijaku became a marker of the fact that an intellectual was experiencing the full weight of modern civilization; they were at the very edge of the modernization process. The image of a morbid masochist genius constructed by writer Tanizaki Jun’ichirō formed the basis of almost all of his works.
The main method of research is analytical. Special attention is paid to the specifics of the development of Japanese culture in the first quarter of the 20^th century, when Tanizaki Jun’ichirō joined the discourse of the modernist era with his ideas about the ideal woman who had to change the “genetic” code of the Japanese nation, transforming a person both externally and internally. The works of the writer are a series of “manifestos”, aimed at rethinking the role and image of women in modern society, searching for one’s own identity and the place of the Japanese nation in the modern world.

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