THE IMAGE OF THE IDEAL WOMAN IN TANIZAKI JUN’ICHIRŌ’S NOVEL BLUE FLOWER

Abstract

This paper is about the Tanizaki Jun’ichirō’s (1886–1965) experience of creating a 1920–1950s Japanese woman image inspired by the urban environment of Yokohama — the city as a mirror of the Western culture in Japan. The writer who had combined the images of European and Oriental women in order to obtain the architype of new Japanese woman in his early works no longer wanted to do this. He began to portray a new-age woman — his new ideal, which writer observed in Hollywood movies. Tanizaki Jun’ichirō anticipated the appearance of Modan gāru on the Japanese stage, women who became objects of public attention because they followed Western fashion trends and lifestyle. Precisely this kind of woman occupied Tanizaki’s mind for the first half of the 1920s. The novel Blue Flower (Aoi hana, 青い花, 1921) was the first Tanizaki Jun’ichirō’s work, in which we meet the modan garu, a new type of Japanese woman of the first half of the XX c. In this novel, he presents the West as a source of femininity, and western attributes now as being able to change both the exterior and interior of a human. Blue Flower is the result of Tanizaki Jun’ichirō’s research of these new women in his quest for their physical perfection.