Volume 35, Number 20 · December 22, 1988
Art of Cruelty
By Ian Buruma
Hell Screen, Cogwheels, A Fool's Life
by Ryunosuke Akutagawa, translated by Takashi Kojima, by Cid Corman, by Will Petersen, with a foreword by Jorge Luis Borges, an introduction by Kazuya Sakai
Eridanos, 145 pp., $12.00 (paper)
Childhood Years: A Memoir
by Jun'ichiro Tanizaki, translated by Paul McCarthy
Kodansha, 181 pp., $17.95
Two short stories, by Tanizaki Jun'ichiro and Akutagawa Ryunosuke, appeared within ten years of each other; Tanizaki's 'The Tattooer' in 1910, and Akutagawa's 'Hell Screen' in 1918. The stories are remarkably alike. 'The Tattooer' concerns Seikichi, a tattoo artist in the decadent phase of the Edo period, around the 1840s let us say, whose ambition is, as the author puts it, to engrave his soul into the skin of a beautiful woman. It takes time to find the perfect human canvas for his masterpiece, but when he catches a glimpse of the exquisite feet of a young teahouse girl, he knows his goal is near. 'This,' he feels instinctively, 'is a foot to be fed by men's blood, a foot to trample on their bodies.'
Review, 2541 words
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