Naomi

Joji is twenty-eight, salaried, and unmarried when he spots fifteen-year-old Naomi waitressing in a Ginza cafe, and he decides on the spot that she's raw material rather than a person: unformed enough to be shaped into a wife who can sit at a Western-style table and pass for Mary Pickford. He funds her English lessons, her dance lessons, her wardrobe, and moves her into his house under the thin fiction of guardianship before either of them calls it what it is. Tanizaki's joke, delivered completely straight, is that Joji believes himself the sole author of Naomi's transformation right up until the transformation stops answering to him.

Naomi's name does real work here, transliterated in katakana, deliberately foreign-sounding against Joji's plainly Japanese one, and so does her face, praised throughout in distinctly Western terms and repeatedly compared to American film stars, flattering Taisho Japan's appetite for imported glamour without ever asking what that appetite costs the person wearing it. As Naomi absorbs dance halls, cigarettes, and a widening circle of male admirers faster than Joji can supervise, the education he financed keeps outrunning the obedience he expected it to buy, and the novel tracks, almost gleefully, how completely the pupil overtakes the tutor's plan for her.

Tanizaki narrates the whole novel in Joji's own retrospective voice, and the gap between what he reports and what he seems to understand about it is the real subject: he describes being slapped, mocked, and financially drained by Naomi in the same satisfied tone he used for her early lessons, treating each fresh degradation as proof of devotion rather than defeat.

The novel's reception mirrored the story it told. Serialized from March 1924 in the Osaka Asahi Shimbun, it was suspended within months by government censors who judged Naomi's frank modern sexuality too vulgar for print, then finished a few months later in the women's magazine Josei. The controversy did nothing to slow the book's influence: it was popular enough among Japan's Jazz-age youth that 'Naomism' became slang for the fashionably Westernized young women who modeled themselves on her, proof that readers were exactly as susceptible to Naomi's transformation as Joji was.