A comparison of the motifs of artist's obsession in „The Tattooer“ by Tanizaki Jun'ichirō and „Tale of a Mad Painter“ by Kim Dong-in

This paper discusses similarities in the choices of plots and motifs in the short stories The Tattooer (1910) by Japanese writer Tanizaki Jun'ichirō and Tale of a Mad Painter (1935) by Korean writer Kim Dong-in, and hypothesizes a possible connection between them. In order to find out whether these works are really connected, common literary influences on both stories and analyzed stories’ structures and motifs were compared in this thesis. Results revealed that these two works were written under the influence of the same literary works: the theme of the relationship between art and violence and the motif of the artist obsessed with the desire to create an artistic masterpiece in The Tattooer and Tale of a Mad Painter are most likely inspired by Oscar Wilde's novel The Picture of Dorian Gray and Edgar Allan Poe's short story The Oval Portrait, while motifs of sexual perversions are inspired by Psychopathia Sexualis by Richard Freiherr von Krafft-Ebing. Not only two stories were written under the same influences, but the story Tale of a Mad Painter itself intertextually reworked Tanizaki’s The Tattooer adjusting motifs to Korean realities and making the structure more complex.

Disruptions of Daily Life

This book explores the mass-media landscape of the early twentieth cspecific authorsentury to uncover the subversive societal impact of four major Japanese authors: Tanizaki Jun'ichirō, Yokomitsu Riichi, Kawabata Yasunari, and Hirabayashi Taiko. The book examines the literature against global realities through a modernist lens, studying an alternative modernism that challenges the Western European model. Through broad surveys of discussions surrounding Japanese life in the 1920s, the book locates and examines flourishing divergent ideologies of the early twentieth century, such as gender, ethnicity, and nationalism. It unravels how the narrative and linguistic strategies of modernist texts interrogated the innocence of this language, disrupting their hold on people's imagined relationship to daily life. These modernist works often discursively displaced the authority of their own claims by inadvertently exposing the global epistemology of East versus West. The book expands modernism studies into a more translational dialogue by locating subversions within the local historical culture and allowing readers to make connections to the time and place in which the texts were written. In highlighting the unbreakable link between literature and society, it reaffirms the value of modernist fiction and its ability to make us aware of how realities are constructed — and how those realities can be changed.

Shattering the Status Quo: Reading Modernism in the Early Twentieth Century

This introductory chapter provides an overview of how literary modernism operated in Japan, looking at the works of Tanizaki Jun'ichirō, Yokomitsu Riichi, Kawabata Yasunari, and Hirabayashi Taiko. Contrary to prevalent conceptions of high modernism as art-objects sequestered from the utilitarian language of capitalist society, modernist literature was highly enmeshed in the language of the mass print media, one of the major sources of social ideology since the beginning of the twentieth century. The works of the four Japanese authors disrupt the ideologies that made daily living appear seamless and comfortable. They did so to expose the way such norms were bolstered by narrow, constrictive, and essentialist notions of gender, ethnicity, society, and nation; to reveal the way such norms were employed to discipline the minds and behaviors of Japanese citizens; and finally to provoke cognitive and sensational liberation from the supremacy of these norms. The chapter then considers the emergence and establishment of the I-novel genre in Japanese literary history, as well as the phenomenon of modanizumu.