Japanese Literature Summaries
日本語

Naomi — Summary and Characters

A man's slow surrender to Naomi

Author
Tanizaki Jun'ichirō
Published
March 1924
First appeared in
Osaka Asahi Shimbun
Form
Novel
Genres
  • Romance
  • Psychological
Setting
  • Tokyo
Length
179,399 characters
Reading time
About 5 hr 59 min
Orthography
Modern script and kana

About this work

Tanizaki's best-known novel and the model for the femme fatale in modern Japanese literature. Serialization began in the Osaka Asahi Shimbun in 1924 and, after an interruption, continued in the magazine Josei until 1925. Jōji, a sober engineer, sets out to raise Naomi, a girl from a café, into his ideal of a Western woman — and is instead played with by her and reduced to servitude, as he confesses in his own words. Set against the modern manners of the years around the Great Kantō Earthquake, its portrait of a man intoxicated by his own worship and ruin even produced a catchword, "Naomi-ism."

Summary

Kawai Jōji, a sober and upright electrical engineer, is drawn to Naomi, a fifteen-year-old apprentice waitress at a café in Asakusa, and takes her home to live with him. Meaning to raise this girl with her Western-looking face into his ideal — a stylish, refined woman — he has her taught English and music, gives her expensive clothes, and cares for her as one might cherish a doll. But as she grows, Naomi shows her true nature, wilful and unrestrained, spending his earnings like water and going about openly with young men. Learning of her infidelity he turns her out of the house once; but he cannot cut himself free of his obsession with her body and her charm. Having apologized and swallowed every demand in order to bring her back, Jōji sinks from anything like an equal husband into something more like a servant who waits on her. A man who set out to make his ideal woman finds himself tamed by her instead, and comes at last to take his own servitude for a pleasure — and Jōji sets down this foolish, irresistible course of love without a trace of shame.

Characters

Chapter-by-chapter synopsis

The app covers this work chapter by chapter (full text in the app).

  1. 1. About This Work
  2. 2. Main Characters
  3. 3. Major Supporting Characters
  4. 4. The Meeting — A Café in Asakusa and the "Fairy-Tale House" in Ōmori
  5. 5. The Failure of Education — From "Mind" to "Body"
  6. 6. Dancing — Hamada and Kumagai, and the Rumors at the Seiyōken
  7. 7. Summer in Kamakura — The Betrayal Discovered
  8. 8. Expulsion and Disappearance — Twelve Thirty-Six in the Afternoon
  9. 9. Return and Surrender — "Do You Understand Now How Terrible I Can Be?"
  10. 10. Key Motifs and Foreshadowing

The opening (original text)

I intend now to write, as honestly and as plainly as I can, the facts just as they were about the relations between my wife and myself, which I believe have few parallels in the world. For me it is a precious record I shall not forget, and at the same time it will surely serve my readers as material worth something too.

Naomi by Tanizaki Jun'ichirō (Aozora Bunko)

The ending (original text)

With this the record of our marriage comes to an end. Let anyone who reads it and thinks it absurd laugh at it. Let anyone who thinks it instructive take it for a good warning. As for me, I am in love with Naomi, and so it cannot be helped whatever anyone thinks. Naomi is twenty-three this year, and I am thirty-six.

Naomi by Tanizaki Jun'ichirō (Aozora Bunko)

Famous passages

I intend, in what follows, to set down as honestly and frankly as I can, just as it happened, the story of a marriage between my wife and myself that I believe has few parallels in the world.

An opening confession in the form of a memoir. It foretells the course by which a man who set out to raise the girl Naomi into his ideal woman ends up her slave.

Read the original

The original Japanese text is available at Aozora Bunko, and the app downloads the same text for its vertical-text reader.

Aozora Bunko library card

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