This perversion called love

"This Perversion Called Love positions one of Japan's most canonical and best translated twentieth century authors at the center of contemporary debates in feminism. Examining sexual perversion in Tanizaki's aesthetic essays, cultural criticism, cinema writings, and short novels from the 1930s, it argues that Tanizaki understands human subjectivity in remarkably Freudian terms, but that he is much more critical than Freud about what this means for the possibility of love. Author Margherita Long takes readers with her on her personal search for a meaningful feminist approach to Tanizaki's work, and makes the case that perversion in his writings always turns out to involve not the proliferation of interesting gender positions but rather the tragic absence of even two sexes, since femininity is only ever defined as man's absence, supplement. or complement." "In these pages, Long reads Tanizaki with the theoretical complexity he deserves but has seldom received in either Japanese or English. By showing how Tanizaki addressed questions of modernity that are in no way specific to Japan or Japanese literature, Long's work is intended to draw a crossover readership from, and spark conversation between, feminist theory and Japanese literature. Although recent feminist work in Japanese literary and cultural studies is resolutely historicist and focused on gender, Long critiques these two paradigms. By offering a compelling account of the losing side in the current feminist debate in both North America and Japan about how far the "gender" paradigm can take us, This Perversion Called Love should stir up controversial exchanges among veteran scholars and inspire a new generation of feminist scholarship in critical Asian studies."--BOOK JACKET.