La scoperta dell'infanzia. Tanizaki, Vita e opere

In Japan's opening to the West and modernization in the late nineteenth century and the early decades of the twentieth century, a profound revision of educational processes and gender formation is implemented. Boys and girls become the perspective model of adult citizen values. The modern education system gives literary impetus and popularity to stories concerning childhood and adolescence. In the two stories presented here, Tanizaki Jun'ichirō confronts these new values, anticipating some of the characters of his most famous characters in the mature production and approaching the subject of education from a critical point of view. Shōnen (Adolescents, 1911) and Chiisana ōkoku (The Little Kingdom, 1918), show how the writer devoted his writings to childhood not because he was nostalgic for the past but because children were essential to his artistic vision. From his earliest works he gives imagination a primary role and recognizes the artistic fact as having absolute value. It has often been pointed out as a consequence of this attitude, the refusal to pay attention to political or social phenomena. However, it cannot be said that Chiisana ōkoku and Shōnen are devoid of ideological vision. Indeed, the very stories that feature children and childhood games as characters allow Tanizaki to subvert the social and ethical values of the time. In these stories, the writer seems to challenge the predominant ideology that saw childhood as the age of innocence and conceived of education with a rigid division of roles and gender. It is precisely the ambiguous nature of children that allows Tanizaki to invent, in the fiction of play, roles and themes opposed to the foundations of the modern nation, namely the patriarchal system. Chiisana ōkoku already suggests in its title an alternative world, a prophecy of a totalitarian regime; in Shōnen the transgressive Mitsuko wields power that was previously exclusively male and becomes the queen of her tiny, secret kingdom.