The Secret History of the Lord of Musashi by Jun'ichirō Tanizaki

First published:Bushuko hiwa, 1931-1932, serial; 1935, book (English translation, 1982)

Type of work: Historical fiction

Time of work: 1549-1559

Locale: The Mount Ojika and Mount Tamon castles, Japan

Principal Characters:

• Hoshimaru, later
• Terukatsu, the eldest son of the feudal chief Kiryu Terukuni, the Lord of Musashi
• Tsukuma Oribensho Norishige, the eldest son of Tsukuma Ikkansai
• Lady Kikyo, the wife of Norishige and paramour of Terukatsu
• Doami, a servant and jester of Terukatsu

The Novel

In his preface to The Secret Life of the Lord of Musashi, Jun’ichirō Tanizaki claims to have examined secret papers telling of the otherwise unknown masochistic sexual desires of the famous sixteenth century samurai, the Lord of Musashi. The purpose of his book, he explains, is to reveal the development of these sexual desires in the young Musashi. Tanizaki approaches his subject with formal respect, carefully placing Musashi in the context of other renowned and respected warriors who were known to have enjoyed cruel and unusual sex practices. The novel’s material is then presented as a historical investigation; it is related in the past tense, and the point of view is third-person, with occasional first-person commentary.

The novel is divided into six books, each divided into chapters. Book 1 opens with an account of the author’s two “secret” sources: “The Dream of a Night” was written by a nun named Myokaku, who had apparently once been in the service of Musashi; “Confessions of Doami” was written by a servant of Musashi and recounts sexual exploits that the servant not only witnessed but in which he was also forced to participate. As an occasional confidant of his master, Doami also had learned from Musashi himself the history of his sexual appetites. Throughout the novel these two sources are referred to, quoted, and compared with other (genuine) historical accounts.

In the three chapters of book 2, the origin of Musashi’s sexual perversion is explained. The scene is the castle on Mount Ojika, where Musashi—referred to as Hoshimaru during this stage of his life—is kept hostage by Lord Tsukuma Ikkansai, who has won power over Hoshimaru’s father and apparently retains Hoshimaru as surety against rebellion from the father’s clan. The castle on Mount Ojika is being besieged by the forces of a war-lord named Yakushiji Danjo Masataka. The year is 1549, and Hoshimaru is twelve years old. Restless and disappointed at not being able either to fight in the battle or to observe it, Hoshimaru listens to women of the castle who describe the action and is finally invited to observe the women at their nightly task of cleaning and dressing the decapitated heads of defeated warriors. On observing this spectacle, Hoshimaru is entranced, and he becomes especially excited upon seeing a young woman combing and cleaning a “woman-head,” which is a head whose nose has been removed. Hoshimaru learns that warriors, when unable to carry the head of a defeated enemy, will sever its nose in order to return to identify it at the end of the day. The thrill for Hoshimaru is watching the calm, often smiling face of the beautiful girl as she attends almost affectionately to the grotesquely defaced death’s head. The vision of beauty, “spiced with the bitterness of cruelty” brings Hoshimaru to ecstasy, and he even feels jealous of the head. Though surprised at his reaction, like a man who, “believing himself to be in robust health, discovers that he has a malignant disease,” Hoshimaru is nevertheless driven uncontrollably by it, and it is this ecstasy that he attempts to duplicate in his sexual exploits thereafter.

Three of these exploits dominate the remainder of the narrative. In the first, Hoshimaru, desperate to observe again the dressing of one of the rare woman-heads, determines to take the head of Lord Masataka, the chief of the besieging army. Though only twelve, Hoshimaru is almost equal to the task. He manages to sneak into the enemy camp and slay the sleeping lord but cannot sever the head before he is pursued by guards. He does manage to sever the nose, which he takes with him in his escape. The consequences of his daring are great: Faced with possible disgrace, the besieging forces retreat, fabricating a story of their lord’s dying of an illness. Thus the twelve-year-old samurai-to-be brings about the defeat of an army but with the same stroke deprives himself of ever again observing what he most desires to see—the young woman dressing a woman-head.

The second exploit occurs when Hoshimaru—now called Terukatsu, having reached maturity (fifteen years old)—meets Lady Kikyo, daughter to the Masataka that Terukatsu had slain three years earlier, and wife to Tsukuma Oribensho Norishige, son of the Ikkansai who had held Terukatsu hostage for more than ten years of his youth. Tormented with the suspicion that Norishige’s father was responsible for her father’s disgrace, Lady Kikyo has secretly employed men to remove her husband’s nose in revenge. Terukatsu learns of her desire and does the job for her. As a result of previous careless attempts on his nose, Norishige has by now lost an ear and much of his upper lip also. Terukatsu becomes Lady Kikyo’s lover, but his greatest excitement is watching her and her deformed husband together. This nearly surpasses the vision of the young woman dressing the woman-head, for Norishige is more hideously deformed, more grotesque than a woman-head, and lives to receive the continuing affections of his wife.

The third adventure includes the participation of Terukatsu’s servant and jester, Doami, and the lord’s vivacious, innocent, and childlike wife, Lady Oetsu, known as Shosetsuin. For Terukatsu, the high point of his relations with his wife is when he has Doami placed in a hole in a floor so that only his head protrudes and has Shosetsuin attend to it as if it were a decapitated head. Again, Terukatsu can feast on the vision of a young, beautiful girl’s attentions to a death’s head. Testing the loyalty of Doami and the limits of his wife’s cruelty, Terukatsu gets his wife drunk and asks her to sever the nose of Doami. She agrees but cannot perform the act. Instead, Terukatsu has her drill a hole in the servant’s ears. The following day a sober Shosetsuin is horrified by the memory of the evening, and Terukatsu loses interest in her.

The Characters

Miyamoto Musashi is well-known to Japanese readers as the historical samurai whose reputation has grown into legend. Tanizaki’s formal introduction in his preface mirrors as well as mocks the care customarily exercised in handling a folk hero, and the novel itself is a grotesque parody of historical fiction. The story is dominated by its central character; other characters are significant only inasmuch as the protagonist can interact with them. If popular historical fiction lacks depth, however, in its drive to glorify its heroes, this parody provides that depth in its meticulous tracing of the origins of the disgraceful obsession that drives its protagonist.

The complexity of the central character is provided by a fusion of the heroic and the perverse. The young Hoshimaru is physically strong, alert, self-conscious, and impatient with the restrictions of his youth. Throughout the narrative the sense is conveyed of a power held back only by convention. The qualities that can bring success to the samurai warrior, however, can carry an abnormal intensity to everything else, so that it is not surprising that Hoshimaru’s curiosities and desires fix themselves into obsession. Reared in a castle which is intricately structured with layers of internal, middle, and external chambers, Hoshimaru is equally attentive to the refinements and delicate beauty of the aristocratic seclusion at the center, represented by the women with whom he first interacts, as to the gory struggle, waged by sword-brandishing samurai, that daily moves closer to the center from the outer and middle layers. Hoshimaru’s sexuality expresses this tension as he seeks to reexperience, repeatedly, the delicate woman loving a gruesome, de-faced man.

Kikyo and Shosetsuin serve in similar ways the protagonist’s sadism. Each provides the ideal contrast—as did his first love, the dresser of woman-heads—to the deformed males. Where Kikyo is the type of aloof, regal beauty delicate in her refined life as lady to a feudal lord, Shosetsuin is the type of youthful innocence, virginal, childlike, and delicate in her own unfamiliarity with her husband’s world.

Norishige and Doami are a similar pair, as ideal victims of the protagonist’s sadism. Doami is ideal for his skill at mimicking the decapitated head and for his slavish obedience. Norishige is, however, the superior victim for the contrast he represents as an exalted figure brought low by violence and hideous deformity.

Critical Context

Though not translated into English until 1982, The Secret History of the Lord of Musashi was originally published serially in 1931-1932 and in book form in 1935, placing it at the beginning of the second period of Tanizaki’s literary career. His first period had just ended with the publication of his collected works in twelve volumes. Where his first period of fiction consisted of traditional storytelling, in which Tanizaki wove his plots with a conventional mix of dialogue and objective narrative, the second period introduced experimentation in combining fiction with nonfiction and employing less orthodox storytelling. The Secret History of the Lord of Musashi is an excellent ex-ample of both these areas of innovation. The narrator begins by announcing his intention to record the undisclosed truth about the legendary samurai, and he liberally speculates during the narrative on the motives of its characters. By fabricating events in the story of his real-life protagonist, and fabricating as well some of his very sources, Tanizaki creates a parody rich in ironic humor. The humorous pretense running through the work is that the author is coolly objective and appropriately distanced from his historical material.

Interest in Japanese tradition and history, while not new in Tanizaki’s writing, is another characteristic that dominates in this second period. Yoshino Kuzu (1931; Arrowroot, 1982), appearing only months before the serialization of The Secret History of the Lord of Musashi, depicts a writer who is investigating a fifteenth century imperial court outside Kyoto. Two other historical fictions of this period are “Ashikari” (1932; English translation, 1936) and “Shunkin sho” (1933; “A Portrait of Shunkin,” 1936).

Sadomasochism and obsession with unobtainable beauty are elements so common in Tanizaki’s work that they are regarded as two of its unifying characteristics. In The Secret History of the Lord of Musashi, however, these elements are brought together with Tanizaki’s humor. The story’s exaggerated perversity, with the protagonist’s fantastically bizarre desire, creates a parody of Tanizaki’s own fiction and presents the author as he comments humorously on his work.

Bibliography

Howard, Richard. “Japanese Master,” in The Nation. CCXXXV (September 4, 1982), pp. 183-184.

Keene, Donald. “Tanizaki Jun’ichirō,” in Dawn to the West: Japanese Literature of the Modern Era, 1984.

O’Brien, Geoffrey. “The Secret History of the Lord of Musashi,” in The Village Voice. XXVII (April 27, 1982), p. 47.

White, Edmund. “Shadows and Obsessions,” in The New York Times Book Review. LXXXVII (July 18, 1982), pp. 8, 22-23.