EN COTIZACIÓN

¿Existe el crimen perfecto? ¿Es posible cometer un asesinato y quedar impune? ¿Puede la mente humana permanecer ajena al arrepentimiento? Mizuno, un escritor arrogante, mujeriego e indolente, cree que sí, y lo ha plasmado en su última novela, salvo por un pequeño detalle: ha cometido un error al escribir el nombre de la víctima. Esta errata sin importancia se convertirá en obsesión cuando los hechos narrados en la obra comiencen materializarse en la vida real. ¿Alguien le está tendiendo una trampa? Consciente de que las sospechas de un asesinato podrían apuntar hacia él, Mizuno se embarca la búsqueda desesperada de una coartada sólida con la que probar su inocencia.

Tanizaki vuelve a demostrar su talento narrativo en esta obra sorprendente en la que juega de manera magistral con los límites entre la realidad y la literatura para ofrecer una reflexión irónica y sagaz acerca del oficio de escritor.

* I would like to thank NetGalley and the publisher for the opportunity to read and review this book. *

Tanizaki's In Black and White has an Escher-like nature to its plot. Tanizaki is writing about a writer who is writing about a writer who wants to commit the perfect murder by killing a writer.

Mizuno is a feckless writer of "diabolism" who, in a last-minute rush, sends a murder story to a major magazine without proper proof-reading. He soon realises that he has mistakenly used the real name of the person that he modelled his victim, Cojima. He tries to get that fixed, but can't.

Mizuno soon envisages a situation where he is vulnerable; some third party could murder Cojima and the blame could fall upon him, as people could interpret his story as an account of his own intent. He panics and goes to great lengths to try and negate this possibility. This includes writing a second part of the story that describes this new scenario, shifting suspicion to a "shadow man". This is not easy though, as Mizuno is a slow and lazy writer and time is of the essence. A further distraction arises when he meets a gorgeous woman in the Ginza, and commences a professional relationship with her, which soaks up all of his money and time.

Tanizaki spins this complex plot effortlessly, and keeps the reader guessing all the way to the end. I found the "apology" after the ending very apt, but I suspect it might puzzle some readers. I think it is essential to read the translator's afterword, as this gives very significant background to the story (which was written in 1923) and helps explain a lot of what is going on in this baffling piece. ( )

In Black and White is one of Tanizaki's lesser known works, apparently so obscure that most Japanese and English scholars of Japanese literature are not aware of this work's existence. So, we English readers are lucky to be ahead for the first time...👏🏻

Adding to its mysterious allure, this book is about a writer, Mizuno, who lives a hedonistic life (cough, that cliché of the artist, cough) and is constantly broke. One day, he sends in his latest work, a murder mystery, and accidently writes in the name of an acquaintance into the manuscript, which is very similar to the fictitious name. Suddenly seized by fear that a murder will actually occur, he rushes to stop the printing press, but finds out that he's too late. What happens next is a series of fateful events that pulls him into a self-perpetuating web of paranoia and confusion, with reality soon echoing the fiction of his work.

The murder mystery soon flourishes into a familiar theme familiar to all writers and artists, especially those who look to their own lives for inspiration: is the art fully representative of the person who created it, and if it is, where is the distinction between art and real life?

This was a highly enjoyable read as Tanizaki's depiction of debilitating anxiety is VERY realistic, and you find yourself unknowingly infected with it. ( )

In black and white, written in 1928, ran as a successful serial a few months before Some prefer nettles and Quicksand, but for some reason was never re-issued in book form until it appeared in Tanizaki's collected works. It seems to have been largely overlooked until the recent appearance of Phyllis Lyons's English translation.

Mizuno is a struggling young writer living in a Tokyo boarding house and in debt with every bar, whore-house and pawnbroker in the area. He's already sabotaged his marriage by writing a string of wife-murder stories, and now another story, just sent off to the magazine at the last possible moment, looks likely to get him into worse trouble.

His first-person narrator in the story describes getting away with the perfect crime, the motiveless murder of Codama, a man whose link to the narrator is so distant that no-one would suspect his involvement. Unfortunately, in his haste Mizuno has written "Cojima" in several places where he meant "Codama", and he realises that Cojima is in fact a slight acquaintance he must have had in mind whilst he was describing Codama. This mistake will obviously cause embarrassment to him and the magazine if the story is read by anyone who knows Cojima, but Mizuno is worried about something else - what if there's a "Shadow Man" out there somewhere who is out to get him? If Cojima is now murdered, suspicion will automatically fall on Mizuno.

To forestall this, Mizuno works out when the murder would have to take place, and puts in place a comically complex plan to ensure that he is not left without a convincing alibi. Needless to say, it all goes horribly wrong...

Apparently Tanizaki wrote this story in part as a follow-up to a high-profile debate he had had in 1927 with the writer Ryūnosuke Akutagawa about the relative merits of modernist stream-of-consciousness "I-novels" and tightly-structured plots - it's a kind of literary pastiche in which Mizuno's position as a stream-of-consciousness antihero forces him to craft the literary tools for his own destruction. But it also works well as a crime thriller in its own right, albeit with a rather black kind of humour. ( )