秘密Himitsu — A Taste for Secrets

Contents

1. In Search of a Hidden CornerOn a whim, the narrator withdraws from his busy social life and rents a room in a Shingon temple hidden in a tangled slum quarter of Asakusa. He reflects that even in his native Tōkyō there must be countless streets he has never walked. He recalls a childhood visit to the Hachiman Shrine in Fukagawa, where the unexpected river and ferry behind the shrine seemed like a dream world far from the city he knew.
2. A Hidden Lodging in Forgotten StreetsExploring Tōkyō for a place to hide, the narrator finds many districts he has never set foot in, and he settles on a lonely, run-down neighbourhood around a temple in Matsubachō. His senses have grown so dulled that ordinary city pleasures no longer move him, and he longs for a strange, artificial, secret way of life like the hide-and-seek games of his childhood. The temple is of the esoteric Shingon sect, which feeds his fantasies, and his room there is warm and full of autumn light.
3. A Room of Incense and Strange BooksThe narrator packs away his serious books and fills his temple room with books on magic, crime and anatomy, old Buddhist paintings and burning incense, and spends his days lost in fantasies. At night he drinks whisky, slips out over the graveyard hedge and wanders Asakusa in a different disguise each time. One evening he sees a woman's crêpe kimono in an old-clothes shop, and his love of fine silk drives him to buy it so that he can walk the streets dressed as a woman.
4. A Night Walk in Women's ClothesLate at night in the empty temple, the narrator makes himself up and dresses fully as a woman, discovering a sensual pleasure in cosmetics and in the feel of the silks. He walks out into the dim streets of Asakusa, where no one notices anything, and he imagines himself a criminal in disguise. In the bright lights of the park's Sixth District, he sees his reflection in a large mirror and finds that other women accept him as one of themselves, and some even envy him.
5. Nightly Masquerades in AsakusaDisguised as a woman, the narrator finds that the familiar night life of Asakusa Park looks new and dreamlike. He goes out in costume every night, sometimes carrying a dagger or a narcotic so that he can feel the romance of crime without committing one. About a week later, sitting drunk in the special guests' seats upstairs at a cinema, he notices that a beautiful, striking woman and her gentleman companion have sat down beside him.
6. A Former Lover in the Darkened TheatreThe woman beside the narrator reads out a film caption, and by her husky voice he recognises T, a woman he had an affair with on a voyage to Shanghai and then deserted. She is now even more beautiful and commanding, and she draws every eye in the cinema away from his own female disguise. He feels jealous and humiliated, and wonders whether she knows him and is taking an ironic revenge.
7. A Note Slipped Into a SleeveEnvy of the woman's beauty turns into desire, and the disguised narrator slips her a note in archaic style asking her to meet him again. As the crowd leaves she whispers that he is 'arrested at last'. At the temple he finds her reply hidden in his hood: she recognised him from the start and agrees to meet, but only if a rickshaw man takes him, blindfolded, to her house.
8. Blindfolded Ride Through the RainOn a night of torrential rain the narrator goes to the Kaminarimon. A rickshaw appears, and the driver blindfolds him and seats him beside a silent woman, almost certainly T. After a long, deliberately winding ride he is led into a house, and the woman comes to him and unties the blindfold.
9. Nightly Visits to a Hidden HouseInside the mysterious house the narrator finds the woman transformed: no longer bold and showy but quiet, plainly dressed and melancholy, begging him never to abandon her and to think of her as a woman from a dream. For a month or two he visits her almost every night, always blindfolded on the rickshaw, but his curiosity about where the house lies grows. When he finally begs her to remove the blindfold, she refuses: if he learned her secret, she says, she would no longer be the dream-woman he loves.
10. The Street with the Seal-Maker's SignThe narrator insists, and the woman reluctantly removes the cloth covering his eyes. He glimpses a lively, unfamiliar street with a seal-maker's signboard before she covers his eyes again and tearfully begs him to think of her only as a woman in a dream. Later he retraces the rickshaw's route on foot by daylight and finds the alley, but in the dry autumn sun it is a shabby, ordinary street near places he already knows, and his excitement fades.
11. The Hidden House Opposite the ShrineDriven by curiosity, the narrator retraces the woman's deliberately roundabout route as best he can, loses it near Kakihamabashi, and after an hour of searching finds her house in a hidden alley opposite the Dōryō Gongen shrine. She gazes down at him from an upper window, pale as a corpse, then withdraws, her secret exposed. She turns out to be Yoshino, a wealthy widow; he abandons her, moves to Tabata, and craves pleasures stronger and bloodier than mere secrecy.

Before you read

• Learn the common place-name suffixes before you start: 町 (ちょう/まち, neighbourhood), 橋 (はし/ばし, bridge), 堀 (ほり/ぼり, canal), 座 (ざ, theatre) and 区 (く, ward). Parts 8 and 11 trace the rickshaw route as long chains of street and bridge names. You do not need to memorise them; just recognise each one as a place and follow the direction of travel.
• The narration relies on literary grammar that recurs throughout: 〜の如く/〜如く ('like, as if'), 〜つつ ('while'), 〜に違いない ('must surely be'), 〜なければなるまい ('will have to'), 〜に随い ('as … , in accordance with'), 〜た揚句 ('after all that, in the end') and 〜ば〜ほど ('the more … the more'). Watch for 〜ながら used concessively ('although') as well as in its everyday sense.
• The notes exchanged in Part 7 are written in an archaic epistolary style, and T's reply is in sōrōbun, the classical letter style marked by 候 (そうろう). Read these passages for the gist: who wants to meet whom, and on what condition. Do not try to parse every form.
• Notice how speech marks character. T speaks polite feminine Tōkyō speech, while the rickshaw man in Part 8 uses brusque shitamachi speech. The narrator's own voice is formal plain style (〜である). Comparing these registers helps you track who is speaking.
• Expect lists built with 〜だの〜だの. In Part 3, for example, this pattern catalogues the narrator's books, paintings and objects. The text also includes katakana loanwords and English phrases kept as they are, so read the English directly and treat the katakana as ordinary vocabulary.

Words to know

The most useful words from the notes across the story.

Plot summary

About the author

Tanizaki Jun'ichirō was born in Nihonbashi, Tōkyō, and became one of the major novelists of modern Japanese literature. His early stories, such as 刺青 (The Tattooer), are known for their aestheticism and their fascination with beauty, obsession and transgression, qualities that are also on display in 秘密. After the Great Kantō Earthquake he moved to the Kansai region, and his later writing turned increasingly toward traditional Japanese culture. His best-known works include 痴人の愛 (Naomi), 蓼喰ふ蟲 (Some Prefer Nettles), 細雪 (The Makioka Sisters) and the essay 陰翳礼讃 (In Praise of Shadows). He also produced modern Japanese translations of The Tale of Genji.

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