The Tattooer
In an Edo when men still made a profession of being beautiful, the tattooer Seikichi takes a private pleasure in the groans of the clients pinned under his needles, and has spent years hunting the one skin worth his best work. Catching sight of a bare white foot stepping down from a palanquin, he searches the pleasure quarter until he finds its owner, then shows her two scroll paintings - a Chinese princess studying a prisoner led to execution, a young woman standing among the bodies of men - before he drugs her and works a great spider across her back. Tanizaki's debut at twenty-four, praised into print by Nagai Kafū, and the first statement of the subject he never abandoned: the man who arranges his own ruin at the hands of a beautiful woman.
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Lineage
- influenced by ↑ The Picture of Dorian Gray
Attributes
Closest analogues
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- 51% · 9 shared