Taishō Malaise as Decadence: Self-Reclusion and Creative Labor in Satō Haruo’s A Pastoral Spleen and Tanizaki Jun’ichirō’s A Fool’s Love

Abstract

One of the most significant ideas that the writers of Taishō Decadence drew from fin-de-siècle Decadence was the primacy of artificiality over nature. The European appraisal of artificiality involves an intricate inter-play between nature and human dexterity, drawing it from a dialectic between the mature civilization and the barbaric.¹ The primacy of artificiality is a notable departure from Romanticism wherein Nature is the optimal source of art and human subjectivity. In Decadence, the primacy of subjective worldview subsists, but it goes hand in hand with concrete labor beyond pure imagination and fascination with Nature. A notable case is readily available in Baudelaire’s concept of paradis artificiels (artificial paradise). Through this artistic scheme, the poet crafted an ideal condition of individuality through the use of narcotic substances. For example, the artificial effect of morphine and wine fueled his hallucination and dream, and lead to enhance his faculty of the imagination proper. In comparison with the previous age of Romanticism, as Jean Pierrot states, fin-de-siècle Decadents were keen to incorporate such substances into their aesthetic program in the quest for hitherto unknown sensations and pleasure.² By pushing the human imagination to new limits, the Decadents overtly repudiated the classical notion of art as an imitation of life and stood against Romanticism, too, in presenting an anti-natural view of the universe.³