Stills from the film Chunqin (1976 edition).
1
A female violinist named Chunqin became blind due to an eye disease at the age of nine. Sasuke is her servant, and he admires Haruka, and in order to be able to spend more time with her, he asks to worship Haruka as her teacher. Haruka's teaching was extremely strict and almost harsh, and their teaching and learning were almost entirely between Haruka's abuse and Sasuke's crying. However, instead of leaving Haruka, Sasuke loves her even more, and they have an illegitimate child. Later, Chunqin was framed and disfigured, and she did not let Sasuke look at her ugly face, and Sasuke blinded his eyes, leaving Chunqin forever beautiful in his mind. This is the story in Junichiro Tanizaki's "Harukami".
For Sasuke, Haruka's suffering is the source of his happiness. He gave up his ego and blindly obeyed Chunqin until he finally blinded Chunqin. Taking pleasure in being abused and pleasure in suffering reminds us of an Austrian novel, Venus in a Fur Coat, in which the author Mosock writes the story of a man, Saunin, who aspires to become a slave to the woman Wanda. Saunin was willing to be driven by Wanda, punished by her, and gave her the power of life and death. He made a slave agreement for her: "Mr. Saunin van Kushmsky ended today the life of Madame Wanda van Duraya's fiancé and renounced her right to be her lover. Swearing by the honor of a man and a nobleman, he voluntarily became a slave of Madame Van Dulaye from then on until she regained his freedom. ”
"Shunkinsho", Sogensha First Edition
"Chunqin Copy" and "Venus in a Fur Coat" are strikingly similar, both of which tell stories of abuse. Surprisingly, the abusers were all voluntary, Sasuke volunteered to become Haruka's student, and Saunin volunteered to ask Wanda to be his abusive master. This kind of cruel abuse and oppression arouses not pain and fear, but attachment and pleasure, and they invariably tame themselves to the abuser, abandon themselves, give up their subjective status, and become slaves to their masters with a dead heart, thus achieving spiritual sublimation.
In Venus in fur coats, Saunin asks Wanda, "Please whip me so that I may be happy." ”
In haruka, Sasuke puts it this way:
"Probably anyone thinks it's unfortunate to be blind. But since I became blind, I had never tasted such feelings, but on the contrary, I felt in my heart that the world had become a pure land of bliss, as if only me and Master Chunqin were alive and living on the lotus platform. This is because after I was blind, I could see everything I couldn't see before... In particular, the beautiful sound of the master playing the three strings was also tasted after I lost my sight. Usually, I always say only verbally: 'The master is a genius in this line.' But now I finally understand the true value of the master's piano skills, which is a world of difference compared to my immature skills. I was surprised by that. What a sin I had not realized this before! Looking back, how stupid I was! So even if God says to let me see the light again, I will refuse. Master and I, only because we are blind in both eyes, can enjoy the happiness that the blind people cannot enjoy. ”
This is the typical sadomasochistic mentality. Sadomasochism, sadomasochism in English, abbreviated as SM. Sociologist Mr. Pan Guangdan translates it as "sadomasochism". Li Yinhe gave a concise definition of "sadomasochism": "It is a sexual activity that associates pleasure and pain, or a sexual activity that obtains pleasure through pain." ...... If inflicting suffering on others can lead to one's own sexual arousal, it belongs to the category of sadistic tendencies; if receiving suffering can lead to one's own sexual arousal, it belongs to the category of masochistic tendencies. The main content of sadomasochistic relationships is domination and subordination and behaviors that cause psychological and physical suffering. ”
It is generally believed that people pursue happiness, but people with sadomasochistic tendencies pursue pain and get happiness through pain. Modern physiology has also found that pain and pleasure are closely related, not that pain is just pain, but pain is also pleasure. Many 19th-century physicians have been documented to use flogging to stimulate male sexual pleasure. Of course, there are factors that transform from pain to pleasure, such as the desire for love, and we can see from Rousseau's memoirs that Rousseau in his childhood deliberately provoked her to beat her in order to get the love of Miss Lambercier. Freud said, "In the male fantasy, to be whipped is to be loved." ”
Most of the sadomasochistic parties are combined in interdependent emotions and joys, and love occupies an extremely important position in sadomasochistic relationships. Of course, sometimes it's also a strategy to counteract the pain. Li Yinhe said: "Masochistic tendencies come from a deep fear of the feeling of weakness and lack of importance, which leads to a strong need for feelings and a strong fear of not appreciating yourself to others. It's a sense of vulnerability, hurt with narcissistic tendencies. Unable to control this feeling, masochistic people shift from passive to active, immersing themselves in 'a feast of tormented revelry', seeking painful ecstatic experiences. Suffering is painful, but immersing yourself in extreme torture can dilute the pain. ”
In the West, sadomasochism is a topic of great concern. Foucault had a high opinion of sadomasochism, arguing that it was a widespread cultural phenomenon that caused one of the greatest shifts in the Western imagination: an irrational shift to a delirium state of the mind.
In Western literature, sadomasochism literature has a special place, represented by writers such as Sade, Masok, and Pauline Rij. Not only that, some writers who do not take sadomasochism as the main theme also often have sadomasochistic factors, such as Hugo's "Notre Dame de Paris", Kafka's "Judgment" and so on.
Junichiro Tanizaki has been exposed to classical Japanese literature since childhood, and has been fascinated by the "Tale of the Rain Moon" and the westbound waka collection "Yamagaji", and loves the works of The Samurai and Akinari Ueda, and learns Chinese poetry to cultivate sinology literacy. He originally had little interest in the West, and even when the Japanese literary and art circles were already enthusiastic about the nude female portraits of the French painter Gauguin and the pursuit of Western cultural interests, he also took a cold attitude towards Western literary and artistic ideas, and turned his attention to China and India in the East. But at a time when western nihilism was overflowing, he was unable to satisfy his desire for a woman's flesh and the desire for sensual pleasure, and his thoughts took a 180-degree shift, believing that the beauty he envisioned could no longer be found in his own land, and that great art could only be found in the distant West.
In his essay "Tokumi", Tanizaki Junichiro counts the "straightforward and magnificent singing of the sorrow and joy of life" of Western literature and art, saying that he was "suddenly attacked by a strong cult of the West, and felt a trembling excitement" in it. So he argued that "one must come into contact with the West or to develop one's own art by assimilation", and even goes so far as to say: "In order to satisfy my desires, I will go to the West if possible—no, instead of going to the West, it is better to become completely a man of their land, with the consciousness of the determination to bury his bones in their land, to move there, and this is the only best way." It was only because his family was poor that he did not have the opportunity to go to the West, so in 1921, he moved to the Honmaki foreigner settlement in Yokohama, indirectly experiencing pure Western life. He once spoke specifically about the influence of the West on him in Love and Pornography: "The influence of the West on us is undoubtedly multifaceted, but one of the biggest influences is actually the 'liberation of love'. Further, it is the 'liberation of sexual desire'. Imagine that the West used to have the greek nude beauty of the civilization, and today many streets in European cities still stand mythical statues of goddesses. The women who grew up in such a country and in the city streets certainly maintained a well-proportioned and healthy flesh. And our goddesses really have to keep their same beauty, we must also have their myths, and worship their goddesses as our goddesses; we must transplant the fine arts that go back thousands of years to our country. ”
In fact, Tanizaki Junichiro's so-called "West" is mainly "sex", and the so-called "beauty of the West" is "the beauty of sex". On this basis, he fell in love with Wilde's "aestheticism", denied religion, opposed secular morality and habits, advocated the artistic spirit of pursuing beauty and sexual pleasure in a demonic and wrong world, and used this artistic spirit as the pillar of his "demonic" concept, in an attempt to discover the "beauty" he sought from the power of "evil".
Tanizaki Junichiro wrote in "Tattoo" that a tattooist poured his life into the spider pattern on the back muscles of a young beauty, and the next morning the beautiful woman went into the bath, the pain was unbearable, but the tattoo artist found that in the light of the morning light, her back muscles showed a kind of feminine beauty, and he was overwhelmed by the gorgeous beauty he had created. This beautiful woman is a "Salle-American" character, and in this novel, the author vividly expresses his ideological tendency to take pleasure in evil and masochism.
Subsequently, Junichiro Tanizaki wrote a number of works with sadomasochistic tendencies. His novel "Rao Taro" is written by the protagonist's torture of the woman showing a perverted fascination, the more the woman loves him, the more he desires the woman to cruelly torture him, so that he reaches a state of hyperactive trance.