A Portrait of Shunkin · Biography
The Life of Mozuya Shunkin
Compiled at Sasuke's behest; Sasuke the real author
A sixty-page life of a blind shamisen master, printed on handmade paper for a memorial, written in the old literary style, in which the devoted pupil who supplied every fact appears only in the third person.
Cide Hamete is the Arab historian Cervantes needs in order not to have written the Quixote. Sasuke is the pupil Tanizaki needs in order not to have invented Shunkin.
The Life is sixty pages, large type, handmade paper, old literary style, third person. The narrator tells us at once that Sasuke supplied the material and may be regarded as the real author, which is the only warning we get before the worship begins. Shunkin is gifted, beautiful, severe. Sasuke is lucky to carry her shamisen. When the two accounts of his blindness disagree, the booklet has the cataracts and the man has the needle. Tanizaki does not choose. He lets the scholarly frame do what scholarly frames do: make a cruelty look like a source.
This library is full of found manuscripts. Most of them are adventures. This one is a love that has already written the beloved and called the result a document. The photograph is faded. The servant who tends the graves was a child in the house. Every witness is inside the devotion. Shunkin remains a voice in a dark room, which is what Sasuke wanted, and what Tanizaki, who was thinking about shadows that year, knew how to arrange.
On the readability rating. Tanizaki quotes the Life at length, then talks over it. There is no sixty-page memorial booklet to hold. The story you can buy is the commentary.
In-world history
Mozuya Shunkin, daughter of an Osaka druggist, blind from girlhood, becomes a teacher of shamisen and koto. Nukui Sasuke, apprentice in the shop, is assigned to lead her, then to learn from her, then to live as her shadow. When her face is ruined by scalding water, he blinds himself so that the face he remembers will be the last. After her death in 1886 he has a Life compiled for private distribution. Tanizaki's narrator, a modern antiquarian, acquires the booklet, visits the graves in Shitadera, and tries to adjudicate between the Life, which says Sasuke went blind by cataract, and the later story of the needle. Shunkin never existed. The documentary tone was good enough that some first readers were not sure.
Why it matters
Tanizaki's joke is scholarly and cruel: the authentic record is the one the servant paid for, and so the woman it praises cannot be checked against anything but his worship.
Appearances
- A Portrait of Shunkin (1933) — Jun'ichirō Tanizaki Shunkinshō; the narrator works from a slim private biography, a faded photograph, and an old servant's talk
Connected volumes
- Related to The History of Don Quixote de la Mancha · Don Quixote
- Related to The Navidson Record · House of Leaves
- Related to The Book · The Fictions of Bruno Schulz
Catalogue record
- Category
- Biography
- World
- A Portrait of Shunkin
- Imagined by
- Jun'ichirō Tanizaki
- Language
- Japanese
- First appearance
- Shunkinshō, 1933; English as A Portrait of Shunkin / The Story of Shunkin
- Readability
- Extensive excerpts
Sources
- Jun'ichirō Tanizaki, Shunkinshō (1933). English translation by Howard Hibbett, "A Portrait of Shunkin", in Seven Japanese Tales (Knopf, 1963).
Added by house · last checked 2026-09-09