traditional ideals of Japanese women and is seemingly the antithesis of Tanizaki’s Naomi. She is attired in clothing similar to that worn by the puppets of the traditional theatre,
‘It suited the old man’s tastes to search the old-clothes shops…for materials no longer in style, for crepes and brocades tightly woven in small, subdued patterns, heavy and stiff as strands of chain. O-hisa was forced into them, protesting helplessly at the ‘musty old tatters’.’
However, Kaname’s belief that O-hisa is a puppet-like artefact of the past (‘O-hisa was a shade left behind by another age’) and his subsequent identification with this, is problematic when viewed in light of the ambiguousness of her true character. Throughout the text, O-hisa is seen from the perspective of Kaname, whose growing desire for an identity informed by the Japan located in the ‘floating world’ (ukiyo) of the Edo period informs his understanding of her aesthetic. Yet through the third-person narrative frame, the reader is soon led to suspect that O-hisa’s affectation of antiquity belies, to some degree, a modern girl. For example, she protests at wearing the traditional kimono and obi, and possesses a compact, for which the Old Man complains:
‘A compact…I do object to the way the women take them out in…show more content… Through O-hisa, Kaname has returned to a home which ‘is never allowed to actually disappear, but is kept hovering, with anxiety and dread, on the edge of absence’. This transformation can also be seen as a demonstration of Tanizaki’s own concerns regarding the undesirability of an identity’s pendulous state, as it balances between progressive modernity and the conservatism of the past, much like the suspension of the basin of water between competing
