Jôji frames his tale of his strange relationship with Naomi by commenting on the age in which he lives:

     "As Japan grows increasingly cosmopolitan, Japanese and foreigners are mingling with one another; all sorts of new doctrines and philosophies are being introduced; and both men and women are adopting up-to-date Western fashions.  No doubt,the times being what they are,the sort of marital relationship that we've had, unheard of until now,will begin to turn up on all sides (p. 1)"

  2. Why is Jôji attracted to Naomi?

Jôji, by his own description, is a frugal, hardworking man with a rural,Confucian-style upbringing.  He now works as an engineer in Tokyo.  Given that electricity was a booming business in this day, Jôji works in a glamourous field, promoting and profiting from modern technology. He is expected to marry a middle-class woman, yet he finds himself obsessed with a young bar girl.  How does he explain this attraction?  How does their relationship unfold?
 

3. How do we read Jôji's fascination with whiteness? 
 
Consider this quote by Tanizaki scholar Ken K. Ito:

    "The sexual and racial values behind Jôji's aspirations for Naomi are
    are nowhere more clearly delineated that in their first ball-room
    dancing lesson.  The dance class gives Jôji the opportunity to touch,
    in the person of his instructress Madama Shlemskaya, that ultimate
    object of his fantasies, the white woman....Madame Shlemskaya fulfills
    all of Jôji's fantasies about the beauty, sexuality, power, and size
    of the white race.  When she calls out the beat of the dance music with
    a little whip in her hand, it is difficult not to see in her a personification of the West
    as a stern and demanding mentor (p. 87)."

    Ken Ito. Visions of Desire: Tanizaki's Fictional Worlds.Stanford University
     Press, 1991.

4. What attracts Naomi to Jôji and keeps her coming back to him? 
 

5. Jôji often associates Naomi with food.  How do descriptions
   of Naomi's hunger and consumption feed the reader ideas about her
   character?
 

6. What kinds of power do Naomi and Jôji exert in this relationship?
 

7. How are distinctions of East and West drawn in this novel?
  Consider this quote from Ken K. Ito:

    "As much as Naomi is the fable of a Japanese dominated by his  obsession with the West,
     it is also the story of a "West" that can be manipulated, objectified, and even consumed
     (p. 100, Visions of Desire).
 

8. How is the idea of the modern created here?

Consider this quote Donald Keene:

    "It is a summing up of the craving for modernity, free love and
    liberation from cramping old traditions that marked [Tanizaki's]
    earlier works, but implicitly condemns the hero, Jôji, for his
    adultation of a waitress whose coarse appeal destroys a decent,
    sensitive man.  However, the book did not seem a condemnation to 
    its first readers.  Young people were attracted by the portrayal 
    of the môdan gaaru...who vilated all the old rules, and the term
    'Naomi-ism' was invented to describe her appeal (p. 735, Dawn to 
    West: Japanese Literature of the Modern Era. NY: Holt, Rinehart,
    and Winston, 1984).

    Then there was the Great Kantô Earthquake of 1923: