Earticle

This article looks into Tanikazki Junichiro’s novel “Jinmenso” to explore his aspiration towards the film media. His perception of the film media is displayed in his essay “The Present and Future of Moving Pictures”, published around the time he was conceiving “Jinmenso”. In this essay Tanizaki paid attention to one of the aspects of film - ‘looking and feeling real’. As film makes any fictional world seem true, the audience can experience both reality and fantasy. Tanizaki focused on this borderlessness of cinema and wrote the novel “Jinmenso”. The short novel contains several borderlessness factors. In terms of form, Tanizaki introduced screenplay writing into the novel. Content-wise, as the movie world in the novel influences the novel world, the double structure plot of movie-in-novel becomes ambiguous. The story is told in rumors which also have the effect of breaking the border between truth and lies. The borderlessness shown in “Jinmenso” is actually the borderlessness of the film media. Tanizaki firmly believed that by using this characteristics of film he might navigate the world of the ‘real’ fictional world, which his stories were aimed at.