Junichiro Tanizaki · Kanto, Tokyo, Kanagawa

Retracing Junichiro Tanizaki's Naomi to Yokohama's Foreign Quarter: A Literary Travel Guide

Follow the real 1920s Tokyo-to-Yokohama world behind Tanizaki's Naomi (Chijin no Ai) — including the Yamate hillside where the author himself lived out the novel's Westernizing obsessions.

Naomi

Junichiro Tanizaki

A hilarious story of one man’s obsession and a brilliant reckoning of a nation’s cultural confusion—from a master Japanese novelist. When twenty-eight-year-old Joji first lays eyes upon the teenage waitress Naomi, he is instantly smitten by her exotic, almost Western appearance. Determined to transform her into the perfect wife and to whisk her away from the seamy underbelly of post-World War I Tokyo, Joji adopts and ultimately marries Naomi, paying for English and music lessons that promise to mold her into his ideal companion. But as she grows older, Joji discovers that Naomi is far from the naïve girl of his fantasies. And, in Tanizaki’s masterpiece of lurid obsession, passion quickly descends into comically helpless masochism.

Naomi (痴人の愛, Chijin no Ai, literally "A Fool's Love") is Junichiro Tanizaki's 1924–25 novel about Jōji, an engineer who takes in a 15-year-old café waitress named Naomi, grooms her into his ideal of a Westernized "modern" woman, and is gradually consumed and dominated by his own creation. It's a comedy of obsession as much as a tragedy, and it's soaked in a very specific time and place: Tokyo and Yokohama in the years just after World War I, when jazz, ballroom dancing, and Western fashion were reshaping Japanese urban life. The novel gave Japanese a new word — Naomizumu ("Naomi-ism") — for the modern-girl aesthetic it both mocked and helped popularize.

A novel drawn from its author's own life

Tanizaki didn't invent this world; he was living in it. In 1921 he was renting a house next to a Western-style bar in Honmoku, on Yokohama's waterfront, and in 1922 he moved further up the hill to Yamate, the city's old foreign settlement. By his own account he took up ballroom dancing and Westernized his furniture and dress during this period — precisely the transformation Jōji pushes onto Naomi in the novel. Tanizaki's wife's younger sister, Seiko Kobayashi, is widely cited as the real-life model for Naomi. The Great Kanto Earthquake of September 1923 ended this chapter of his life abruptly, forcing him to relocate to the Kansai region, and it was from there, the following year, that he wrote the novel looking back on it.

In the story itself, Jōji and Naomi's world moves outward from central Tokyo — the cafés and "opera" theaters of Asakusa, where Naomi first works as a waitress; the dance hall culture around a (fictional) Ginza café called Eldorado, where Naomi's transformation is most on display; a small Western-style house in the suburbs at Omori, their first home together — before the story's final chapters relocate to a much larger Western house in Yokohama's old foreign settlement. None of Asakusa's 1920s cafés or Ginza's dance halls survive as identifiable sites today, but the Yokohama end of the story does.

Stop 1: Yamate, Yokohama — the hillside where Tanizaki lived this story

Yamate (山手) was Yokohama's designated foreign residential district from the 1860s on, and it's still full of preserved Western-style houses from exactly the period the novel is set in and Tanizaki lived through. A cluster of these houses, known collectively as the Yamate Western-style Residences (山手西洋館), are open to the public for free.

The centerpiece is the Ehrismann Residence (エリスマン邸), built in 1925–26 for Swiss silk trader Fritz Ehrismann and designed by Antonin Raymond, the Czech-American architect often called the father of Japanese modernism. It has a fireplace parlor, a combined living/dining room, and a sunroom overlooking the garden, plus a small café.

• Getting there: Motomachi-Chukagai Station (Minatomirai Line), Exit 6, about 8 minutes on foot; or JR Ishikawacho Station, south exit, about 13 minutes.
• Good to know: Free admission, 9:30–17:00, closed the second Wednesday of the month. Two other preserved houses nearby, Yamate 111-bankan and the Diplomat's House, each have their own small cafés, so it's easy to turn this into a slow afternoon. The Motomachi shopping street below the hill — which Tanizaki himself wrote about walking excitedly as a self-declared "haikara" (fashionably Westernized) enthusiast — is worth the walk down.
• Nearby: The Yokohama Foreign General Cemetery and Minato no Mieru Oka Park (Harbor View Park) are a short walk further along the bluff, if you want to extend the visit.

Practical travel notes

• Best time to visit: Yamate's gardens are especially pleasant in spring; the houses themselves are indoor visits year-round.
• Base yourself in: central Tokyo or Yokohama itself both work — Yamate is about 30 minutes from central Tokyo by train.
• Language: well signed in English; this is one of Yokohama's standard tourist routes.
• The book itself: the standard English translation, titled Naomi, is by Anthony H. Chambers.