4.25.2017. New York: New Directions. 96 pages. Translated by J. Keith Vincent.

Devils in Daylight is an early work (c. 1918) by an author very famous in his homeland, but (as is the case more often than not) not so well known here, though certainly better known by some English-speaking readers than myself (several other works by the same author having already been translated); so I read Tanizaki’s novella knowing next to nothing about Tanizaki and have little more guide for my reading than what was between the one-eye-and-human-skin-decorated covers. (Okay, you inveterate preambler, what did you find?)

To some degree, this pretzeling is very much the point. The relatively sane Takahashi is a writer who just wants to go to sleep after an all-nighter working on a past-due piece for his editor. But he is forced to play Watson to Sonomura’s maniacal Sherlock, who is more interested in unraveling an endless parade of developments and complications, which he continues to do right up until the very end of Devils in Daylight. In this way Takahashi and Sonomura represent two different sides of the writer’s task: to open the tags of his story (to use a web development metaphor), create some arcane set of plot functions, and then cleanly close all those tags once he’s opened them. This Tanizaki manages to do; this is not so much a Kafka-like fragment but rather a Borgesian-metafiction, a trickster text (and from a writer contemporary with the first and preceding the second.) The story does include a lurid murder, breathless letters, and a beautiful, deadly woman (so as to allow book reviewers to use words like “erotic” and “sensual”–because the inclusion of the barest hint of sex, the very slightest gesture, however not-really-about-sex it is, makes a book seem more profound . . . or something.)

The translator, J. Keith Vincent, points out the story’s direct inspiration in Edgar Allen Poe’s “The Gold-bug,”–right down to the framing device in the first paragraph of having “contracted a friendship” with a possible lunatic. For my part, I was reminded of Bolaño, another writer known for grafting meta fiction onto mystery, and I think in either case there are distinct mystery “beats” here that fans of that genre will easily enjoy. I admit that I am not the biggest fan of this over-caffeinated, overly expository writing mode: mystery, it seems to me, relies in high degree on the element of surprise, and on introducing extraordinary elements (like murders, serial killings, suicides, and the like) into every day life, whereas my bias has always been in favor of books that treat everyday life as innately surprising. (I prefer plots to unfurl like a flag rather than twist like a road. Instead of writing a book debating the fact of Sonomura’s nut-casery, I would’ve written a book exploring its causes–and, say mystery fans, it would have been a boring one.)

In any case, Devils in Daylight never allows the reader a moment’s boredom, preferring to unravel on Sonomura’s terms rather than that of the more cautious Takahashi. It is a concise one-sitting read, and yet multi-faceted in spite of its brevity–a suitable appetizer to make me want to read more of this author.