Postcolonial Studies, Vol. 5, No.

2, pp 147 151, 2002

One thing and another on the privy*

TANIZAKI JUNICHIRO
(translated by Thomas Harper)
My most unforgettable impression of a privy, one that even now I recall from
time to time, struck me when I went to the toilet at a noodle restaurant in the
town of Kamiichi in the Yamato region. Suddenly the urge to defecate came
over me; I asked directions, whereupon I was shown to a toilet at the rear of the
establishment , overlooking the bed of the Yoshino River. As a rule, when you
walk to the rear of these buildings by the rivers edge, the rst oor becomes the
second oor, because another level has been built on below the upper level. The
noodle restaurant being of this construction , the toilet was located on the second
oor; yet when I straddled the hole and peered down, I could see the earth and
the plants of the riverbed, so far below as to make me feel dizzy. Rape blossoms
blooming in the elds; butter ies itting to and fro; people passingI could see
them all quite clearly. In short, this toilet jutted out from the second oor,
beyond the edge of the bluff above the riverbed. Below the boards upon which
my feet rested there was naught but thin air. The solids discharged from my
rectum went tumbling through several tens of feet of void, grazing the wings of
butter ies and the heads of passers-by, on their descent to the excrement
receptacle. The spectacle of their descent was distinctly visible from above; yet
since no frog leaps in/the sound of water1 was to be heard, neither did any foul
odors come wafting up from below. And above all, even the excrement
receptacle itself, when you look down at it from that height, doesnt look at all
unclean. The same must be true, I thought, when you go to the toilet on an
airplane. Yet nowhere else could there be so tasteful a privy, where butter ies
utter in the space through which ones feces fall, and beneath which real rape
elds bloom. This is all very well, of course, for the person who is in such a
privy; but for those passing below it could be disastrous. The riverbed being
broad, there are elds and owerbeds and clothes lines running along the rear of
the houses. Quite naturally, there will be people milling about in such places;
and they can hardly spend every moment looking out above their heads. Unless
someone puts up a signpost saying, Toilet Above, one could, in a careless
moment, pass directly beneath it. Whereupon, sooner or later, one could well
undergo baptism by Peony Cakes.2
City toilets, where cleanliness is concerned, cannot be faulted; but they lack
any touch of this sort of elegance. In the countryside, land is plentiful and one
is surrounded by lush groves of trees. It is usual, therefore, that the privy stands
apart from the main house, joined to it by a covered passageway. The Kensendo,
Sato Haruos3 ancestral home in Shimozato in the province of Kii, has scant
oor space, but I understand that the garden is 3000 tsubo 4 broad. It was summer
when I went there. The privy, at the far end of a long covered passageway
ISSN 1368-879 0 print/ISSN 1466-1888 online/02/020147 05 2002 The Institute of Postcolonial Studies
DOI: 10.1080/136887902200002106 5

ONE THING AND ANOTHER ON THE PRIVY

extending into the garden, was enveloped in the shade of dense greenery. In such
a place, any foul odors are instantly dispersed into the fresh air that surrounds
it; one feels as refreshed as if one were relaxing in a garden pavilion, with no
sense whatever of uncleanliness. In sum, it seems best to locate the privy as
close as possible to the earth, in a place that has intimate ties with nature. Which
is to say, the more nearly one can approximate that simple, primitive practice of
relieving oneself in the elds, surrounded by tufts of grass, gazing up at the blue
heavens, the better it feels.
It was nearly twenty years ago now, but the artist Nagano Sofu5 had this story
to tell upon returning from a trip to Nagoya. The city of Nagoya, he felt, was
very advanced culturally, and the standard of living of its citizens in no way
inferior to that of Osaka or Kyoto. What was it that made him feel this way? It
was the scent of the privies, he said, that he had sniffed in the several homes to
which he had been invited. The artist explains it thus: even the most impeccably
cleaned toilet will give off a faint hint of scent, one compounded of the scent of
deodorant chemicals, the scent of excreta, the scent of weeds and earth and moss
in the garden. And that scent will differ slightly from house to house, that in the
homes of the re ned being a re ned scent. Accordingly, when one whiffs the
scent of a toilet, one can tell something of the character of the people who
inhabit the house, and imagine what sort of lives they live. For the most part, he
said, the privies in the homes of the upper crust of Nagoya gave off a genteel
and urbane scent. And how right he is, one realizes when one thinks of it, the
scent of a toilet can indeed be the vehicle of nostalgicall y sweet memories of a
certain sort. When, for example, a person long absent from his old home returns
after an absence of many years, it is above all the moment when he goes to the
toilet and catches a whiff of the familiar old scent that the memories of
childhood, one after another after another, come back to life, and a comforting
sense of intimacy wells up within him, that makes him feel, Yes, Im home
now! And the same can be said of ones favorite restaurants and tea houses.
Most of the time such things are forgotten, but when one does venture forth and
enter the privy of one of these houses, all manner of memories of pleasant
moments spent there oat back into ones thoughts, gently resurrecting the
moods of past pro igacies, the lost atmosphere of erotic adventures. And,
strange though it may seem to say it, Im inclined to think the scent of a toilet
can serve to calm ones nerves. That the toilet is a place suited to meditation is
well known; though to be sure the new ush toilets dont really work that way.
There are no doubt various other reasons for this, but surely it has a great deal
to do with the unrelenting cleanliness of a ush toilet, for they give off none of
what Sofu describes as that elegant scent, that urbane scent.
Theres an old story about the toilet of Ni Yun-lin,6 told to me by Shiga
Naoya,7 who says he heard it from the late Akutagawa Ryunosuke.8 This man
Yun-lin seems to have been a stickler for cleanliness to a degree unusual for a
Chinese. He would collect vast quantities of moth wings and put them in a crock,
which he would then place beneath the oor of his privy and let his feces fall
onto them. One could, of course, consider this simply the substitutio n of a bed
of wings for a bed of sand; but such light, indeed almost weightless, things are
the wings of moths, that this device swallows up the Peony Cakes that drop into
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TANIZAKI JUNICHIRO

it and renders them invisible. Surely there can hardly have been, ever in the past,
a privy so extravagantly equipped as this one. A receptacle for excrementno
matter how beautifully crafted, no matter how immaculate the design of the
placeis something the very thought of which inspires feelings of lth. But this,
this bed of moth wings, one can actually contemplate as a thing of beauty. The
feces drop with a plop from above; a myriad wings utter up, as in a puff of
smoke, which itself appears to be a cluster of ultra-thin fragments of mica, each
and every one of which is dried to perfection and suffused with an inner glow
of reddish-brown. Before youre even aware what it was that fell, the objects are
swallowed up in this accumulation of fragments. Let your imagination run as
wild as you will, and still youll feel not the slightest sense of lth. Yet another
matter for amazement is the trouble it would take to collect these wings. In the
countryside , of a summer evening, great numbers of moths will be itting about;
but for the purpose Ive just described, a vast quantity of wings would be
required. And most likely they would have to be changed for new after each and
every use. Which means setting a multitude of men to work during the summer
months, catching thousands, indeed tens of thousands of moths, so as to lay in
a stock that will last through the year. An extraordinary extravagance, such as
it would hardly have been possible to practice anywhere but in ancient China.
What Ni Yun-lin was at such pains to do was, in short, to prevent his eyes
ever from catching sight of his own excreta. Of course, even in the most ordinary
privy, unless you purposely take a look, you can accomplish your mission
without seeing anything. But so long as it lies in a place where it can be seen,
there will be those times when, driven not so much by an urge to see the
frightful as an urge to see the foul, you will, one way or another, chance to
see it. So, in the end, nothing can surpass those facilities which allow nothing
to be seen. The simplest method, it seems to me, is to keep the space below oor
level pitch dark. This is no great problem, for if you just keep the access aperture
tightly shut, that alone will block a great deal of light; though nowadays many
households fail to take this precaution. A further measure would be to increase
the distance between the oor and the receptacle, so that light from above does
not reach it.
With a ush toilet, like it or not, you yourself see quite clearly what you
yourself have dropped. And particularly with a Japanese-style toilet, over which
one squats rather than sits, as on one of Western style, it lies coiled right below
ones buttocks until one ushes it away. As a hygienic measure, this may be all
to the good, for it does make it easy to discern which foods one has failed to
digest. But a moments thought should suggest how crude a practice this is. At
the very least, one does not care to contemplate some oriental beautyhair soft
as cloud, face like a owergoing to such a toilet. For one hopes that these
ladies of rank and elegance will not know what sorts of things issue from the
place upon which they sit; or that they will be kind enough to maintain a false
pretense of not knowing.
If, speaking hypothetically , I were to build a toilet exactly as I would wish it
to be, I would of course choose the old style and avoid the ush system. And,
if possible, I would shift the excrement receptacle to a place at some remove
from the toilet itselfto a owerbed at the back of the garden, for example, or
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to the vegetable garden. Which is to say, beneath the oor of the toilet I would
install a sloping earthen pipe, or some such, that would convey the waste to this
location. There would then be no opening beneath the oor through which light
could penetrate, and it would thus be pitch dark. Faint traces of that scent of
urbane elegance, so conducive to contemplation , may remain, but no foul,
unpleasant odors whatever. And since collections would not be carried out
directly beneath the toilet, one would be spared the worry of having to make an
unseemly escape from the room while in the midst of ones business. For
families that grow vegetables and owers, a separate receptacle would make a
convenient source of fertilizer as well. If I am not mistaken, the so-called
Taisho Toilet9 was of this design; and in the suburbs, where land is not at a
premium, I would recommend this in preference to the ush system.
The most elegant of urinals is a morning glory lled with boughs of cedar.
I do have some qualms, however, about the great clouds of vapor that rise from
it in winter. The reason this happens is that, with all those cedar needles, the
liquid doesnt just drain away, but travels at a leisurely pace from needle to
needle as it falls. The vapor that billows up toward ones face while one urinates
may be bearable when it emanates from ones own urine; but when one chances
to follow immediately upon the previous person, one must wait with great
patience until the vapor vanishes.
Some restaurants and tea houses burn cloves to check odor; but in the privy,
it is actually better just to use plain camphor or naphthalene. For ever since
sandalwood has come to be used in medicines for the treatment of venereal
disease, its pleasant associations would seem to have disappeared completely.
And though the scent of cloves was once thought alluring, any association with
thoughts of the privy will put an end to that. No one will ever want to soak in
a clove bath again. I make a particular point of this warning because I am fond
of the scent of cloves.
At school I was taught that in English, when one wants to go to the toilet, one
says, I want to wash my hands, but can that be true? I have never traveled to
the Occident, but in China, when I stayed at an English hotel in Tientsin, I asked
the boy in the dining room in a soft voice, Where is the toilet room? I was
terribly embarrassed when he asked loudly in reply, You mean the W.C.? Even
worse was the time I was stricken with a sudden attack of diarrhoea in a Chinese
hotel in Kuangchow. When I asked for the toilet, the boy immediately showed
me there; which was ne, except that unfortunately there was only a urinal. I was
utterly at a loss what to do. For I had never learnt how to say the crapper in
English. So I tried asking for the other one, but the boy didnt understand me.
Anything else I could have explained with gestures, but this I just didnt have
the courage to mime. And all the while the urge grew more and more pressing.
One has these distressing experiences so often, I thought at the time; I really
must learn what to say in English when this happens; but the fact is, I still dont
know.
When we mistakenly open the door to a toilet thats already in use, we
exclaim, Ah! Someones in there. But do you know how to say that in
English? I posed this question a long time ago when I was with Chikamatsu
Shuko.10 Shuko, I suppose, had heard some Westerner say it in a toilet at a hotel.
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TANIZAKI JUNICHIRO

In such a situation, he told me, you say, Someone in! Since then well nigh
twenty years have passed, but Ive never had the opportunity to put that phrase
to practical use.
Hamamoto Hiroshi told me of something that once happened to him when he
came to Kyoto on business for the Kaizosha Publishing Company. He had come
to my house in Okamoto, after which, on the return trip from Umeda to Kyoto,
he went to the toilet on the train. But when he slammed the door shut, the handle
fell off, and he wasnt able to open it again. He shouted and he pounded, but on
a rushing train there was no way anyone could hear him. He had no choice but
to resign himself to imprisonment for the time being, so he picked up the fallen
handle and began tap, tap, tapping on the door. Another passenger must have
heard him and informed the conductor, for he was freed before they reached
Kyoto. Ever since I heard that story, Ive taken particular care, whenever I go
to the toilet on a train, not to open or close the door too roughly. If its an
ordinary train one can always open the window and call for help when it stops
at the next station. But on a night express one could be stranded for hours were
one to meet with such misfortune.

Notes
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1

2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10

Kawaya no iroiro, by Tanizaki Junichiro (1935); Kanze Emiko. Originally published in Bungei shunju,
July 1935.
Tanizaki alludes to the famous haiku by Matsuo Basho (1644 94):
furuike ya/kawazu tobikomu/mizu no oto
Ah, the ancient pond! And into it leaps a frog. The sound of water.
Botamochi, a variety of sweets composed of a core of rice cake covered with a reddish brown paste made
of mashed azuki beans. Here, of course, it is a humorous euphemism for feces.
1892 1964. Poet, novelist, and literary critic.
The equivalent of about 12,000 square yards, or roughly 2.5 acres.
1885 1949.
1301 74. Ranked as one of the four great painters of the late Yuan Dynasty, and known for his
uncompromising fastidiousness.
1883 1971. Novelist.
1892 1927. Novelist.
Probably so named because designed during the reign of the Taisho Emperor, 1912 26.
1876 1944. Novelist.

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