Daniel Arrieta    Department   Kyoto University of Foreign Studies  Department of Hispanic Studies, Faculty of Foreign Studies    Position   Associate Professor
Date	2023/02/23
Presentation Theme	Tanizaki's cat: a metaphor of the ideal woman or and example of animal agency?
Conference	24th Conferences of the Spanish Society of General and Comparative Literature
Conference Type	International
Presentation Type	Speech (General)
Contribution Type	Individual
Details	In his novella 猫と庄造と二人のをんなNeko to Shozo to Futari no Onna (The Cat, Shozo, and His Two Wives), from 1936, Tanizaki Junichiro revisits some of the themes and motifs frequently observed in his literary world, such as the love triangle , the ideal woman, and the East-West dualism. However, in this case the love triangle is enriched by the appearance of a cat, which turns the triangle into a quadrilateral. In this paper we confront the characterization of Lily the cat as a metaphor for the ideal woman with another interpretation of the text in line with animal studies: animal agency. Finally, we compare the original text with the 1956 film adaptation of the novel by Toyoda Shiro.