Captain Shigemoto's Mother

Written in 1949, Captain Shigemoto's Mother tells a story of a young boy named Shigemoto's thinking of his mother, who was abducted away at his childhood. Lady Genji, Captain Shigemoto's mother was famous for her beauty in the Heian Period. She married Kunitsune who is 50 years older than her. The elder husband treated his wife with love and care, however the loneliness of a young woman cannot be easily be filled, therefore the lady kept having love affairs with others, and finally lead to the scandal of the Minister of the Left openly abducting Kunitsune's wife in the Kunitsune's family feast. The author quoted words and phrases from other works to support the truth of the story, while the personal opinions appearing from time to time brings mixed feelings of truth and imagination, the misplacement sense of overlapping ancient and modern times, all these make the reading like a documentary legends or anecdotes, and provide the readers with attractive and rich pleasures of reading. Using the Japanese classical literature approach represented by the Tale of Genji, Junichiro Tanizaki created a magnificent legend of Heian era. Commentator Kamei Katsuichiro praised that the Captain Shigemoto's Mother is a combined outcome of Tanizaki's Literature at the top level.I hope not to offend the dignity of the historical facts, while at the same time make complements to the insufficient records, and therefore to develop my own world---Junichiro Tanizaki