Word for Word: Stop calling ‘Naomi’ the Japanese Lolita

On a random school day in 2021, my friend Clara ran towards me with a book in her hands.

“Anna, you need to read this,” she said, showing me the cover: “Naomi” (1925), by Jun’ichiro Tanizaki. “It’s the Japanese Lolita!”

Both Clara and I were curious about Vladimir Nabokov’s “Lolita” (1955), although we’d never even read it.

At the time, those two 14-year-old girls were beginning to look for more challenging, more daring novels. “Lolita,” we knew, was a banned book in several countries. An unspeakably obscene novel about a pedophile.

But Nabokov still felt too adult for us. Tanizaki, however, seemed friendlier. “Japanese Lolita” sounded like a watered down version of “Lolita” — one we could consume more easily. 

So we began “Naomi,” embarking on the story of Jōji, a 28-year-old electrical engineer from a wealthy family who is instantly drawn to Naomi, a 15-year-old waitress from a lower-class background. Fascinated by her Western looks and sophisticated mannerisms, Jōji decides to adopt and educate Naomi to become his ideal wife. However, as she grows older and smarter, the unequal power dynamics of their relationship start to shift in her favor.

They are both stories of grown men unnaturally attracted to young girls, but can you really compare “Naomi” to “Lolita”? As I kept reading, I completely forgot about “Lolita.” 

Clara and I would meet up every few days or so to talk about the book. At first, we thought that Jōji was a weirdo and Naomi was a girlboss. Then, we felt bad for Jōji and got annoyed at Naomi. By the end of the book, we had differing opinions: Clara thought Naomi was evil; I thought she was cunning and amusing.

I was so enamored with Tanizaki’s sarcastic writing style that I went on to read more of his works. After that, I moved on to other modern Japanese authors, like Mori and Dazai. By that point, I’d forgotten all about classic Nabokov and the infamous “Lolita.” Tanizaki had bewitched me and dragged me into the world of Japanese literature.

This fondness for Japanese literature led me to take a class called “Tokyo as a Metaphor” this semester where, coincidentally, we studied “Naomi.” So, four years after I first read it, I revisited the book. But this time with a different focus: the city of Tokyo.

I learned that the novel was written within the context of the modernization of Japan. Jōji, being a young man from a traditional agriculture-based family in Japan, had moved to the rapidly urbanizing Tokyo hoping for better job opportunities. There, he meets a teenage Naomi who “resembled Mary Pickford” and had a Western-sounding name — love at first sight. He decides to rescue her, a lower-class woman, from an unavoidable fate by educating her in English and piano.

It becomes increasingly clear how Jōji and Naomi serve as allegories for Japan and the Western, especially American, world. Jōji falls in love with Naomi, but is slowly overpowered by her. Traditional Japan falls in love with modern Western culture, but is slowly overpowered by it.

Reading “Naomi” the second time around, I returned to an old question with a different tone: How could anyone ever compare “Naomi” to “Lolita”?

Now aged 18, a little older and hopefully a little wiser, I decided to face “Lolita.”

I was met with a tragic and overly descriptive novel about a man in his thirties who becomes obsessed with a 12-year-old girl. “Lolita” is horrifying because Nabokov’s unreliable narrator almost convinces us that this is a love story between two people who love each other — and not a story about an adult man who kidnaps and sexually abuses a child. 

“Naomi” and “Lolita” are both stories of grown men unnaturally attracted to young girls. But after that, the similarities stop.

So why did my friend dub “Naomi” the “Japanese Lolita”?

In my home country of Brazil, we have a concept called “complexo de vira-lata” (mutt complex), which is a collective feeling of inferiority amongst Brazilians in regards to our culture when we compare it to the cultures of the “developed world,” namely, North America and Europe. 

Although this feeling of inferiority is supposedly self-imposed, it doesn’t come out of nowhere: Growing up in Brazil, the books that were presented to me as “classic literature” were mainly American or European, not Latin American, African or Asian — even though I lived in a Latin American country. 

I was set up to think that Nabokov’s “Lolita” would be more important than Tanizaki’s “Naomi.” The nickname “Japanese Lolita” grabbed my attention because by approximating “Naomi” to a Western work, I unconsciously valued it more. 

Now that I see how the plot of “Naomi” itself tackles precisely this issue, its senseless comparison to “Lolita” feels both ironic and fitting. 

Calling “Naomi” a “Japanese Lolita” only undermines the value of its story.

It sets up expectations for the novel to be similar to “Lolita,” which it isn’t. And it shouldn’t be. “Naomi” was never meant to be similar to “Lolita” — the latter didn’t even exist when the former was published. 

We should be able to read these two incredible works and appreciate them in their own specific contexts, without having to put one or the other down. 

So, please don’t call “Naomi” the “Japanese Lolita,” just go read it instead!

Anna Ripper Naigeborin PO ’28 is from São Paulo, Brazil. She has recently been into watching Éric Rohmer movies.