Cascadia Calling, 2026.1.12
"I have not yet seen a man who loved virtue as zealously as he did pleasure"
I spent the first week of the year in Spokane. Between work, family obligations, and social engagements, it served to shake off the sloth of the holiday season. The winters in Spokane are always chaotic. I learned that the weather service can make my phone shriek if a severe enough “snow squall” is on its way. I learned this, along with every other customer of the bar Jade, as the snow outside turned from big fluffy flakes to a near-whiteout when our phones all started bleating at once.
Given there was good company and good beer, there were much worse places I could have been snowed in.
“I implore you,” the Duke replied. “Do not search my eyes with that mysterious gaze of yours. Do not enfold my body in your arms. Thought the Sage has taught me to overcome evil, I know not yet how to resist the power of beauty.”
I’ve already finished two books this year. (Hold your applause, they’re both books I started in December.) Both, in their way, deal with the perils and attractions of vice. The first, The Siren’s Lament, is a collection of three stories by Jun’ichirō Tanizaki (translated by Bryan Karetnyk) and collected in an edition from Pushkin Press. The stories, “The Qilin”, “Killing O’Tsuya”, and “The Siren’s Lament” are all character studies of obsessed men following their desires to their own destruction.
I found all of the stories compelling, but I was particularly struck by how torn the central character of “The Qilin” is. A duke enchanted by his evil mistress, he ultimately chooses subservience to erotic and romantic obsession over his desire for the Good. It is, in a way, an anti-Socratic character study. The Duke doesn’t commit evil out of ignorance. He knows he is giving in to evil and knows that he is powerless before it, because it comes to him in the form of his beloved.
It’s a simple story. Both thematically and structurally, it’s a morality tale, albeit a sardonic one. The moral of the story, such as it is, is given in the words of the Sage as he rides out of town, having failed to save the Duke and his kingdom:
I have not yet seen a man who loved virtue as zealously as he did pleasure.
The second story, “Killing O’Tsuya” is more of a character study. Tanizaki tells the story of two lovers who are not so much star-crossed, as vice-enthralled. It similarly features an upright male figure who is led to ruin by his obsession with a wicked beloved. I haven’t read enough of Tanizaki’s work to know if this trend rises to the level of some kind of misogynistic motif, or if this is just down to the editor’s decision to lump like with like in this edition.
The bloody tale tells the story of Shinsuke, a well-meaning young man who runs off with his boss’s daughter. The daughter, the titular O’Tsuya, soon falls to the wiles of the world and becomes and geisha. Along the way, Shinsuke ends killing a bunch of people, all while promising to turn himself in to the authorities, just after a little more time with O’Tsuya. Over time, though, he gives in to rage, jealousy, and vice and ends up killing his lover.
Tanizaki is an excellent storyteller and (at least in this translation) a compelling stylist. His obsession with moral corruption can be a little unsettling in its gender dynamics, but it drove him to craft some gripping stories.
A big part of sobriety is establishing the ability to sit quietly in the world you’ve got, not grasp after the unreachable world you want.
The other book I finished this year was Rax King’s Sloppy: Or: Doing It All Wrong. This book was also obsessed with vice, but had a much more modern view of it. Rax King’s collection of essays build a memoir of someone fighting against their own impulses towards vice and self-destruction. It’s a personal and contemporary look at the attraction of giving in to our own worst impulses.
One thing I quite liked about King’s book is that she never once pretended that vice isn’t fun. She acknowledged, hell, even at times celebrated, that we mere, non-fictional mortals give in to booze and drugs and debauchery because it’s often a hell of a good time. And also because, critically, it can tear us away from ourselves when we don’t like who we are.
We are not all morally upstanding young men who require a worldly geisha to drag us into the depths of moral turpitude. Some of us are quite able to find the road to depravity by ourselves.
Ultimately, Tanizaki felt like he was fictionalizing his own and his societies panic. He was taking a psychodrama and rendering it as drama on the page. King, of course, is writing in the context of our own society’s moral and psychological hangups, but she seems genuine in the relish with which she sometimes writes about her drug use. She’s also unflinching when detailing the horrible relationships and self-destruction that it led her to.
True to the title, she also doesn’t provide any clean answers. While she talks at length about the ways in which she’s like her father, for instance, she never blames him or casts her own similar failings as being his fault or as a result of trauma. Rather, in each case she gives detailed and personal psychological studies of his influence on her. This allows her to write with real, genuine fondness of him and of all the bad habits and influences she picked up from him.
As a pair, the two books were interesting to read together. They detailed two paths to destruction and two models of vice. One as the malign result of erotic obsession, the other of the simple fact that none of us are perfect and vice has its own inherent appeal.
While I liked reading them both, as someone who has absolutely given in to his share of vices in the past, King’s model seems much more human.
At least for those of us who don’t have the advantage of being fictional heroes.