SOURCE: "Tanazaki's The Bridge of Dreams' from the Perspective of Amae Psychology," in Literature and Psychology, Vol. XXXV, Nos. 1 & 2, 1989, pp. 46-64.

In the following excerpt, DeZure perceives evidence of amae, a psychological syndrome particular to the Japanese, in the characters of the story "Yume no ukihashi" ("The Bridge of Dreams").

"The Bridge of Dreams" by Jun'ichiro Tanizaki is the confessional memoir of a young man, Tadasu, and his relationships with his mother and stepmother. The tale traces the development of his obsessional dependency needs in relation to them and culminates in his social and economic deterioration and his demoralization. For western readers, it calls to mind Marcel's involvement with his mother in Proust's Remembrance of Things Past and generally suggests a Freudian Oedipal Complex. But the tale is not occidental, and to characterize it quite so neatly in western terms is to misread and oversimplify the psychological dynamics...