According to the triangular theory of love by psychologist, Robert Sternberg, there are

three main components to love. These are intimacy, a feeling of attachment and connectedness,
passion, a feeling of sexual attraction and limerence, and commitment, the part of the
relationship which contains the decisions to be with each other and the idea of shared
achievements and ideals. Different kinds of love are accomplished by combining these three
components. The highest level of love is consummate love which encompasses all three of these
components. Unlike traditional love stories that would end in a happily ever after idea, the idea
of love in Japanese stories, such as Naomi by Junichiro Tanizaki, Kokoro by Natsume Soseki,
and The Human Chair by Edogawa Ranpo, is far more varied and often seem to lack one of the
main components of love and when consummate love Is finally achieved the characters must
give up something great in order to achieve it. They tend to act as warnings as to what can
happen when love runs off course rather than what is the best possible thing that love can be that
is more traditional in western stories and novels.
In The Human Chair by Edogawa Ranpo, Yoshiko, a famed writer, becomes the object of
obsession of a man who claims to be living inside of her favorite chair who informs her of his
life through a manuscript. While she is distraught upon hearing this and quickly flees from the
chair inside her study, she is not given enough time to process everything when a second letter
comes explaining that the manuscript was actually just a simple story. Within the story that
Yoshiko reads, the reader is given a detailed story about a man who wanted to feel a deeper
connection to someone and his means to an end was building a chair to live in to feel closer,
physical contact with whoever sat in that chair. As people sat in the chair, he would obsess about
feeling the contours of their bodies, imagining a far deeper relation that was actually real. His
idea of love encompasses the idea of passion while not including the other two facets of love.

This is often termed infatuated love. Most love often starts out as infatuated love, with desire
being the main reason for a relationship but often without commitment, infatuated love lasts
mere moments. In the story, he only has a sexual desire for the object of his affections and his
object of desire are often fleeting and ephemeral as he moves on from person to person as
quickly as they sit in his chair. His passion is so great that he even mentions that he is suffering
excruciating pains because of [his] mad love and longing (The Human Chair 21). While this is
an extreme exaggeration of infatuated love, this can be related to the love that young people
often experience where the only actual part of love is passion and sexual desire. This love often
lasts a night or two and the determining factor is whether the components of intimacy and
commitment can be added. This story also shows an extreme representation on what a one sided
relationship can be. Yoshiko shows what is termed as nonlove, which is to say she experiences
none of the facets of love. This makes sense as she is the object of infatuation of someone who is
hidden. As a story, The Human Chair shows two of the younger types of love which are often
experienced by people. In western stories, these kinds of love traditionally will evolve into more
committed types of love and rarely exists by themselves.
Another story which shows various different perspective of love is Kokoro by Natsume
Soseki. In this story the narrator tells the story about his relationship with a man he meets,
Sensei, who eventually becomes his mentor. The love between the narrator and Sensei begins as
a simple friendship where the main component is intimacy as they are able to discuss various
aspects of life with each other. This leads the narrator to slowly change this friendship into what
is called companionate love. This type of love is often a much stronger version of friendship. The
main component is the addition of commitment to the preexisting intimacy. It is often seen in
marriages where passion no longer exists, much like the marriage of Sensei and his wife. This

marriage almost mirrors the relation between Sensei and the narrator. Both of them are very
intimate and close relationships yet they both lack intimacy that would make them what most
people consider true love. Sensei is very aware of his situation and even warns the narrator about
it. When he was younger, Sensei did try to achieve this true love by asking Ojosan to marry him.
This would come at a price, as his good friend K was also in love with Ojosan. His drive to
marry Ojosan came from various places including attraction to her but also a sense that he would
lose her forever if he let K ask her to marry him. Sensei showed what can be called romantic
love. There was passion and intimacy in his relation with Ojosan but there was never
commitment. They lived together but there was never a sense of belonging to each other. He
realized this was missing when K, in confidence, told him he was about to declare his love for
her. Sensei tried to reach that level of consummate love that everyone aspires to as it is the ideal
form of love but when he tried, his betrayal of K was the last straw. Whether it was the sole
reason or one of many contributing factors, Senseis actions lead K to commit suicide. Once this
occurred, Senseis relationship with Ojosan was deeply affected to the point where while
intimacy and commitment where still present, the passion, that is to say the physical attraction,
had vanished. In the end, Sensei tries to warn the narrator to find true love as it is an important
part of life and to not become like him, jaded and just going through life without actually
enjoying it. This seems to be the main message that Sensei tries to get across to the narrator
throughout the story and as the narrator tries to find and explore a deeper friendship with Sensei,
he ignores other relationships and in turn eventually loses his one meaningful relationship.
Kokoro again deviates from the traditional story of love by showing that love is not easy, and it
tends to disappear as time goes by and situations occur. More often than not, in stories love

grows stronger as the story progresses and by the end it is clear that the main characters will end
in happiness.
Another story that shows various kinds of love aside from the traditional happily ever
after love is Naomi by Junichiro Tanizaki. Unlike in Kokoro, the main characters, Joji and
Naomi, actually achieve consummate love and are very happy together. In the beginning, Joji
tries to mold Naomi into his perfect woman by transforming her into the perfect modern Western
woman. His relationship starts through infatuated love as he is struck by how she looks and how
much she reminds her of Mary Pickford. As he begins to talk to her and engage in conversations,
he discovers that they can be very intimate, sharing their dreams and goals with each other, their
love begins to progress into romantic love, at this stage they are bonded emotionally as well as
physically. It isnt until he asks Naomi to move in with him, that commitment is really added into
their relationship and they reach the final stage of consummate love. Normally this event would
normally mark the climax of the story. Usually the main characters would overcome some sort of
hardship to be together and realize that they truly belong with each other. Yet Naomi takes a
completely different turn. In the story, we see their relationship slowly disintegrate eventually
reaching the point where love is nonexistent, then from nowhere it seems to bounce back and yet
at the end neither character is truly happy with the relationship. As the story progresses, the three
components of love slowly disappear as Naomi becomes a more Western woman. Slowly
Naomis commitment to the relationship begins to wane. She no longer begins to see Joji as a
necessary part of the relationship and he mostly becomes a provider. She begins to have other
relationships at first they are merely empty love relations which mean they are only marked by
a show of commitment but no passion or intimacy but her relations with other men eventually
become centered around passion and physical attraction. These extraneous relations took a severe

toll on Joji eventually leading him to break things off. Once again this story deviates from the
traditional ending of Joji becoming happy after breaking off what could be considered a toxic
relationship. However, Junichiro Tanizaki takes the story in a different direction with Naomi
coming back and using her physical traits to lure Joji back into becoming her provider. Joji,
while happy, becomes very aware of the situation and ends the novel in with a paragraph saying
If you think that my account is foolish, please go ahead and laugh. If you think that theres a
moral in it, then, please let it serve as a lesson. (Naomi 237). This warning serves the reader to
think about their personal relationships. The story of Naomi serves as a warning to all who read
it about the troubles that obsession in love can lead to, Joji gives everything for Naomi but she
does not return his affections.
These three stories all serve as warnings of what can happen when a certain type of love
is taken to the extreme. In western stories, love is often used as the end goal of the story with the
climax often being the creation of a new consummate love relationship or the break off of a toxic
relationship and the improvement of life for one of the two. However, Japanese stories often act
in an opposite way, having the creation of creation of love serve as a starting point for the actual
story with the relationship often ending in a severe way or devolving into a bad relationship. In
the three examples analyzed in this paper, none of the relationships achieved consummate love,
or what is traditionally called true love. In two of the stories, Naomi and Kokoro, a good
relationship devolved into a toxic or nonexistent relationship by the end giving the reader
something to think about and ponder about their own relations. The story The Human Chair
served to warn what can happen when an infatuation goes to an extreme. In the end, these stories
cause the reader to critically think about their relationships and thing about them rather than just
imagine a perfect ending that more traditional western stories and novels.