A short life of the author
Jun’ichiro Tanizaki (24 July 1886 – 30 July 1965) was a Japanese novelist, short story writer, and essayist who is widely regarded as the greatest Japanese prose stylist of the twentieth century and one of the supreme novelists of modern world literature. His career spanned the entire arc of Japan’s modernisation — from the late Meiji era through the Pacific War to the postwar boom — and his fiction charts the psychological tensions of that transformation with a frankness about desire, obsession, and the erotic dimension of aesthetic experience that was revolutionary in Japanese letters and remains striking today.
Life and Career
Tanizaki was born in the Nihonbashi district of Tokyo, the son of a rice merchant whose business was declining. His childhood in the old commercial quarter — destroyed by the Great Kanto Earthquake of 1923 — gave him a lifelong nostalgia for a vanishing world of traditional culture. He attended Tokyo Imperial University but dropped out before graduating.
His early fiction — beginning with “The Tattooer” (刺青, 1910), about a tattoo artist who creates his masterwork on the skin of a beautiful woman — announced his central themes: the worship of female beauty, the erotics of submission, and the relationship between art and cruelty. Through the 1910s and early 1920s he was associated with the aestheticist movement in Japanese literature and was an enthusiastic Westerniser, fascinated by Hollywood, Edgar Allan Poe, and Oscar Wilde.
Naomi (痴人の愛, 1924–1925) — about a man who raises a young girl to be his ideal Western-style wife, only to find himself enslaved by the creature he has created — is his first major novel and his most explicit exploration of Japan’s infatuation with Western modernity. The title character, who affects Western clothes, dances the foxtrot, and treats her husband with casual contempt, became a cultural archetype: the Japanese press coined the term “Naomi-ism” (ナオミズム) to describe the phenomenon of modern young women.
After the 1923 earthquake destroyed Tokyo, Tanizaki moved to the Kansai region (Osaka and Kobe) — a move that transformed his aesthetic. The encounter with Kansai culture — older, more conservative, rooted in the Osaka merchant tradition — turned him from a Westerniser into the great literary defender of Japanese tradition. Some Prefer Nettles (蓼喰う蟲, 1928–1929) dramatises this transformation: its protagonist, caught between a modern Western-style wife and a traditional mistress, is drawn irresistibly toward the old culture.
The Makioka Sisters (細雪, 1943–1948) is his masterwork: a vast, leisurely novel about four sisters of a declining Osaka merchant family, centred on the search for a husband for the third sister, Yukiko. The novel was suppressed by the wartime military government, which considered its preoccupation with bourgeois domestic life unpatriotic. It was serialised clandestinely and published in full after the war. It is the supreme novel of the Japanese bourgeoisie — a book that achieves the scope and social density of Proust or Tolstoy within the framework of a marriage plot.
The Key (鍵, 1956) — a novel told through the alternating diaries of a husband and wife, each of whom is manipulating the other sexually — and Diary of a Mad Old Man (瘋癲老人日記, 1961–1962) — about a seventy-seven-year-old man’s obsessive desire for his daughter-in-law — are the masterpieces of his late period, exploring the persistence and absurdity of desire in old age with a candour that is both comic and disturbing.
In Praise of Shadows
In Praise of Shadows (陰翳礼讃, 1933) — Tanizaki’s most famous essay — is a meditation on Japanese aesthetics that argues for the beauty of shadow, darkness, and subtlety against the harsh, revealing light of Western modernity. The essay has been enormously influential in architecture, design, and aesthetic theory, and its central argument — that beauty depends on what is concealed as much as on what is revealed — is the key to Tanizaki’s fiction as well.
Critical Standing
Tanizaki is universally recognised as one of the great novelists of the twentieth century. He was nominated for the Nobel Prize multiple times and was widely expected to receive it; his failure to win remains one of the Nobel committee’s most conspicuous oversights. The Makioka Sisters is his undisputed masterpiece.
Key Works
- Naomi (1924–1925)
- Some Prefer Nettles (1928–1929)
- In Praise of Shadows (1933)
- The Makioka Sisters (1943–1948)
- The Key (1956)
- Diary of a Mad Old Man (1961–1962)
Why Was Tanizaki Never Awarded the Nobel Prize?
Tanizaki was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature multiple times and was widely expected to receive it. His failure to win — like that of Borges and Nabokov — remains one of the committee’s most conspicuous oversights. He died in 1965; the prize went to Kawabata in 1968, in what was widely understood as a belated recognition of Japanese literature that Tanizaki had deserved first.
Collecting Tanizaki
Japanese first editions are specialised. English translations — primarily by Edward Seidensticker and Howard Hibbett — are the main collecting focus. The Makioka Sisters (1957, Knopf, trans. Seidensticker) brings $80–$200. Some Prefer Nettles (1955, Knopf) brings $40–$100. Seven Japanese Tales (1963, Knopf) brings $30–$80.