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Biography
Japanese

Jun'ichirō Tanizaki

1886 — 1965

Jun'ichirō Tanizaki was a Japanese novelist whose works — including Some Prefer Nettles (1929), The Makioka Sisters (1943–1948), and The Key (1956) — are among the greatest achievements of modern Japanese literature. His fiction explores the tensions between tradition and modernity, East and West, with a sensual, aestheticized prose style and a fascination with female beauty, masochism, and cultural loss.

Past sales0
PeriodModern
NationalityJapanese
1. Biography

A short life of the author

Jun’ichirō Tanizaki (1886–1965) was born on 24 July 1886 in Tokyo. He studied Japanese literature at Tokyo Imperial University but left without graduating.

Life and Career

Tanizaki’s early work was influenced by Western decadence and Poe. The 1923 Great Kantō earthquake prompted his move to the Kansai region (Osaka-Kyoto), which deepened his engagement with traditional Japanese culture.

Tade kuu mushi (Some Prefer Nettles, 1929) — about a man torn between his modern, Westernized wife and the traditional Japanese world represented by his father-in-law’s puppet theater — marks this turn. Sasameyuki (The Makioka Sisters, 1943–1948) — a vast novel about four sisters in a declining Osaka merchant family in the years before World War II — is his masterpiece: an elegiac chronicle of a vanishing world, comparable to Proust and Chekhov in its emotional register.

Kagi (The Key, 1956) — a novel told through the alternating diaries of a husband and wife, each secretly reading the other’s — explores sexual obsession and power. In’ei raisan (In Praise of Shadows, 1933) — an essay on Japanese aesthetics — is his most widely read nonfiction work.

Major Works and Themes

Tanizaki wrote about beauty, desire, the female body, the tension between Japanese tradition and Western modernity, and the aesthetics of shadow and concealment.

Key Works

  • The Makioka Sisters (1943–1948)
  • Some Prefer Nettles (1929)

Collecting Tanizaki

Japanese originals are the primary collected form. English translations (Knopf, Vintage) bring $10–$30. Tanizaki died in 1965.