Devils in Daylight

Jun'ichirō Tanizaki was born in 1886 in Tokyo's Nihonbashi district, the son of a merchant family. He grew up in an urban, commercially oriented environment that gave him access to both the modernizing culture of Meiji Japan and the older Tokyo traditions that modernization was steadily replacing, and this double exposure — to the new and the about-to-be-lost — became one of the central preoccupations of his fiction. He studied Japanese literature at Tokyo Imperial University before dropping out to concentrate on writing, and published his first stories in the 1910s to immediate recognition.

His early work — including Tattoo (Shisei) and The Secret — is marked by a fascination with perversity, with the erotics of power, cruelty, and submission, that would remain consistent throughout his career. Tanizaki's fiction is preoccupied above all with desire: its mechanisms, its objects, its refusal to conform to conventional hierarchies of value. His protagonists are often men enslaved to women who dominate or abuse them, or who submit willingly to pain and humiliation in the pursuit of an aesthetic or erotic ideal whose satisfaction is never quite achieved. This material, which in lesser hands might be simple titillation, Tanizaki handles with a formal sophistication and psychological precision that make it genuinely illuminating about the structures of desire.

His major novels — The Makioka Sisters, The Key, Diary of a Mad Old Man, and the earlier Some Prefer Nettles — span a range of scale and register that demonstrates his extraordinary versatility. The Makioka Sisters, his masterwork, is an expansive family chronicle following four sisters of an Osaka merchant family in the years before the Pacific War, attempting to arrange a marriage for the third sister while the fourth pursues unsuitable relationships of her own. It is a long, patient work of social observation — Tanizaki's equivalent of the great Victorian family novel — written with the attention to material culture and domestic detail of a meticulous chronicler. In Praise of Shadows, his celebrated essay, extends his fiction's aesthetic concerns into explicit argument: a meditation on Japanese aesthetics, on the beauty of darkness and patina and imperfection that he saw modernization threatening to eliminate.

Tanizaki was nominated for the Nobel Prize multiple times and remains one of the most admired prose stylists in the history of Japanese literature. He revised The Makioka Sisters repeatedly throughout his life, and continued to write until shortly before his death in 1965 at the age of seventy-nine, his final works showing no diminution of the preoccupations that had driven his work from the beginning.