At the time of his death in 1965 at the age of seventy-nine, Tanizaki Jun'ichiro had been writing fiction, plays, essays, poems, and translations almost without interruption for more than fifty-five years. In this series of meditations on seven of Tanizaki's novels and novellas, the renowned translator Anthony Chambers explores the attempt by Tanizaki's characters to construct ideal worlds: fantasies that were far removed from the concerns of everyday life and were, for the most part, unattainable. Chambers focuses on the thread of fantasy that Tanizaki weaves throughout his work; he examines...
At the time of his death in 1965 at the age of seventy-nine, Tanizaki Jun'ichiro had been writing fiction, plays, essays, poems, and translations almo...
With a precision and brilliance unmatched perhaps by any other novelist of the twentieth century, Junichiro Tanizaki interweaves a sense of his country's deep past with the kind of pathologies and obsessions we are likely to think of as modern. Here, in two eerie and beautiful novellas, he displays this skill at its most elegant and affecting. The Reed Cutter has a contemporary setting, though it might have taken place any time in the past thousand years. On a fine September evening, the narrator decides to make a solitary excursion to the site of an ancient imperial palace south...
With a precision and brilliance unmatched perhaps by any other novelist of the twentieth century, Junichiro Tanizaki interweaves a sense of his countr...
