Jun'ichiro Tanizaki Books

An essay on aesthetics by the Japanese novelist, this book explores architecture, jade, food, and even toilets, combining an acute sense of the use of space in buildings. The book also includes descriptions of laquerware under candlelight and women in the darkness of the house of pleasure.

Jun'ichiro Tanizaki's In Black and White is a literary murder mystery in which the lines between fiction and reality are blurred. The writer Mizuno has penned a story about the perfect murder that comes to intrude on his life. In Black and White is a masterful yet little-known novel from a great writer at the height of his powers.

Sonoko Kakiuchi is a cultured Osaka lady, unfortunately widowed young. it is a tale of infatuation and deceit, of eliberate evil. Its theme is humiliation, its victim Sonoko's mild-mannered husband. At is centre - seductive, manipulating, enslaving - is one of Tanizaki's most extraordinary characters, the beautiful and corrupt art student Mitsuko.

The marriage of Kaname and Misako is disintegrating: whilst seeking passion and fulfilment in the arms of others, they contemplate the humiliation of divorce.

This is an enchanting essay on aesthetics by one of the greatest Japanese novelists. Tanizaki's eye ranges over architecture, jade, food, toilets, and combines an acute sense of the use of space in buildings, as well as perfect descriptions of lacquerware under candlelight and women in the darkness of the house of pleasure.

Tanizaki's masterpiece is the story of four sisters, and the declining fortunes of a traditional Japanese family. It is a loving and nostalgic recreation of the sumptuous, intricate upper-class life of Osaka immediately before World War Two. With surgical precision, Tanizaki lays bare the sinews of pride, and brings a vanished era to vibrant life.

In Childhood Years, originally published serially in a literary magazine between 1955 and 1956, Tanizaki Jun'ichiro (1886-1965) takes a meandering look back on his early life in Tokyo. He reflects on his upbringing, family, and the capital city with a conversational-and not necessarily honest-eye, offering insights into his later life and his writing.

These two short novels, published in the early 1930's ranked high in Tanizaki's own estimation of his work. Based on invented documents that overlap with historical reality, the story unfolds a masterly balance of irony and melodrama, elegance and brutality, civilised ritual and vengeful barbarity.

A novella and two short stories reveal Tanizaki at his best and most bizarre

Junichiro Tanizaki's Seven Japanese Tales collects stories that explore the boundary at which love becomes self-annihilation, where the contemplation of beauty gives way to fetishism, and where tradition becomes an instrument of voluptuous cruelty....

This is the diary of a middle-aged man who is deeply in love with his younger wife, Ikuko. In spite of that love, the pair have grown physically apart, each unsure of the other's desires...until the day Ikuko discovers her husband's diary with its desperate hints of jealousy and voyeurism. Ikuko realises she has found the key to his very soul.

The decadent tales in this collection span 45 years in the extraordinary career of Japan's master storyteller, Tanizaki Jun'ichiro (1886-1965), the author of Naomi, A Cat, a Man, and Two Women, and The Makioka Sisters. Made accessible in English by the expertise of translators Anthony H. Chambers and Paul McCarthy, the stories in The Gourmet Club vividly explore an array of human passions.

In Childhood Years, originally published serially in a literary magazine between 1955 and 1956, Tanizaki Jun'ichiro (1886-1965) takes a meandering look back on his early life in Tokyo. He reflects on his upbringing, family, and the capital city with a conversational-and not necessarily honest-eye, offering insights into his later life and his writing.

While recovering from a stroke, seventy-seven-year-old Utsugi turns to his diary to wryly record his struggle with his ageing body and his growing desire for his beautiful daughter-in-law Satsuko, a chic, Westernised dancer with a shady past.

In "The Reed Cutter", the narrator meets a strange man who tells him a story of obsession; and a tenth-century Kyoto minister demands and receives his rival's wife during a drunken party in "Captain Shigemoto's Mother"

In Praise of Shadows is an eloquent tribute to the austere beauty of traditional Japanese aesthetics.

Quicksand is a silkily nuanced novel of erotic gamesmanship and obsession. Sonoko Kakiuchi, an Osaka lady of a good family, married to a dully respected lawyer, tells a story of temptation and betrayal. Sonoko is infatuated with the beautiful art student and femme fatale Mitsuko, a woman so seductive and heartless she can even turn Sonoko's husband into her own accomplice. Filled with intrigue...