Jun'ichirō Tanizaki

In Osaka in the years immediately before World War II, four aristocratic women try to preserve a way of life that is vanishing. The story of these women, the Makioka sisters, forms what is arguably the greatest Japanese novel of the twentieth century, a poignant yet unsparing portrait of a family--and an entire society--sliding into the abyss of modernity. Tsuruko, the eldest sister, clings obstinately to the prestige of her family name even as her...

"One morning, Takahashi, a writer who has just stayed up all night working, is interrupted by a phone call from his old friend Sonomura: barely able to contain his excitement, Sonomura claims that he has cracked a secret cryptographic code based on Edgar Allan Poe's The Gold-Bug and now knows exactly when and where a murder will take place -- and they must hurry if they want to witness the murder, because it's later that very night! Sonomura has a...

"Black and White is a full translation of Tanizaki Jun'ichirō's 1928 novel, Kokubyaku, with an introduction that identifies the special conditions that might have made it a "lost" novel. This novel offers a window into Tanizaki's life and work at a critical transition point in his career. The introduction focuses on the moment Tanizaki astounded the literary world in 1928 by writing three novels in the same year, after several years of relative...

Were it not for shadows there would be no beauty. In Praise of Shadows is an eloquent tribute to the austere beauty of traditional Japanese aesthetics. Through architecture, ceramics, theatre, food, women and even toilets, Tanizaki explains the essence of shadows and darkness, and how they are able to augment beauty. He laments the heavy electric lighting of the West and its introduction to Japan, and shows how the artificial, bright and

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Revolving around the changing of the seasons, The Makioka Sisters follows the lives of four sisters who have taken on their family's kimono manufacturing business, over the course of a number of years leading up to the Pacific War. A graceful study of a family at a turning point in history, and a poignant evocation of changing times and fading customs.