Junichiro Tanizaki spent more than half a century writing about desire, and much of that career was reshaped by an earthquake. Born in Tokyo in 1886, he left the city after the Great Kanto Earthquake of 1923 and settled in the Kyoto and Osaka region, and critics have long described how the move turned a writer fascinated by Western modernity into one increasingly drawn to older Japanese traditions. The result is one of the most varied shelves in modern Japanese fiction, running from Jazz Age scandal to wartime family saga to explicit late novels about aging and obsession.
This guide walks through the Junichiro Tanizaki books you can read in English, which one to pick up first, and what sets the major novels apart. The Japanese authors hub covers his place in the tradition, our ranking of the best Japanese novels handles The Makioka Sisters, and the Japanese classics page covers his essay In Praise of Shadows. Tanizaki isn’t an author I’ve read, so the judgments below lean on his critics and translators rather than on my own reading.
Where to Start
The Makioka Sisters is the book most readers mean when they say Tanizaki, and it’s the best introduction to his scope. If you’d rather start with something short and sharp, Naomi shows the obsessive early Tanizaki in a single novel. The Key and Diary of a Mad Old Man, usually sold together, show the late Tanizaki at his most daring.
Anyone interested in design, architecture, or aesthetics should also read In Praise of Shadows, which is short enough to finish in an evening.
The Life, and the Reinvention
Tanizaki was born in Nihonbashi, in the merchant heart of Tokyo, into a family in the printing business that was prosperous when he was small and struggling by the time he was a student. He entered the literature department at Tokyo Imperial University in 1908 and was forced out in 1911 because he could not pay the fees, which settled the question of whether he would need to make a living by writing.
He had already begun. His first published work, a one-act play, appeared in 1910 in a literary magazine he had helped found, and the same year the short story The Tattooer made his name: a tattoo artist inscribes a giant spider on the back of a beautiful young woman, and her beauty acquires a demonic power over him. Britannica places those early stories in the company of Edgar Allan Poe and the French Decadents, which is a fair description of the young Tanizaki, a writer chasing sensation and largely uninterested in restraint.
In his Tokyo years he was drawn to everything Western: he lived in the foreign community on the Yokohama Bluff, went to the movies constantly, and wrote scenarios for silent films. Then the 1923 earthquake destroyed the city and he moved west, to the Kansai region, and stayed. His marriages tell part of the story of the rest: three of them, the last in 1935 to Matsuko Morita, whose family and sisters are generally cited as the inspiration for the Makiokas.
Tanizaki produced three separate modern Japanese versions of The Tale of Genji, in 1941, 1954 and 1965, a project that ran alongside his own fiction for a quarter of a century. He received Japan’s Imperial Prize in Literature in 1949, and in 1965 he became the first Japanese writer elected an honorary member of the American Academy and the National Institute of Arts and Letters. He died at Yugawara later that year, at seventy-nine.
Naomi
1924 to 1925 · translated by Anthony H. Chambers
A buttoned-up engineer takes in a young café waitress, intending to mold her into the kind of glamorous, Westernized modern wife he has seen in films, and instead finds himself completely under her control. He pays for her English lessons and her dancing lessons, and she uses both against him.
The novel is a satire of Japan’s infatuation with the West and a study of masochistic devotion, and it caused a sensation when it was serialized, to the point that the newspaper running it came under pressure to stop. Among the Junichiro Tanizaki novels it is the clearest statement of his early preoccupations, and it reads quickly: the engineer’s self-deception is funny before it turns pitiable, and Naomi herself is one of the great destructive characters in Japanese fiction.
Some Prefer Nettles
1928 to 1929 · translated by Edward Seidensticker
A husband and wife in a loveless marriage both know they should divorce and keep putting it off. He has a mistress, she has a lover, the arrangement is understood by everyone including their son, and still nobody acts. Meanwhile the husband finds himself drawn toward his father-in-law’s world of traditional puppet theater, old Osaka manners, and a young mistress kept in the old style.
Critics often read it as a mirror of Tanizaki’s own turn from Western modernity toward Japanese tradition, and it is the most delicately balanced of his novels: nothing is resolved, and the pull between the two worlds is left exactly as unresolved in the prose as it was in his life.
Quicksand
1928 to 1930 · translated by Howard Hibbett
An Osaka housewife tells a lawyer the story of her consuming affair with a younger woman from her art class, and of how the affair drew in her husband and a young man until all four were bound together by blackmail, forged letters and competing obsessions. The Japanese title, Manji, is the Buddhist symbol whose four arms stand for the four of them.
It was serialized in the magazine Kaizo, and the narration is written in Osaka dialect, which gives it an unusual, confiding voice in Japanese and gave Hibbett a serious problem in English. It has been filmed several times, and its plot is the most twisting of his major books.
The Secret History of the Lord of Musashi and Arrowroot
1931 to 1935 · translated by Anthony H. Chambers
Two short works published together in English. The Secret History of the Lord of Musashi is a mock-historical chronicle, assembled from invented sources, of a medieval warlord whose erotic life was shaped by something he witnessed as a boy during a siege, and it is among the strangest things Tanizaki wrote. Arrowroot is a quieter, digressive account of a journey into the mountains of Yoshino in search of the past, in which the narrator’s research keeps dissolving into legend.
Together they show Tanizaki playing with history in two completely different registers, the lurid and the elegiac, and Chambers’s notes are what make both readable for anyone who doesn’t know the periods involved.
A Portrait of Shunkin
1933 · translated by Howard Hibbett
The story of a blind, imperious teacher of the shamisen and the servant who devotes his entire life to her, told through the fragments of an old biography and the narrator’s speculation about what the record leaves out. Her cruelty to him is constant and he accepts it as the price of proximity, and the story’s famous turn is an act of devotion so extreme that readers argue about it a century later.
It’s one of Tanizaki’s most admired shorter works and a concentrated version of his fascination with beauty and self-abasement. In English it appears in the collection Seven Japanese Tales, which is the best single sampler of his short fiction.
In Praise of Shadows
1933 · translated by Thomas J. Harper and Edward G. Seidensticker
His famous essay on darkness, lacquerware, toilets, candlelight, and the beauty of dimly lit rooms, and on what electric light did to Japanese taste. It wanders, contradicts itself, and complains, and it has become the most widely read thing he wrote outside Japan, with a devoted following among architects and designers who quote it far more often than they quote his novels.
The Japanese classics page discusses it in full. Read it after The Makioka Sisters, which is the novel that puts its aesthetics into practice.
The Makioka Sisters
1943 to 1948 · translated by Edward Seidensticker
The Makioka family, prosperous Osaka merchants now in decline, try to arrange a marriage for the third sister, while the youngest resists every rule of propriety. It runs from 1936 to 1941, and its plot is mostly the slow business of negotiations, illnesses, outings and kimono, which is precisely why the war’s approach feels so heavy in it.
Its serialization was halted by the wartime authorities, who regarded a novel about the leisure of rich women as unhelpful to the war effort, and Tanizaki kept writing it privately until the war ended. It is his longest and most celebrated novel, discussed at length in our Japanese novels ranking, and the The Makioka Sisters page covers the title, the real family, and the three film versions.
The Reed Cutter and Captain Shigemoto’s Mother
1932 and 1949 to 1950 · translated by Anthony H. Chambers
Two novellas about obsessive love, each narrated by a son looking back at his father. In The Reed Cutter, a man recounts his father’s devotion to a woman he could not marry, and the arrangement the two households made instead. In Captain Shigemoto’s Mother, set in the Heian court, an elderly minister is tricked into giving up his young wife to a younger rival, and his son spends a lifetime trying to recover the memory of her.
The second is the more remarkable: it is Tanizaki writing in the world of the Genji he had spent years translating, and the longing in it is for a mother rather than a lover, which gives his usual material a strange new charge.
The Key
1956 · translated by Howard Hibbett
A middle-aged professor and his wife each keep a secret diary about their marriage and their sex life, and each writes knowing, or hoping, that the other will read it. The novel alternates between the two diaries, and the reader watches both spouses manipulate each other through what they pretend to hide, while the professor’s health gives way under the strain of a scheme he has designed himself.
It was frank enough to cause controversy in Japan when it appeared, it has been filmed repeatedly, and it is the purest demonstration of Tanizaki’s late method: two unreliable narrators and no authorial voice to adjudicate between them.
Diary of a Mad Old Man
1961 to 1962 · translated by Howard Hibbett
An ailing, wealthy man in his late seventies records his physical decline and his fixation on his glamorous daughter-in-law, especially her feet. He is paying for her company in small ways, she knows exactly what she is doing, and the book is candid about age, illness and money in a way little else in the period is.
It is darkly funny, and one of Tanizaki’s final major works, written when he was himself old and ill. In English it is usually published in a single volume with The Key as seen above, which makes the pair an efficient way to meet the late Tanizaki, though reading them back to back is a bracing experience.
The Shorter Books and the Memoir
Several more volumes have reached English. A Cat, a Man, and Two Women, from New Directions, is a comic novella about a man whose two wives compete for his attention while he cares mainly about his cat, and it is the lightest thing on this shelf. The Gourmet Club gathers six stories about food and appetite, including the title piece about a group of gluttons who go looking for sensations no restaurant can supply. Childhood Years is his memoir of growing up in Meiji Tokyo, useful for anyone who wants the city he lost in 1923.
Then there are the first-time translations of recent years: Devils in Daylight, from 1918, a lurid early story about two men who spy on what appears to be a murder, translated by J. Keith Vincent. The Maids, a late novel about the young women who worked in a household over decades, translated by Michael P. Cronin. Red Roofs and Other Stories, translated by Anthony H. Chambers and Paul McCarthy. And In Black and White, a 1928 thriller translated by Phyllis I. Lyons, which was never even published as a book in Japanese outside his collected works.
These are for readers who already know the major novels. Pico Iyer, reviewing Devils in Daylight and The Maids for The New York Review of Books, judged both minor, interesting mainly for what they show about how Tanizaki’s work changed from the beginning of his career to the end.
The Full English List at a Glance
Novels and novellas: Devils in Daylight · Naomi · Some Prefer Nettles · Quicksand · In Black and White · The Secret History of the Lord of Musashi · Arrowroot · The Reed Cutter · A Portrait of Shunkin · A Cat, a Man, and Two Women · The Makioka Sisters · Captain Shigemoto’s Mother · The Key · Diary of a Mad Old Man · The Maids
Essays, stories and memoir: In Praise of Shadows · Seven Japanese Tales · The Gourmet Club · Red Roofs and Other Stories · Childhood Years
Where to Go Next
Tanizaki’s modern versions of Murasaki’s novel make The Tale of Genji page a natural companion, and his contemporaries have their own guides: the Yasunari Kawabata guide and the Natsume Soseki guide. The Yukio Mishima guide covers the most famous writer of the generation that followed.
