Jun'ichirō Tanizaki

Jun'ichirō Tanizaki was a Japanese novelist born on 24 July 1886 in Nihonbashi, in Tokyo, and he died on 30 July 1965. He began publishing while still a student and became one of the leading figures of modern Japanese literature. His early work was drawn to beauty, desire and obsession, often with a daring and playful eye. After moving to the Kansai region following the great Kanto earthquake of 1923, he turned increasingly to traditional Japanese culture, though he never stopped writing about the tensions between old and new, East and West. His novels explore marriage, family, longing and the strange pleasures people hide from one another. He also wrote essays on aesthetics and produced a well-known modern translation of The Tale of Genji into modern Japanese. His clear, elegant style and his unflinching interest in human appetite have kept him widely read in Japan and abroad.