The great books list features a number of Japanese writers but between Basho and the 20th Century Japanese literature had little impact outside of the islands of Japan. The early 20th Century saw a world wide rebirth in interest in Japanese writing. Jun'ichirō Tanizaki was one of the major writers of modern Japanese literature, the best known after Natsume Sōseki. His themes of sexuality, eroticism, obsession and the evolution of Japanese society were challenging and controversial both within and outside Japan. The 20th Century was a century of tremendous upheaval and calamity for Japan and Tanizaki also explored the ideas of tradition and Japanese national identity.
Tanizaki was born in 1886 in Tokyo into a well-off merchant family. While Tanizaki enjoyed a pampered upbringing, his family fell on bad times during his teen years and while he entered university and the Literature Department of Tokyo Imperial University he was forced to drop out because of his inability to pay the fees.
Tanizaki published his first work at the age of 23 in 1909, a one-act stage play. He followed it up with the short story Shisei or The Tattooer. The erotic story with its S and M overtones became a success and Tanizaki became well known within literary circles in Japan. Tanizaki followed up this minor success with several similarly themed stories such as Kirin, Shonen and Akuma or The Devil.
In 1916 Tanizaki published two stories Shindo and Oni no men. He had recently married but the marriage was strained and his wife soon began an affair with another writer. The stress of the breakup showed itself in Tanizaki’s writing and he began a period of plays, novels and even early screenplays.
In 1922 Tanizaki moved to Yokohama in order to gain some inspiration from the city’s large foreign population. The interlude in Yokohama was a period where Tanizaki shook off some of the formal rigidity of Japanese life and led a western style bohemian lifestyle.
A year later, Tanikazi moved to the city of Kyoto. The ancient city had been devastated by an earthquake and the city was in a massive modernist rebuilding phase. The juxtaposition of new modernist architecture and the traditional buildings of older Japan interested Tanizaki.
His first work published after the earthquake became his first widely read novel; Chijin no ai or "Naomi," was published in 1925 and explored of his usual suspects: obsession, traditional class distinctions, sex and cultural identity. Four years later, Tanizaki wrote Manji or Quicksand, a daring work that explored lesbianism.
Tanizaki enjoyed a sustained period of popularity with novels like Tade kuu mushi (Some Prefer Nettles), Yoshinokuzu (Arrowroot), Ashikari (The Reed Cutter,) and Shunkinsho (A Portrait of Shunkin), the last published in 1934.
Throughout the rest of the thirties Tanizaki worked on a modern translation of the classic The Tale of Genji. He also worked on his masterpiece – Sasameyuki (which is translated ad a Light Snowfall but which was published in English as the Makioka Sisters).
The Makioka Sisters was published in Japan during the Second World War as the tide began to turn against the imperial Japanese Empire. It would not be published outside Japan in 1948.
After the war Tanizaki continued to write and publish and remained one of Japan’s most famous writers. One of his last novels The Key dealt with the issue of aging and sexuality. His tales of eroticism, identity and culture clash were ahead of their time are still widely read in Japan. Tanizaki died in Tokyo in 1965 aged 79.

The Makioka Sisters

Remarkably, Tanizaki completed this novel during the Second World War, when the Japanese Empire was being overrun by Allied forces. The novel addresses the theme of Japanese culture and how it was being lost to westernism and modernization. The novel takes place in Osaka during the war and follows the life of four sisters of a once wealthy family who are rapidly moving toward a more austere life. This obviously is an autobiographical tip of the hat to Tanizaki’s own young life. Two older married sisters are trying to arrange a marriage for the third while the youngest cant wait for the other to be married and begins a series of torrid affairs with whole unsuitable men. Again there is much speculation that Tanizaki used his own adulterous wife and her three sisters as the models for the characters.
The Makioka sisters cling to their family name and attend traditional events like the Cherry Blossom festival and put on a show of traditional decorum, but beneath the surface the family is wracked by conflicting emotions and events beyond their control.
The novel marries small beautiful portraits of family life and interactions with broader social, artistic and political themes. Unlike his earlier novels, Tanizaki implies most of the eroticism and sexuality rather than overtly describes them and explores the more subtle emotional undercurrents of the family.