[Keene is an American educator, translator, and critic with a special interest in Japanese literature. In the following excerpt, he examines recurring motifs in Tanizakïs short fiction.]

The writings of Tanizaki Junichirō are apt to surprise equally by their exceptional diversity of subject and manner, and by their equally exceptional consistency of themes. The diversity is likely to attract our attention first. Tanizaki derived materials for his novels from the distant past of the Heian and Muromachi periods, from the war chronicles of the sixteenth century and the popular fiction of the early nineteenth century. Still other works were closely based on personal experience. His inspiration was usually Japanese, but at the outset of his career he was influenced especially by Baudelaire and Poe, as he later recalled with some shame: "It is not my intention to debate here whether having been influenced by the West was beneficial or harmful to my writings, but no one knows as well as I—to my great embarrassment—in what extremely superficial, indeed mindless ways this influence revealed itself." Apart from European influence, two journeys to China, his only travels abroad, added an exotic touch to some of his writings and provided the basis for harshly objective comments on Japan. Tanizaki used his materials freely, whether Japanese or foreign, sometimes producing carefully documented historical tales, sometimes works that, despite their factual appearance, are almost entirely of his invention.

Tanizaki's methods of narration embrace almost every variety of technique, including the normal third-person account; the first-person confession; the mixed contemporary and historical style in which the narrator (often Tanizaki himself) intrudes at times into the telling of a story from the distant past; and the novel composed of letters or diaries. The diversity of Tanizaki's work is suggested moreover by the remarkably contrasting shapes and appearances of the first editions of his books, each intended to produce a distinct impression by its format, type, binding and even paper as well as the content.

So great is the variety of works Tanizaki wrote in the half-century between 1910 (the year of his début with "The Tattooer") and 1962 (the year of Diary of a Mad Old Man) that it is only on reflection that we perceive the striking consistency of themes throughout the works composed over this long period. Most conspicuous was his utter preoccupation with women. His novels are filled with superbly evoked portraits of women, but with rare exceptions he seemed uninterested in depicting male characters. This is true, of course, of much modern literature in Japan; the men, in fiction at least, tend to be weak-willed and negative, no match for the women. Tanizaki created some characters that might be described as alter egos of himself—Sadanosuke in The Makioka Sisters comes most quickly to mind—but he failed to impart to them his own immense masculine energy and purpose. It seems improbable that Tanizaki was incapable of drawing such a character; rather, his absorption with women was so great as to make him see in men only the mirrors or slaves of his female characters.

The characteristic male in a Tanizaki novel is an abject figure whose greatest pleasure is to be tortured by the woman he adores. This is true whether the hero is a figure of the distant past or a contemporary. This masochistic worship of women, this glorification of demonical women who reduce men to grovelling slaves, is certainly not a heritage of the traditional Japanese literature. We cannot imagine Prince Genji craving to be trodden on by Murasaki or finding his greatest pleasure in waiting on her like a servant, but this is precisely true of Seribashi in Ashikari or Sasuke in "A Portrait of Shunkin." Of course, women are frequently depicted in the old literature as monsters of jealousy or deceit, and Saikaku's heroines (like Tanizaki's) sometimes exhaust their partners by excessive sexual demands; but although the worship of cruel women may have in fact existed in traditional Japan, Tanizaki was undoubtedly indebted to Western influence for literary expression of this phenomenon.

Tanizaki's first important story, "The Tattooer" (1910), concludes with the tattooer Seikichi becoming the victim of the work of art he has created. The girl into whose back he has etched a monstrous spider flashes a smile of triumph as she realizes she now is capable of trapping men within her terrible web. One theme, first given expression in the same story, was to persist through all of Tanizaki's later writings: Seikichi is first attracted to the girl by catching a glimpse of her naked foot. We are told: "To his sharp eyes a human foot was as expressive as a face. . . . This, indeed, was a foot to be nourished by men's blood, a foot to trample on their bodies."

An extreme expression of Tanizaki's foot-fetishism, as he himself called it, was "Fumiko's Feet" (1919). In this story an old man, infatuated with the beautiful feet of his young mistress, asks a young painter to draw her portrait in a pose that best reveals her feet. When he himself is bed-ridden and too feeble to play with the girl's feet in his accustomed manner, he asks the willing painter to roll like a dog at Fumiko's feet and allow himself to be trampled by her. The old man dies blissfully happy because during his last moments Fumiko's foot has been pressed against his forehead.

Almost every work of Tanizaki's has passages revealing his fascination with women's feet. In the play The Man with the Mandoline the hero, a blind man, drugs his wife so that he can fondle her feet while she sleeps. Sometimes, as in "A Portrait of Shunkin," it is the woman who insists on warming her feet against a man's face or chest, sometimes it is the man who longs desperately to feel the weight of a cruel woman's feet. In Tanizaki's last major work Diary of a Mad Old Man (1962), the tottering old man gets down on his hands and knees in the showerroom for the privilege of cramming his daughter-in-law's toes into his mouth. In the same work the foot-fetishism that runs through Tanizaki's entire career is given its grand finale in the description of the tombstone that the old man erects almost at the cost of his life: it is a reproduction of his daughter-in-law's footprint, enlarged to heroic size, and meant to stand in triumph forever over the abject old man.

A related aspect of foot-fetishism and the craven masculine surrender to the female, the desire to abase himself before her, is the man's fascination with her excreta. I can hardly recall a Western novel that even mentions the heroine's going to stool, but this is a frequent, almost obsessive theme in Tanizaki's works. The Makioka Sisters (1942-47) alone contains more detailed and graphic references to bowel movements than one would find in a whole library of Western novels, and the last sentence of the work is the unforgettable: "Her diarrhoea never did stop that day, and even after she boarded the train it still continued." In "A Portrait of Shunkin" the attentions of Sasuke to his mistress Shunkin in the lavatory are lovingly described. In Secret Stories of the Lord of Musashi (1935) the hero manages to find his way to the beautiful princess by creeping up through the hole in her toilet. In The Mother of Captain Shigemoto (1950) the ninth-century courtier and lover Heijū falls madly in love with a palace lady who refuses him. Determined to cure himself of his passion, he decides to obtain possession of her chamber pot, supposing that when he sees that the contents are exactly like those of a quite ordinary person's chamber pot he will be disillusioned. He snatches away the pot from a lady-inwaiting and carries it home. But he cannot bring himself to open the covered leather box, not because he is afraid of being disgusted, but because he wants to savor the pleasure. "He took it in his hands again, lifted it up and looked at it, put it down and looked at it, turned it around, tried calculating the weight of the contents. At last, with great hesitation, he removed the lid, only for a balmy fragrance like that of cloves to strike his nostrils." He probes the contents, more and more astonished by the exquisite fragrance. Instead of being disillusioned he is now frantically determined to become intimate with so extraordinary a woman. Carried away by his delight, "he drew the box to him and sipped a little of the liquid in the contents."

Tanizaki's absorption with the excretory processes was not confined to his fiction. In his essay "In Praise of Shadows," for example, he devotes pages to describing the traditional Japanese toilets, which he finds infinitely more agreeable than the gleaming Western vessels. He declares, "It may well be said that the most elegantly constructed works of Japanese architecture are the toilets." In another essay, "All About Toilets" (1935), he writes, "A certain nostalgic sweet remembrance accompanies the smell of a toilet. For example, when someone who has been away from home for a long time returns after an absence of years, when he goes into the toilet and smells the odor he knew long ago, it brings back better than anything else memories of his younger days, and he really feels the warmth of 'I'm home!'" But in excreta as in feet Tanizaki insists that they belong to a beautiful woman. The steam from another man's urine on a cold day definitely does not please him.

Even a superficial acquaintance with the literature of psychoanalysis reveals how intimately connected fetishism is with the reiterated mentions of the excretory processes. Here is Freud on the subject: "Psychoanalysis has cleared up one of the remaining gaps in our understanding of fetishism. It has shown the importance, as regards the choice of a fetish, of a coprophilic pleasure in smelling which has disappeared owing to repression. Both the feet and the hair are objects with a strong smell which have been exalted into fetishes after the olfactory sensation has become unpleasurable and been abandoned." Various of the followers of Freud have pointed out that fetishism is associated with a clinging to the mother and the strong desire to identify with her, and with a castration anxiety. Case after case is reported of foot-fetishists whose memories of their mothers are lovingly entwined with fecal smells. But it is not within my powers to psychoanalyze Tanizaki; suffice it to say that Tanizaki's fetishism and coprophilia both seem to be associated with the longing for the mother, which is a powerful though intermittent theme in his works.

The heroines of Tanizaki's novels generally suggest in appearance what he wrote of his mother, who was small (less than five feet tall), delicate of features, well-proportioned rather than frail. On the whole Tanizaki had less to say about the faces of his women than their feet. The features are classical, we are told, but they are deliberately blurred, as in the description of Oyu-san in Ashikari: "There was something hazy about Oyu-sama's face, as if one saw it through smoke. The lines of her features—the eyes, the nose, the mouth—were blurred as if a thin veil lay over them. There was not one sharp, clear line." The narrator in "A Portrait of Shunkin" tells us, "There is a photograph of her at thirty-six which shows a face of classic oval outline and features so delicately modeled they seem almost ethereal. However, since it dates from the eighteen-sixties, the picture is speckled with age and as faded as an old memory. . . . In that misty photograph I can detect nothing more than the usual refinement of a lady from a well-to-do Osaka merchant family—beautiful, to be sure, but without any real individuality." In a late work "The Bridge of Dreams" (1959), again, we are told, "I cannot recall my first mother's features distinctly .. . all I can summon to my mind's eye is the vague image of a full, round face. . . . All I could tell from the picture was that she wore her hair in an old-fashioned style." The clearest identification of this dimly perceived beauty with his own mother was given by Tanizaki in the story "Yearning for My Mother," written in 1918, the year after his mother's death. When he finds her in his dream she is insubstantial, hardly more than a beautiful shadow.

The function of the male in Tanizaki's stories is to worship this unearthly creature. In Ashikari Seribashi's slavish devotion to Oyu-san not only keeps him from presuming to have physical relations with her, though sometimes they share the same bed, but even from having relations with his own wife. In "The Bridge of Dreams" the narrator's attachment to his stepmother, who has blended completely in his mind with the mother he lost when a small child, is so great that even after he is married he "was always careful to take precautions against having a child—that was the one thing I never neglected." The young man in this story still suckles at his stepmother's breast at the age of eighteen, and there is more than one hint that he has sexual relations with her. He marries only to provide the stepmother—whom he always refers to as Mother—with a devoted servant, and when the stepmother dies he immediately gets rid of his wife, preferring to live in his memories.

But if this mother figure is gentle and dimly perceived even when in her presence, she is often cruel. The fear that the mother may refuse the child her love apparently belongs to the same complex of phenomena associated with foot-fetishism I have already mentioned, but in Tanizaki's stories the cruelty of the beloved woman becomes a source of allure. For his male characters it is not enough to grovel before a beautiful woman, to kiss her feet and even to crave her excreta; he must feel she is cruel. The old man in Diary of a Mad Old Man describes his ideal of a beautiful woman: "Above all, it's essential for her to have white, slender legs and delicate feet. Assuming that these and all the other points of beauty are equal, I would be more susceptible to the woman with bad character. Occasionally there are women whose faces reveal a streak of cruelty—they are the ones I like best. When I see a woman with a face like that, I feel her innermost nature may be cruel, indeed I hope it is." The fascination Naomi, the heroine of A Fool's Love, exerts over the hapless hero lies as much in her cruelty as in her exotic beauty. Shunkin is conspicuously cruel to Sasuke, referring to him contemptuously as a servant. Even a seemingly compliant and inarticulate Kyoto lady, Ikuko in The Key (1956), will betray and destroy her husband. Indeed, the cruelty of a woman, her delight in observing pain, is often what first attracts a man to her. The hero of Secret Stories of the Lord of Musashi is captivated as a boy when he sees a beautiful young woman smile as she carefully cleans and dresses a severed head. He is in particular driven to an ecstasy of delight when he sees her tending a head from which the nose has been cut, a mekubi, or "female head," an obvious reference to castration. The whole life of the future Lord of Musashi is determined by that sight, and he desires nothing more than to recreate the scene, if possible becoming the severed head over which the smiling young woman bends. Oyu-san in Ashikari is certainly not a monster, but she demands not only obedience but utter sacrifice from her slaves. At the end of Manji (1930) Mitsuko destroys the health of her two worshippers by insisting that they drink heavy sedatives each night before going to bed, to insure that they will not be unfaithful to her. Such examples of cruelty only serve to inflame the men who wait on these beautiful women. Even if cruelty destroys a man's body it can only foster his passion.

Men sometimes figure in the novels in the role of consort to the queen bee, destined to be discarded once they have fertilized the women they worship. But in Manji the males are contemptible and even unnecessary. Sonoko is satisfied with her homosexual love for Mitsuko and has no use for her husband; Mitsuko, for her part, though tied to the feckless young man Watanuki, derives her greatest pleasure from the adoration of Sonoko, another woman. In other stories, however, the male is necessary, if only to provide the woman with a suitable object for her sadistic impulses. Kikkyō in Secret Stories of the Lord of Musashi is drawn to Terukatsu because he alone can enable her to wreak vengeance on her husband, Norishige. Terukatsu supposes that once he has performed the service demanded of him—cutting off Norishige' s nose and destroying his castle—Kikkyō will surrender herself to him, but he discovers that the queen bee, her object attained, has no further interest in her abettor.

The woman usually express no particular preference in men, as if their features made no difference. It is true that Itsuko in The Key is attracted by Kimura's young body, but there is never any suggestion that she loves him or values him as anything more than the instrument of her lust. For that matter, though Itsuko is repelled by her husband's body, she is not averse to intercourse with him, providing he is sufficiently active. Tanizaki, reflecting the sentiments of his female characters, seldom describes the faces of the males. One of his rare descriptions of a man's face, Watanuki's in Manji, is not so much a portrait as a forewarning of his treacherous character. Sonoko, though at first she finds Watanuki attractive, is quickly disenchanted.

But if handsome male features do not seem to interest women, ugliness is no obstacle. Kikkyō is more devoted to Norishige after his nose is cut off (his mouth has already been made into a hare-lip, and one ear has been shot off) than when he was whole. In Diary of a Mad Old Man the old man does not wish his daughter-in-law to see him when he removes his false teeth and looks, in his own words, exactly like a monkey, but she insists that it does not make any difference. Indeed, the indifference of Tanizaki's women to men suggests the indifference of a cat to human beings. Perhaps it was no accident that Tanizaki throughout his life was fascinated by cats.

I have so far described themes that remained astonishingly constant in Tanizaki's writings for over fifty years. My examples have been chosen from every period of his career, and many others might be adduced. I think that these are the basic themes of his books, but the last impression I would like to give is that his writings are monotonous or that he failed to respond in any way to the enormous changes that occurred in Japanese society. At one level at least Tanizaki's writings present an evolving set of ideas about traditional Japan and the West. This is expressed even in the preferences in women of his different heroes. For example, Jōji, the hero of A Fool's Love (1925), seems to embody Tanizaki's own feelings of about 1915. Jōji is enslaved by the European-looking beauty of Naomi (whose very name sounds foreign), so much so that he feels ashamed of his own typically Japanese features. At the end of the novel they are living in the foreign section of Yokohama, and he has accepted her demand that she have the right to entertain foreign male friends without interference from him. The implied condemnation of this surrender to the cult of Western beauty suggests that Tanizaki himself was no longer so susceptible. This is developed in Some Prefer Nettles (1929) into a rediscovery of traditional Japanese beauty. Kaname, the hero, is attracted by the West, particularly by the worship of women as goddesses, but in the end he finds himself succumbing to the quiet charms of an old-fashioned Kyoto woman. Tanizaki's former adulation of Western things is replaced by a new appreciation of traditional Japanese culture. In the decade after Some Prefer Nettles he gives us a collection of portraits of typically Japanese women, each composed and classical of face but harboring the ferocity of a tigress. The period was brought to an appropriate close with Tanizaki's translation into modern Japanese of The Tale of Genji, bringing new life to its great gallery of beautiful women.

It may have been the anxieties of war, perhaps even a fear that as the result of the war that began in 1941 Japan would be changed beyond all recognition, that drew Tanizaki back from the past to modern Japan, the Japan of the 1930's. With something of the elegiac spirit of a chronicler recording (lest people forget) the last days of Rome before the barbarian invasions, he recreated in The Makioka Sisters the city of Osaka in days of peace and luxury. The military authorities were right when they decided in 1943 that The Makioka Sisters was subversive, for in this novel Tanizaki indicates that Western elements had become precious parts of the lives of cultivated Japanese and were no longer merely affectations or passing crazes as in the days of Tanizaki's youth. The youngest sister, Taeko, is condemned for her waywardness, an excess of Western freedom, it is true, but the inarticulate Yukiko, a typically old-fashioned Japanese beauty, shows to best advantage in Western clothes.

The conflict between East and West in the minds and lives of the Japanese has now become the most hackneyed of all themes, the first one that leaps in pristine freshness into the mind of every maker of documentary films or television producer. But for Tanizaki this subject, which had absorbed him in the 1920's, lost all appeal and interest after the war. In the last novels the so-called conflict completely melts away. Tanizaki is no longer obsessed by his preference for the past. Utsugi, the old man of Diary of a Mad Old Man, has nostalgic remembrances of his mother, but he delights in the up-to-the-minute costumes of his daughter-in-law, Satsuko. Quite unlike the Tanizaki of In Praise of Shadows, Utsugi is eager to tear down the old, Edo-style house he grew up in and to erect instead a bright new Western-style house where he can live more independently of his wife. In the end he builds a swimming pool in the garden big enough for Satsuko to practice synchronized swimming. Old man Utsugi has accepted Western things as inevitable and even attractive elements in Japanese life. Like all the heroines of Tanizaki novels, Satsuko has a dazzlingly white complexion—in In Praise of Shadows Tanizaki had lovingly dwelt on his fascination for white skin, not the matter-of-fact white of a European woman's, but the mysterious, glowing ivory of a Japanese face—but she shows to advantage when sunburned. Satsuko's feet, of course, are important, but their shape is rather unlike that of Tanizaki's earlier heroines, for she has always worn shoes. Satsuko bathes in a tiled shower, rather than in the scented wooden tub Tanizaki lovingly described in Some Prefer Nettles, but this does not make her less desirable to her eager father-inlaw.

Tanizaki's early period as a writer was certainly marked by infatuation with the West. About 1918, he tells us, "I had come to detest Japan, even though I was obviously a Japanese." He dreamed especially of the kind of women he saw in foreign films. "What I sought were lively eyes, a cheerful expression and a clear voice, a body that was healthy and well-proportioned, and above all, long straight legs and adorable feet with pointed toenails cased in snugly fitting high-heeled shoes—in short, a woman with the physique and clothes of a foreign star." Tanizaki was in the mountains at Hakone at the time of the Great Earthquake of 1923. He was deeply worried about his family, but "almost at the same instant joy welled up inside me and the thought, 'How marvellous! Tokyo will become a decent place now.'" He had visions of a new Tokyo: "Orderly thoroughfares, shining, newly-paved streets, a flood of cars, blocks of flats rising floor on floor, level on level in geometrical beauty, and threading through the city elevated lines, subways, street cars. And the excitement at night of a great city, a city with all the amusements of Paris or New York, a city where the night life never ends. Then, and then indeed, the citizens of Tokyo will come to adopt a purely European-American style of life, and the young people, men and women alike, will all wear Western clothes. This is the inevitable trend of the times, and whether one likes it or not, this is what will happen."

Tanizaki could hardly have been a better prophet of what in fact did take place in Tokyo. However, after the earthquake he decided to move to the Kansai, and gradually his attitudes began to change. He discovered that "I loved the old Japan as a form of exoticism, in precisely the sense that a foreigner treasures the prints of Hiroshige." He visited Nara and Kyoto, again just like a foreign tourist. Gradually he shifted to a more positive appreciation of Japanese culture as it survived in the Kansai, and to an increasing distaste for Tokyo, which he considered a shoddy imitation of the West. Yokohama, where Tanizaki had in earlier days enjoyed dancing with foreign women, became in A Fool's Love the symbol of the unhealthy Japanese mania for the West. In contrast, the world described in In Praise of Shadows, is essentially that of Osaka, a city where the merchant class created a solid and substantial culture capable of resisting Westernization better than Tokyo, a city where the descendants of the old inhabitants had been pushed aside by latecomers, peasants attracted to the big city. . . .

Ashikari (1932), also a story of the Kansai, is a narration within a narration. Tanizaki, the antiquarian, visits Minase, the site of the palace of the thirteenth-century Emperor Gotoba. In a manner reminiscent of Merimée describing Roman ruins in Spain as a prelude to his story of Carmen, but more subtly, Tanizaki passes from the presentday loneliness of Minase to the Minase evoked by the poets, and then to the Minase of fifty years ago as Seribashi, the man he accidentally encounters, relates the story of Oyu-san. The use in this story of Kansai dialect would have been a mistake, for it would have called attention to the narrator, and it is essential that he be the transparent medium for the story who vanishes at the end. Tanizaki's intent in this story is quite the opposite of the usual kind of historical fiction. He wrote: "My wish has been to avoid imparting any modern interpretations to the psychology of Japanese women of the feudal period, but instead to describe them in such a way that I will recreate what those long-ago women actually felt, in a manner that appeals to the emotions and understanding of modern people." By preserving a distance between himself and his characters he kept intact the understated reserve that he felt to be an essential element especially in the women of the Kansai region. Some critics at the time evidently objected to this remoteness, but Tanizaki defended himself in a postscript written to "A Portrait of Shunkin" (1934): "In response to those who say that I have failed to describe what Shunkin or Sasuke are really thinking, I would like to counter with the question: 'Why is it necessary to describe what they are thinking? Don't you understand their thoughts anyway from what I have written?'"

Even at the height of Tanizaki's absorption with the Kansai, the last preserve of traditional Japan, he returned at times to more overt descriptions of his abiding, perverse inclinations. Secret Stories of the Lord of Musashi, as the title indicates, belongs to an entirely different world. It deals with a man, rather unusually for Tanizaki, and is set in the Kantōduring the sixteenth century. The theme, suitably announced in a preface written in stiff, formal Chinese, is the distorted sexual passion of the hero. Terukatsu, unlike the passive males of Manji, Ashikari or "A Portrait of Shunkin," is a martial leader, and his exploits are worthy of his heroic age. But, as Tanizaki reminds us in the preface, the sexual lives of heroes are often surprising. Terukatsu, for all his martial prowess, is a masochist who craves the cruelty of a beautiful woman. In this respect he shows his kinship with Seribashi, Sasuke and old man Utsugi.

Tanizaki employed a favorite technique in this work: he describes finding various old accounts of Terukatsu, and attempts to piece them together into a biography, emphasizing the aspects of his life that normally do not appear in typical accounts of the lives of great generals. The novel opens superbly. Terukatsu, a boy of thirteen, is initiated into the world of manhood by being led to a room in a besieged castle where women are washing, arranging and fastening name-tags to the heads of enemy dead. The scene, filled with a morbid, glowing quality, ranks with Tanizaki's finest achievements, and indeed with anything written in this century. Tanizaki may have derived inspiration from Oan Monogatari, an account of her experiences in Ogaki Castle at the time of the Battle of Sekigahara in 1600 by a young woman of the warrior class. But all that Oan Monogatari contains that is relevant is this single passage: "I remember that the heads which had been taken by our side were collected in the keep of the castle, each one with a tag attached to it. . . . There is nothing to be afraid of in a head. I sometimes went to sleep among all the heads with their carnal smell." Tanizaki may have been less influenced by the text than by the contemporary illustration that shows women in elaborate kimonos preparing the severed heads.

Terukatsu in later life not only enjoyed witnessing the spontaneous, indefinable cruelty of women, he even sought to provoke it, especially in women of the mildest dispositions. His wife O-etsu, an innocent girl of fifteen, is given to such girlish pleasures as hunting fireflies. In later life she takes orders as a nun and is known for her piety and saintliness. But in an unforgettable scene of the novel Terukatsu compels the priest Dōami (one of his biographers) to go down into a hole in the floor, leaving only his head exposed above the floor level, and to pretend that he is a severed head. Terukatsu, having made O-etsu drunk, tests her courage by asking if she will cut off Dōami's nose. She professes her willingness, though he eventually requires her only to drill a hole in Dōami's ear. She performs this service gladly, laughing all the while. When O-etsu recovers from her inebriation she recalls with mortification her wanton behavior. Terukatsu for his part is satisfied at having thus converted his angelic wife into a monster of cruelty, but this achieved, he loses interest in her.

Tanizaki intended to continue Secret Tales of the Lord of Musashi beyond its present conclusion, and even prepared a rough outline of subsequent developments. Although this project was never realized, he referred to it even in his late years, sometimes promising to return to this novel after he had completed his revised translation of The Tale of Genji. It is a pity he did not; even so, it ranks as one of his masterpieces.

The three complete translations of The Tale of Genji, the first of which appeared in 1938, and the third in 1965, the year of his death, unquestionably brought this great novel within the reach of the Japanese reading public—earlier critics had complained that it was easier to read in English translation than in the original—but we must regret the novels Tanizaki might have composed had he not chosen to devote years of his life to this task. Surely there can be no question of his having run out of things to write. After the first version of The Tale of Genji, in fact, Tanizaki wrote The Makioka Sisters, by far his longest novel and perhaps his best (though atypical because of the peculiar wartime circumstances of composition). Between the first and the second Genji translations Tanizaki also wrote such important works as The Mother of Captain Shigemoto, and between the second and third translations he wrote two of his most popular works, The Key and Diary of a Mad Old Man. . . .

It is fitting that Tanizaki's last novel, Diary of a Mad Old Man, like the last works of many other great artists; should have been comic. This does not mean that his earlier works are unrelievedly serious. Secret Stories of the Lord of Musashi, despite its macabre themes, is humorous in its description of the relentless pursuit of Norishige's nose, and some short works, like The Cat, Shōzō and the Two Women (1936), are amusing throughout. But Diary of a Mad Old Man is in its self-satire a wonderfully comic work, and at the same time true to Tanizaki's deepest feelings as The Key is not. It is as if Tanizaki, still intrigued by the old themes of his writings, is now able also to see them at such a distance that they appear comic. It is a captivating book, marred only by the weak ending. Probably this was because the logical ending, the death of the old man, was the one subject Tanizaki at this stage of his life could not treat with humor.

In 1934 Tanizaki wrote of himself, "I am basically uninterested in politics, so I have concerned myself exclusively with the ways people live, eat and dress, the standards of feminine beauty, and the progress of recreational facilities." No doubt this is how he chose to see himself, sometimes at least. But the more complex side of his writing, expressed in countless variations, surely imparted a distinctive quality, sombre, grotesque or comic, that contributed much to the greatness of the man I consider to have been the finest modern Japanese novelist.