Tanizaki is often regarded as having remarkably consistent themes despite the wide range of his subject matter, settings, and style. As a writer who is profoundly interested in the workings of the subconscious, he treated such recurrent themes as the femme fatale, foot fetishism, sado-masochism, longing for mother, coprophilia, and predilection for crepuscular beauty. Except foot fetishism, these themes appear in the two short novels [The Secret History of the Lord of Musashi and Arrowroot]. . . .

Another of Tanizaki's recurrent themes .. . is the child's longing for its mother. Tanizaki's own mother was a well-known beauty. In 1919, after his mother's death, he published "Longing for Mother," a poetic fantasy in which the narrator dreams of searching for his lost mother and encountering her as an unrecognizably young and attractive woman. This theme of longing for mother underlies the novel Arrowroot, in which the narrator's friend named Tsumura searches for the relatives of his long-deceased mother in an effort to learn about her background. The longing-for-mother theme is given an important twist in this novel, because Tsumura finds and falls in love with a cousin who resembles his mother, and eventually marries her. In other words, the image of the mother and that of the wife overlap—an important thematic link in the eleventh-century classic The Tale of Genji, in which the hero continually seeks the love of women resembling his dead mother. The influence of this classic tale by Murasaki Shikibu on Tanizaki is quite clear, for Tanizaki spent seven years (1935-1942) on translating the fifty-four chapters of The Tale of Genji into modern Japanese, not once but three times. (A direct result of Tanizaki's immersion in The Tale of Genji is his long novel The Makioka Sisters, 1943-1948, a nostalgic portrayal of the affluent Osaka merchant family in decline; this novel is often called the modern Tale of Genji.)

The Secret History of the Lord of Musashi is set in the sixteenth century, during the period of the so-called "Warring States," a time of constant warfare among samurai lords. In his first historical fiction, Tanizaki uses the device of a modern-day narrator gathering his material from diverse historical sources to tell the story of the unusual sexual life of the warlord. In the case of The Secret History, these sources are all fictitious, but the manner of their use gives the air of authenticity to the novel. This narrative technique is used also in other works (such as "A Portrait of Shunkin").

The story focuses on the sexual deviation of the hero, from its awakening in his boyhood to its grotesque development in his adulthood. As a young boy, he is sent to his father's overlord as hostage and experiences a siege by enemy forces. It was standard practice during the medieval period in Japan to take enemy heads as proof of one's conquest. The boy witnesses a group of women cleaning, dressing, and tagging severed heads of the enemy for inspection. He is mesmerized particularly by the faint, unconsciously cruel smile of a beautiful young woman as she looks upon the heads, and he wishes to become a severed head himself, to be handled and smiled at. The morbid, masochistic pleasure he experiences becomes the most intense when he sees a head without the nose. Evidently, warriors sliced off the noses of the enemies instead of their heads when they had too much to carry, to identify and claim their trophies later. The boy becomes obsessed with the noseless head, and when he sneaks into the enemy camp and kills the sleeping general, he takes the general's nose. The siege ends abruptly, and the cause of the general's shameful death is kept a secret. The boy reaches adulthood, is now called Terukatsu, and continues to serve the overlord. Some years later, Norishige, the son of the overlord, marries Lady Kikyō, the daughter of the dead enemy general. A series of shooting accidents occurs to Norishige, in which he eventually loses a part of his upper lip and an ear. It becomes clear to Terukatsu that someone is trying to shoot off Norishige's nose, and he senses the revenge of Lady Kikyō for her father's ignominious death. Terukatsu offers his services to the lady and becomes her accomplice. One night Norishige is attacked and his nose is sliced off. Terukatsu becomes the lady's lover and derives sexual stimulation from the sight of the comically pathetic noseless Norishige. Lady Kikyō's hidden malice and cruelty toward her husband are projections of Tanizaki's image of the Japanese woman of the feudal period—a woman who has a virtuous appearance yet harbors thoughts of an illicit love, hatred, cruelty, and so forth.

When Terukatsu becomes the lord of the province of Musashi and marries, he tries to recreate the sadistic pleasure by having a servant pose as a noseless head; however, his wife's refusal to participate in this game puts an end to his plan after the first attempt. His marriage thus turns out to be disappointing, so Terukatsu attacks Norishige's domain and captures his former overlord and lady, to try to regain Lady Kikyō's attention. However, the novel ends somewhat abruptly with Lady Kikyō turning into a virtuous and loving wife to Norishige and thus frustrating Terukatsu's scheme. The story is told through a mixture of narration and exposition, with restraint and humor. Much of the humor is generated by the "clown" figure of the harelipped and noseless Norishige, whose increasingly severe speech impediment is ably, if not with scientific accuracy, captured in English translation as, for instance: "I affeal hoo you hymhahy as a samurai" (I appeal to your sympathy as a samurai).

Arrowroot (the original title: Yoshino kuzu, or, Yoshino arrowroot) is set in the modern times of the 1930s. It is at once a simpler and a more complex work than The Secret History. It is simpler in terms of "plot": the writer-narrator visits Yoshino, an area rich in history and legends, in search of material for fiction, in the company of a friend named Tsumura, who searches for his dead mother's relatives there and finds a cousin, whom he marries. Abounding in scenic descriptions, the work may thus be described as a travel sketch. The novel is complex in terms of interlocking imagery, associations, and multiple layers of time.

The frame of the novel is the narrator's recollection of his trip to the mountains of Yoshino twenty years earlier, in the early 1910s. In addition to this return to the narrator's personal past, various literary associations and historical legends surrounding Yoshino also point to several time periods in the past. These include the narrator's memories of earlier trips to Yoshino as well as a Kabuki play associated with the location (dating back to the eighteenth century); the narrator's viewing of the drum Hatsune, said to be made with a fox skin—the drum which purportedly belonged to Lady Shizuka, a paramour of the tragic hero Yoshitsune (twelfth century) and who is depicted in both the Kabuki play and Nō plays (fourteenth century). In Tsumura's memory, his mother is associated with the music "The Cry of the Fox," which is in turn associated with the folktale-based story of the fox, Kuzunoha (Arrowroot Leaf), assuming the human form, marrying a man and giving birth to a child, yet having to return to the animal realm. The longing-for-mother theme is evident in this fox/mother story as well.

In addition to such intricate linking of literary allusions, the work is imbued with the special aura of the mountains of Yoshino, which served as the natural fortress and hiding place for the Southern Court during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, when the imperial line split into two factions and maintained an uneasy rivalry, finally ending in the victory of the Northern Court. These multiple layers of time resonate with one another and give depth to the narrative.

One of the characteristics of Tanizaki's writings is richness of sensory details. An excellent example is seen in Arrowroot, when the narrator and his friend are offered ripe persimmons: "A large, conical persimmon with a pointed bottom, it had ripened to a deep, translucent red, and though swollen like a rubber bag, it was as beautiful as jade when held up to the light. . . . Tsumura and I each devoured two of the sweet, syrupy persimmons, reveling in the penetrating coolness from our gums to our intestines."