My favorite painting in all the world is one that I have never seen. It is "Portrait of Taira Shigemori" by the medieval Japanese painter Takanobu, and it is in a private collection in Tokyo. I know it from a color reproduction in André Malraux's The Voices of Silence, and every time I look at it again I am left breathless with wonder and delight. I feel (as Malraux meant me to feel) that this painting communicates perfectly to me across great barriers of time and culture.

Some Japanese prints, less powerfully, give me the same experience, but Japanese literature does not. The poetry seems to me entirely untranslatable, reading in English as faint rubbings of vanished poems. The few Japanese novels that I have read tended to leave me with a vague feeling of having missed the point. When she dyes a syllable of his name on her kimono, or he gives her the smaller segments of the tangerine, it is enormously significant, is it not? But significant of what, exactly?

In 1963 I picked up Junichiro Tanizaki's Seven Japanese Tales, translated by Howard Hibbett. Before I had finished the first tale, "A Portrait of Shunkin," I knew that I was in the presence of a master, and that, however native Tanizaki's fiction might be, it is also securely within the tradition of European literature. I had the sense of immediate communication that the Takanobu portrait gives me.

I was a little late coming to him. Tanizaki (now dead) was then 77; he had been publishing for more than 50 years; he was said to be Japan's greatest living writer; and he was a strong candidate for the Nobel Prize. Three of his novels have been published in this country: Some Prefer Nettles in 1955, The Makioka Sisters in 1957, and The Key in 1961. After reading all except the first, I am lost in admiration for Tanizaki's talents and variety.

Two of the novellas in Seven Japanese Tales are master pieces. My favorite, "A Portrait of Shunkin" (1933), is like nothing else I have ever read. It is the story of a female monster and her devoted slave. Shunkin is a blind samisen virtuoso and Sasuke is a former servant of her family and pupil of hers, who himself becomes a samisen master. He cares for her, runs her school, and they live together and have children. She will not marry him because of his social inferiority, however, and the children are sent out for adoption.

The novella rises to two related horrors. In the first, Shunkin, probably in revenge for her sadistic and rapacious treatment of pupils, is disfigured by an unknown attacker, who throws a kettleful of boiling water on her face as she sleeps. Shunkin makes Sasuke promise never to look at her ravaged face, and he keeps his promise by blinding himself with a sewing needle. These awful deeds, which arouse the sort of pity and terror that the self-discovery and self-blinding of King Oedipus do, result in a love of serene beauty. When Sasuke tells Shunkin of his act, she for the first time feels respect and love for him, and they embrace, weeping. "I am inclined to think," the narrator comments, "that the destruction of her beauty had its compensations for Shunkin in various ways. Both in love and in art she must have discovered undreamed-of ecstasies."

There are a number of exotic Japanese customs in the novella, but Tanizaki's craft makes the details of nightingale singing or lark soaring, Shunkin's hobbies, seem as reasonable and familiar as my own pursuits. They are not put in for local color; they function symbolically in the story. The nightingales, which must be taken from the nest in infancy and carefully trained to sing artificial calls, perfectly symbolize the exactions of art; and Shunkin's prized lark, which soars up and never returns, bears with it her sight, her beauty, and her life.

The horror and ecstasy of the novella are kept in perfect tension by a narrator, a masterly creation, who endlessly questions, speculates, and doubts. Thus we see Sasuke's fanatic joy in sacrifice through the eyes of a man who cannot comprehend it (Melville uses the same device in "Bartleby the Scrivener" and "Benito Cereno"). The narrator's skepticism at the end of the story is perfect: "It seems that when the priest Gazan of the Tenryu Temple heard the story of Sasuke's self-immolation, he praised him for the Zen spirit with which he changed his whole life in an instant, turning the ugly into the beautiful, and said that it was very nearly the act of a saint. I wonder how many of us would agree with him."

The other superb novella in the book is "The Bridge of Dreams" (1959). It is another disturbing and perverse study of devotion, now in a recurring chain. The narrator's father is so devoted to his first wife that he gives his second wife her name and turns the second into a facsimile of the first; the second wife loves her husband so devotedly that when she has a child by him she sends it out for adoption, so that her predecessor's son may retain all her maternal love. The narrator, Tadasu, loves his stepmother (who has entirely merged with his mother in his mind) to the point of marrying, after his father's death, in order to have someone to take care of his stepmother; after she dies he divorces his wife and takes his half-brother, who "looks exactly like Mother," to live with him.

The story is thus a succession of ingrown triangles. These relationships are perverse and symbolically incestuous: Tadasu suckled at his mother's breasts until he was four; his stepmother encourages him to continue the habit, and he suckles at her dry breasts until he is 13; when her baby is sent away, Tadasu, then 19, sucks the milk from her breasts. He suffers "an agony of shame" until he realizes that his father must have arranged it all. In this perversity, again, there is great beauty. The various trios sit by the garden pond to enjoy the cool of the evening, with one mother or another dangling her feet in the water while father or son drinks beer, happy and at peace in their web of ties.

The symbolic resonance that birdsong brings to "A Portrait of Shunkin" is obtained here by poetry and one odd symbol. The novella begins on a poem, "On reading the last chapter of The Tale of Genji," written by one or the other of Tadasu's mothers. Other poems are quoted about the stream, or are inscribed on the gates of Heron's Nest (their house), or are mounted on the transom, or come to the narrator's mind in connection with some feature of the house. The effect is to cover Heron's Nest with a patina of order and beauty, so that the perverse attachments of the members of the family can be recognized as the corruption of traditional virtues.

The odd symbol is a "water mortar," a hollow bamboo tube under the pond's inlet, designed to clack regularly as it fills and empties. As an infant sleeping at his mother's breast, Tadasu heard the clack of the water mortar in his dreams; it is disconnected when his father is dying, and is started up again after the funeral. It seems to symbolize the security and reassurance that are the goals of the characters' neurotic attachments.

Ultimately, though, the water mortar remains mysterious, a voice not quite explainable by either hydraulics or psychoanalysis. All the mysteries of this uncanny novella remain: we never learn what the real reason is for anything, or which mother wrote the poem, or even whether Tadasu's wife killed his stepmother, as he suspects that she did. The title symbol, the bridge of dreams, is at once the title of the last chapter of Genji (where it represents Life), the footbridge over the pond at Heron's Nest, and Father's dying words (which well represent his Faustian ambition, handed on to the others, to bridge love across death).

The best of the other stories, "A Blind Man's Tale" (1931) is a historical novella about the warlord civil wars of the sixteenth century; its theme is likewise devotion, the lifelong loyalty of the narrator, a blind minstrel and masseur, to his noble lady. The other four are short, and much less impressive. They are: "The Tattooer" (1910), "Terror" (1913), "The Thief (1921), and "Aguri" (1922). I think that, as was the case with Chekhov, Tanizaki needs the roominess of the larger form for his highest artistry.

The two novels that I have read further display Tanizaki's range. The Makioka Sisters is an excellent novel of a sort that does not very much interest me, the long realistic family chronicle. Its action is the struggle to get the third sister, Yukiko, properly married; when that is achieved the novel ends. Meanwhile Tanizaki has taken us through "the most disastrous flood in the history of the Kobe-Osaka district," "the worst typhoon" to hit Tokyo "in over ten years," and the China Incident. The book communicates the very texture of Japanese life, and that is the trouble. When, on their honeymoon, Teinosuke asks his wife Sachiko to name her favorite fish, and she names sea bream, this is not some powerful symbol of her aspirations, as are Shunkin's nightingale or Tadasu's water mortar; it is just her taste in fish.

The Key is something else again. Hardly longer than a novella, it is a sensual and melodramatic story, told in His and Hers diaries, of a professor's debauching of his innocent wife, so successfully that she kills him to live with her lover, who will be married for convenience to her daughter. Ikuko is another monster, another Shunkin, but here we watch the process of manufacture.

Tanizaki's theme is not really devotion, but devotion curdled into neurotic fixation. In the fashion of Japanese culture, he is very matter-of-fact about the body. What is quite remarkable is the way Tanizaki combines this with a sense of the body's mystery. There is no matter-offactness, but a burning sensuality, in the professor's photographing his wife naked in The Key, published when the author was 70, or in Tadasu at his stepmother's breasts in "The Bridge of Dreams," published when the author was 73.

In this respect, as in many others, Tanizaki reminds me of the Leskov of "Lady Macbeth of the Mtensk District." If one cannot be Tolstoi or Dostoevsky, it is not too bad to be Leskov.