A diary of a middle-aged man who is in love with his younger wife, Ikuko. In spite of that love, the pair have grown physically apart, each unsure of the other's desires ...until the day Ikuko discovers her husband's diary with its desperate hints of jealousy and voyeurism. Ikuko realises she has fo[...]
The marriage of Kaname and Misako is disintegrating. Misako's father believes their relationship has been damaged by the influence of a new and alien culture, and attempts to heal the breach by educating his son-in-law in the Japanese traditions of aesthetic and sensual pleasure. The result is a con[...]
This is an enchanting essay on aesthetics by one of the greatest Japanese novelists. Tanizaki's eye ranges over architecture, jade, food, toilets, and combines an acute sense of the use of space in buildings, as well as perfect descriptions of lacquerware under candlelight and women in the darkness [...]
While recovering from a stroke, seventy-seven-year-old Utsugi turns to his diary to wryly record his struggle with his ageing body and his growing desire for his beautiful daughter-in-law Satsuko, a chic, Westernised dancer with a shady past.[...]
Sonoko Kakiuchi is a cultured Osaka lady, unfortunately widowed young. This work presents a tale of infatuation and deceit, of eliberate evil. Its theme is humiliation, its victim Sonoko's mild-mannered husband.[...]
Junichiro Tanizaki's "Naomi "is both a hilarious story of one man's obsession and a brilliant reckoning of a nation's cultural confusion.
When twenty-eight-year-old Joji first lays eyes upon the teenage waitress Naomi, he is instantly smitten by her exotic, almost Western appearance. Determined[...]
Tells the story of four sisters, and the declining fortunes of a traditional Japanese family. This title presents a loving and nostalgic recreation of the sumptuous, intricate upper-class life of Osaka immediately before World War Two. With surgical precision, it lays bare the sinews of pride, and b[...]
These two modern classics by the great Japanese novelist Junichiro Tanizaki, both utilize the diary form to explore the authority that love and sex have over all.
In The Key," a middle-aged professor plies his wife of thirty years with any number of stimulants, from brandy to a handsome young lo[...]
A pair of sophisticated novels by one of Japan's most important novelists of the twentieth century tells the stories of an ancient Japanese warrior obsessed with severed heads, and of two friends who journey into a mountain region cloaked in legends. Reprint. 12,500 first printing.[...]
Four sisters of a respected Japanese family find different ways to cope with the harsh realities of life in postwar Japan[...]
In "The Reed Cutter", the narrator meets a strange man who tells him a story of obsession; and a tenth-century Kyoto minister demands and receives his rival's wife during a drunken party in "Captain Shigemoto's Mother"[...]
This tale of domestic oppression centres on the once prosperous, now declining, Makiota family which is struggling to marry off one of their daughters. A portrait of a family and society striving to preserve their self-respect in the face of change, as innovation and tradition clash.[...]