Tanizaki Jun'ichirō: Life and Major Works

Born in Nihonbashi, Tokyo, in 1886; his given name was likewise Jun'ichirō. He dropped out of the Japanese literature department of Tokyo Imperial University. His debut work, "Shisei" ("The Tattooer"), was highly praised by Nagai Kafū, and he emerged in the literary world as a standard-bearer of the Aesthetic school. From an early period marked by extraordinary sensuous beauty and the worship of women, he moved to the Kansai region after the Great Kantō Earthquake, and from then on published works set in the Kansai region — "Chijin no Ai" ("Naomi"), "Manji" ("Quicksand"), "Tade Kuu Mushi" ("Some Prefer Nettles") — deepening his devotion to classical Japanese beauty and tradition. With "Shunkinshō" ("A Portrait of Shunkin") and "Sasameyuki" ("The Makioka Sisters") he established a prose style that carried Japanese aesthetic sensibility to its height, and in his later years he continued to show vigorous creative energy with works such as "Kagi" ("The Key") and "Fūten Rōjin Nikki" ("Diary of a Mad Old Man"). He was repeatedly named a candidate for the Nobel Prize in Literature and is counted among the towering figures of modern Japanese literature. He died in 1965 in Yugawara, Kanagawa Prefecture, of kidney failure, at the age of 79.