'The outstanding Japanese novelist of the century...The Makioka Sisters is his greatest book' Edmund White, New York Times Book Review
Junichiro Tanizaki was one of Japan's greatest twentienth century
novelists. Born in 1886 in Tokyo, his first published work - a
one-act play - appeared in 1910 in a literary magazine he helped to
found. Tanizaki lived in the cosmopolitan Tokyo area until the
earthquake of 1923, when he moved to the Kyoto-Osaka region and
became absorbed in Japan's past.
All his most important works were written after 1923, among them
Some Prefer Nettles (1929), The Secret History of the Lord of
Musashi (1935), several modern versions of The Tale of Genji (1941,
1954 and 1965), The Makioka Sisters, The Key (1956) and Diary of a
Mad Old Man (1961). He was awarded an Imperial Award for Cultural
Merit in 1949 and in 1965 he was elected an honorary member of the
American Academy and the National Institute of Arts and Letters,
the first Japanese writer to receive this honour. Tanizaki died
later that same year.
Exquisite craftsmanship
*Guardian*
An exquisite novel about four sisters living though a turbulent
decade, during the Forties and Fifties, I'd put it in the 10
greatest books of the 20th century
*Daily Express*
A complex, detailed and agreeably gossipy book...The author's
obvious nostalgia for this vanished world does not prevent him from
looking objectively at its darker side and this, together with his
artful blend of the exotic and the mundane, creates an absorbing
and richly textured story
*Sunday Times*
A subtle, moving novel
*The Times*
A classic novel of a whole country about to turn on the terrible
hinge of the war into modernity; its tone is elegiac and bleak
*Observer*
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