The Short Fiction of Tanizaki Jun’ichirō

Desire, obsession, and the pull between old Japan and the modern world run through these stories by one of Japan’s greatest novelists. Tanizaki began publishing short fiction in the 1910s, and these early tales already show his fascination with beauty that wounds and pleasure that shades into cruelty. In the best known piece, a tattoo artist inscribes a giant spider on a young woman’s back and wakes something predatory in her. Other stories turn on fetish, performance, and the quiet power women hold over the men who worship them. Cool, precise, and faintly unsettling, they reward slow reading. Free PDF and EPUB editions are available here.