Jun'ichirô Tanizaki was born in the Nihonbashi district of Tokyo in 1886. Although his grandfather was a prosperous merchant, Tanizaki's own father was without commercial talent, and a series of abortive business ventures meant the family was always short of money. All but one of Tanizaki's younger siblings were dispatched to foster homes, and had it not been for the intervention of family friends, Tanizaki himself would have been unable to complete his education.

Much more important to Tanizaki's development than his hapless father were the women in his life: his beautiful mother, Seiki, and his nursemaid, Miyo. The cosseted boy is reported to have suckled at his mother's breast until the age of six and his nursemaid slept at his side throughout his childhood.

Decadence and Diabolism
Entering Tokyo Imperial University as a Japanese literature student at the age of twenty-two, Tanizaki was instrumental in establishing the literary journal Shinshichô, the third issue of which featured his short story "The Tattooer." The tale of a tattoo artist who decorates the back of a young girl with a spider that enables her to dominate the opposite sex, it featured the luxuriant prose, rich descriptive detail, and risqué subject matter that were to characterize the writer throughout his career. Tanizaki was taking a deliberate stand against the literalness of the Naturalists and, according to Gessel, his influences at this time were Edgar Allan Poe, Oscar Wilde, Baudelaire, and Krafft-Ebbing's studies in sexual pathology.

As offers from magazines poured in, Tanizaki dropped out of university to devote himself to writing, publishing his first collection of stories in 1911. He married Chiyo Ishikawa in 1915, but soon started living with her younger sister, Seiko, instead. Tanizaki was so besotted with all things modern and Western at this stage that he moved to the foreign district of Yokohama in the early 1920s, and with her occidental looks and movie star ambitions, Seiko dovetailed more neatly with this obsession than her placid sister. Seiko is even thought to be the model for the promiscuous female protagonist of Naomi, Tanizaki's 1924 novel about Taisho Era decadence.

West is Best
After the Great Kanto Earthquake of 1923, Tanizaki moved his family to Western Japan. This was originally intended as no more than a temporary expedient, but, accustomed as Tanizaki was to the relentless modernization of Tokyo, the traditional atmosphere of Kansai (the Kyoto-Osaka-Kobe area) seemed dreamlike and exotic by comparison and he was to spend the rest of his life there.

The 1928 novel Some Prefer Nettles, about a man trapped in a passionless marriage who finds consolation in the beauty of old Japan, was clearly autobiographical. In 1930, Tanizaki shunted his wife Chiyo off onto a poet friend of his, and in 1931 he was briefly married to a student little more than half his age, before wedding Matsuko Morita, the ex-wife of a wealthy Osaka merchant, in 1935.

Tanizaki's books from this period—The Secret History of the Lord of Musashi, The Reed Cutter, A Portrait of Shunkin—though set in the Japan of several centuries ago tend to deal with the modern theme of sexual obsession. This enthusiasm for the past found its logical culmination in Tanizaki's rendering of the eleventh-century The Tale of Genji into modern Japanese, a massive undertaking that took several years.

Respectable if Dirty Old Man
During the war, Tanizaki worked on his masterpiece, The Makioka Sisters, a psychological study of three sisters from a declining Osaka merchant family. It was one of his least sexual works but fell foul of the censors and so was not published until 1948. Partly because of his refusal to be co-opted by the militarists, Tanizaki was lionized after the war, receiving the Medal of Culture in 1949. Respectability did nothing to affect his choice of subjects, and later works such as The Diary of a Mad Old Man and The Key address the paradox of unfading sexual desire in impotent old age. Tanizaki died in 1965.

"An obsessive concern with 'lust, cleptomania, sadomasochism, homosexuality, foot-fetishism, coprophilia and Eisenbahnkrankheit (railroad phobia)' does not constitute a focus upon the concerns of the average citizen" drily observes Tanizaki biographer Gessel. Sexual deviancy may be Tanizaki's best known, but it is very far from being his only subject. Aside from an artificiality worthy of Flaubert or Oscar Wilde, at different times of his career his works display an insight into female psychology worthy of Henry James, a playfulness worthy of Nabokov, and a historical knowledge worthy of Victor Hugo. Perhaps Tanizaki's overriding characteristic as a writer is his uninhibited and innocent zest for life in all its aspects.