Junichiro Tanizaki

(1886 - 1965)

Born into the Tokyo merchant class in 1886, Junichiro Tanizaki as a young writer in the 1910s drew inspiration from Western authors—among them Edgar Allan Poe and Charles Baudelaire—while later in his career he embraced older Japanese models, translating into modern language the eleventh-century novel The Tale of Genji by Murasaki Shikibu. Between 1943 and 1948, Tanizaki serially published Sisters, a story of the clash between modern and traditional lifestyles.