During a career that extended for more than half a century, from the end of the Meiji era in 1912 to the high-growth era of the 1960s, the novelist Tanizaki Jun'ichir was a champion of the imagination. In a literary milieu dominated by the autobiographical ruminations of the naturalists and later of the shishsetsu (personal fiction) writers, he upheld fiction founded on invention. For Tanizaki, who once said that only lies interested him, truth existed in the reification of the imaginary through language that declared its own primacy and materiality. A grand old man of letters, he accumulated a body of work--comprising a dozen major novels, scores of short stories and novellas, and many plays and essays--that fills thirty substantial volumes in the standard edition of his works. Each of his pieces attests to his undying faith in artifice as the cornerstone of art; his tightly constructed plots and...