SOURCE: "Three Modern Novelists: Tanizaki Junichirō," in Landscapes and Portraits: Appreciations of Japanese Culture, Kodansha International Ltd., 1971, pp. 171-85.

Keene is an American educator, translator, and critic with a special interest in Japanese literature. In the following excerpt, he examines recurring motifs in Tanizakïs short fiction.

The writings of Tanizaki Junichirō are apt to surprise equally by their exceptional diversity of subject and manner, and by their equally exceptional consistency of themes. The diversity is likely to attract our attention first. Tanizaki derived materials for his novels from the distant past of the Heian and Muromachi periods, from the war chronicles of the sixteenth century and the popular fiction of the early nineteenth century. Still other works were closely based on personal experience. His inspiration was usually Japanese, but at the outset of his career he was influenced especially by Baudelaire and Poe, as he later recalled...