The long career of Junichiro Tanizaki … offers a spectacle of unity in the utmost diversity. From his early "diabolist" tales through the traditionalist underpinnings of his middle period to the erotic realism of his last novels, Tanizaki's preoccupations remain the same: the secret ritual, the obsessive desire, the nostalgia so profound that it defines an entire existence. Oddly, he is also the most objective of writers. Never judging, he turns his subjects around and inside out, proposing motives, contradicting them. He rarely hesitates to make jokes of the grotesque figures his characters cut as they attempt to reconstruct the world according to the laws of fetishism.

Of the many fetishes that crop up in Tanizaki's books, few are as bizarre as that of Terukatsu, the Lord of Musashi [the protagonist of The Secret History of the Lord of Musashi], who responds only to the sight of noseless male...