SOURCE: "Tanizaki Jun'ichirō," in Modern Japanese Writers and the Nature of Literature, Stanford University Press, 1976, pp. 54-84.

Ueda is a Japanese educator and critic. In the following excerpt, he examines Tanizaki's treatment of beauty in his fiction.

Tanizaki Jun'ichirō (1886-1965) was never known as a literary theorist or critic. Always confident in his mission as a novelist, he had no urge to write a defense of literature or a social justification of the novel. Not a fast writer, he usually wanted to spend as much of his time as possible on writing fiction; he found little time for reading or evaluating the works of his contemporaries. And yet, by the end of his long literary career, he had produced a sizable number of writings that reveal his ideas on the nature of literature. There is, for instance, The Composition Reader, in which he said what he considered to...