Jun'ichirō Tanizaki is read about 1,062 times a day, in 42 languages.
A typical day, 30 days to 22 October 2026
The middle day of the days counted, so one week of news cannot move it. The line under it is the last 397 days, one point a day.
Something wrong?Tanizaki wrote about erotic obsession and family life with equal precision, mapping the collision between Japanese tradition and the West as his country hurtled through the 20th century. His range ran from shocking to subtle, and the Nobel committee noticed.
A life in dates
Also in Deutsch
Photos 7
Tanizaki (left) as a student at the First Higher School, and its Head Master Nitobe Inazō (right), in 1908.
Tanizaki in 1913, shortly after his literary debut.
Tanizaki with his daughter Ayuko, 1938.
Tanizaki's old residence "Ishōan" in Kobe, where he wrote the earlier part of Sasameyuki in 1943.
Tanizaki in 1948.
Plaque marking the site of the birthplace of Tanizaki Jun'ichiro in Ningyocho, TokyoAwards
In their orbit
About this person
Born in 1886, Tanizaki spent his career tracking the seismic shifts in Japanese society as it lurched between old forms and Western influence. His fiction moved between extremes: destructive sexuality in some works, quiet domestic tensions in others, but nearly all of it circled the same question of what cultural identity meant when tradition and modernity kept colliding. The narrators in his stories often searched for answers he never pretended to have. By 1964 he was on the final six-author shortlist for the Nobel Prize in Literature. He died the following year, in July 1965, one of the most prominent writers modern Japan produced.
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