Junichiro Tanizaki, chronicler of change

By B.H.

FACTS and statistics struggle to capture the emotional effect of sudden social change on the everyman. That is where fiction excels, and no one chronicles that feeling of the world moving underfoot better than Junichiro Tanizaki. One of 20th-century Japan’s most acclaimed writers, Tanizaki was a prolific author who chronicled his country for six decades. He offers a lens on history that is at once thorough and compelling, simultaneously domestic and outward-looking. Two novels, “The Makioka Sisters” (1943) and “The Maids” (1962), its apparent counterpart, are particularly insightful; they offer a portrait of sweeping change as experienced by the wealthy and those who served them. A new translation of “The Maids” should encourage readers to revisit a career that spanned industrialisation, world wars and natural disasters.

Tanizaki was born in Tokyo in 1886, 20 years after the Meiji Restoration, which brought wide-ranging political and economic reforms and opened the country up to world trade and immigration. He spent time studying Literature at the Tokyo Imperial University before pursuing a career in writing the early 1900s, moving to Kyoto in 1923. Much of his work is by turns suspenseful, sensual and comedic, with obsession and passion serving as recurring themes.