SOURCE: "Traditions and Individual Talents in Recent Japanese Fiction," in The Hudson Review, Vol. X, No. 2, Summer, 1957, pp. 302-8.

In the following excerpt, Miner discusses how Tanizaki Junichiro and Kawabata use different aspects of traditional Japanese literature, and how their work differs from the literature of the West.

There is little of the West in the mature art of the two greatest contemporary Japanese novelists, Tanizaki Junichiro and Kawabata Yasunari…. After periods of experimentation, they have modelled their styles on the two most important Japanese fictional traditions—Tanizaki on the classical monogatari style represented at its greatest in Murasaki's Tale of Genji (c. 1000), and Kawabata on the highly imagistic and compressed style of Ihara Saikaku (1642–1693). These two traditions differ from each other considerably but have common qualities which distinguish them from Western fiction….

Tanizaki is a novelist of states of mind and attitude which are developed bit by...