SOURCE: "Tanazaki and Poe: The Grotesque and the Quest for Supernal Beauty," in Comparative Literature, Vol. XXIX, No. 3, Summer, 1977, pp. 221-40.

In the following excerpt, Mizuta Lippit analyzes the thematic and stylistic influence of Edgar Allan Poe on Tanizaki 's short fiction.

Students of Tanizaki usually agree that, like other Taisho writers, he began his career under the spell of the West: the influence of Poe, Baudelaire, and Oscar Wilde, among others, is reflected in many of his early works. It is agreed, however, that the influence of the Japanese literature of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, especially the erotic and sadistic stories in Kusazoshi and Kabuki plays, was also strong. According to the orthodox view, the influence of the western writers became superficial by the end of the Taisho period. Drawn to both East and West, Tanizaki, after a period of severe internal conflict between the two...