Tanizaki Junichirō's works are often described as "sensuous," "dazzling," "exquisite," "devilish," or "sick." One associates his name with the exquisite beauty of a firefly seen through the sleeve of a silk kimono, or the perverse sexuality of a man exhausted by the nightly pleasure of being tortured by his wife. It seems that he writes in order to see what an artist can do with a theme or image that happens to capture his creative ambition. The "germ" of his fiction is sensual and aesthetic, rather than ideological….

Each of Tanizaki's works has one or two central images or themes which are so uncommon as to haunt the reader. Diary of a Mad Old Man offers as theme an old man's tremendous desire for certain parts of the body of his daughter-in-law, and as image, the beautiful young woman's footprints engraved on the old man's tombstone. In...