For all his emphasis on the subconscious, Tanizaki himself was a very self-conscious technician. Perhaps he thought a novel must have a form designed to engage the reader's conscious mind precisely because its contents made their appeal at a different level. In any case, his own novels are characterized by skillfully constructed plot and persuasive rhetoric, in sharp contrast to the uncanny, indefinable nature of their central themes and characters. (p. 71)

Jun'ichirō Tanizaki 1886–1965 The Granger Collection, New York

Tanizaki's concept of structure, as it emerges from the controversy [between himself and Akutagawa Ryūnosuke] is quite clear: a novel should have a tightly knit, skillfully woven plot. "Its components," he observed elsewhere, "should embrace each other so tightly that if one were to be removed the whole would collapse." Not many Japanese literary theorists have shared this approach. Japanese readers have always liked a loose, episodic kind of...