Anthony Hood Chambers

Remembering Tanizaki Jun’ichiro and Matsuko provides previously unpublished memories, anecdotes, and insights into the lives, opinions, personalities, and writings of the great novelist Tanizaki Jun’ichiro (1886–1965) and his wife Matsuko (1903–1991), gleaned from the diaries of Edward Seidensticker and two decades of Anthony Chambers’s conversations with Mrs. Tanizaki and others who were close to the Tanizaki family.

Diary Entries, Interview Notes, and Letters, 1954-1989

Remembering Tanizaki Jun’ichiro and Matsuko

Adriana Boscaro

This volume presents 18 eighteen essays, written by scholars from six countries, on Tanizaki Jun’ichiro (1886–1965), one of the great writers of the 20th century. The essays were originally prepared for a landmark international symposium in Venice in 1995, at which 22 speakers addressed an audience of about two hundred students and scholars in the Aula Magna of the University of Venice. Topics include Tanizaki’s fiction, plays, and film scenarios; his aesthetics; his place in Japanese intellectual history; his depiction of the West; his use of humor; and film adaptations of his works. In 1964 Tanizaki was elected to honorary membership in the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, the first Japanese to be so honored; and it is widely believed that he was being considered for the Nobel Prize in Literature.

The International Symposium in Venice

A Tanizaki Feast

At the time of his death in 1965 at the age of seventy-nine, Tanizaki Jun'ichiro had been writing fiction, plays, essays, poems, and translations almost without interruption for more than fifty-five years. In this series of meditations on seven of Tanizaki's novels and novellas, the renowned translator Anthony Chambers explores the attempt by Tanizaki's characters to construct ideal worlds: fantasies that were far removed from the concerns of everyday life and were, for the most part, unattainable. Chambers focuses on the thread of fantasy that Tanizaki weaves throughout his work; he examines the writer's subtle use of storytelling devices to evoke his characters' alternate sense of reality and encourage the reader's participation in their fantasies. Using his intimate knowledge of Tanizaki's works, Chambers superbly evokes the beauty and truth Tanizaki's characters find in their ideal worlds.

Anthony Hood Chambers

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