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7 Vintage architecture and design books to inspire you

Some Prefer Nettles

Junichiro Tanizaki was one of Japan's greatest twentienth century novelists. Born in 1886 in Tokyo, his first published work - a one-act play - appeared in 1910 in a literary magazine he helped to found. Tanizaki lived in the cosmopolitan Tokyo area until the earthquake of 1923, when he moved to the Kyoto-Osaka region and became absorbed in Japan's past. 
 
All his most important works were written after 1923, among them Some Prefer Nettles (1929), The Secret History of the Lord of Musashi (1935), several modern versions of The Tale of Genji (1941, 1954 and 1965), The Makioka Sisters, The Key (1956) and Diary of a Mad Old Man (1961). He was awarded an Imperial Award for Cultural Merit in 1949 and in 1965 he was elected an honorary member of the American Academy and the National Institute of Arts and Letters, the first Japanese writer to receive this honour. Tanizaki died later that same year.

Kaname’s marriage is disintegrating. 
 
It is the 1920s in Tokyo and he and his wife, Misako, are trapped in a parody of a progressive Western marriage. He escapes into the arms of a lover, whilst closing his eyes to the likelihood that his wife will do the same. But this unhappy arrangement can’t last. Misako’s father steps in, believing that their relationship has been damaged by the influence of a new and alien culture, attempting to heal the breach by educating his son-in-law in the Japanese traditions of aesthetic and sensual pleasure. Meanwhile a fixation with his father-in-law’s mistress is fermenting within Kaname. 
 
‘Chilling…Tanizaki is a master of ambiguity’ The Times 
 
‘Tanazaki pulls aside the shoji that screens Japanese home life to eavesdrop on what people are really saying and thinking behind their polite facades’ New York Times

In Praise of Shadows

Vintage Design Edition

An elegant essay on traditional Japanese aesthetics by the great novelist. A delight to read

A highly infectious essay lauding all things shady and subtly hidden

The outstanding Japanese novelist of this century

This is a powerfully anti-modernist book, yet contains the most beautiful evocation of the traditional Japanese aesthetic... More like a poem than an essay

I am convinced that Tanizaki is one of the few great writers of our time. He is an author of outstanding stature and deserves to be far better known outside Japan than he is

That it is a work of art can never be in doubt

It comes to remind the Western reader that the razzle dazzle of electric lighting was foreign for thousands of years … above all, it highlights the fact that shadow is inseparable from our holistic and spiritual relationship with light

Were it not for shadows there would be no beauty. 
 
Nothing evokes the calm and nuance of the traditional Japanese aesthetic more profoundly than this book. Tanizaki’s eye ranges over architecture, jade, food, even toilets, examining the design and feel of the intimate places we inhabit. His acute sense of the use of space in buildings, his poetic descriptions of lacquerware under candlelight and his appreciation for natural materials suggest the possibility of a simpler, more beautiful life – one in which the softness of shadows is shielded from the dazzling light of modernity. 
 
‘Tanazaki suggests an attitude of appreciation and mindfulness, especially mindfulness of beauty, as central to life lived well’ AC Grayling, Guardian 
 
‘That it is a work of art can never be in doubt’ New Statesman 
 
'Elegant...a delight to read' Independent on Sunday

Diary of a Mad Old Man

His work is unclassifiable: by turns outre and dignified, passionate in its embrace of all things Western and eloquent in its memorializing of the traditional Japanese aesthetic, lightly comic, lyrically evocative and savagely cruel. In a land reputedly inhospitable to the individualist, it demands attention and has earned Tanizaki an undisputed place in the pantheon of 20th-century Japanese literature.

Two or three times a day I think to myself: maybe I’ll die today. 
 
While recovering from a stroke, seventy-seven-year-old Utsugi turns to his diary to wryly record his struggle with his ageing body. Though impotent and in pain he notes down his growing desire for his beautiful daughter-in-law Satsuko, a chic, Westernised dancer with a shady past. Written when the author himself was an old man and shining with self-effacing humour, Tanizaki’s last novel is a tragicomedy about desire and the will to survive. 
 
‘Lightly comic, lyrically evocative and savagely cruel’ New York Times 
 
‘An artistic masterpiece’ Irish Times

The Key

At once sensational and serious – a middle-aged man’s last bout of sexual passion

Tanizaki tells the delicate and, in the end, frightening story with great skill-this is not a book you will soon forget

That this is a work of rare art can never be in doubt

A story about sex and marriage that is as explicit as any novel on the theme since Lady Chatterley's Lover

A husband and wife each write in their diary, never knowing if it is being read by the other. 
 
Ikuko and her husband are deeply in love but have grown physically apart, each unsure of the other’s desires. When Ikuko finds the key to her husband’s diary she ignores it, but she does begin to keep a diary of her own. Both parties start to set down in writing the evolution of their sex life and their deepest, most private desires. Who is reading whose diary? Who knows what? So begins an extended erotic game of lust, jealousy and manipulation. 
 
‘A story about sex and marriage that is as explicit as any novel on the theme since Lady Chatterley's Lover’ The Times 
 
'Sensational and serious' New York Times

Quicksand

A seductive psychological thriller about obsession, jealousy and deceit - and a Japanese queer classic. Sonoko must tell her story. Listen and decide for yourself. 
 
Sonoko Kakiuchi is a cultured Osaka lady in an uninspiring marriage. When she decides to take an art class in town she meets the extraordinary Mitsuko, a woman as beautiful and charismatic as she is cunning. They begin a passionate affair but as Sonoko’s infatuation with Mitsuko deepens, she finds herself sinking ever-further into a quicksand of sex, humiliation and deceit. 
 
‘A riveting tale of malevolent corruption fatally masked by a terrible and deceptive beauty’ Kirkus Reviews 
 
‘Classic Tanizaki…exuberant storytelling within a multi-layered narrative of sexual obsession’ Japan Times 
 
WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY KRISTEN ROUPENIAN

The Makioka Sisters

Four sisters live in dilapidated houses, the daughters of a once-great merchant family of Osaka. 
 
Each of the women navigates her own complex relationship to the fading lustre of the Makioka family name, in the years leading up to the Second World War. Rich with breathtaking descriptions of ancient customs and an ever-changing natural world, Tanizaki evokes in poignant detail a long-lost way of life even as it withers under the harsh glare of modernity. 
 
‘An exquisite novel about four sisters living though a turbulent decade...I'd put it in the 10 greatest books of the 20th century’ David Mitchell 
 
‘A classic novel of a whole country about to turn on the terrible hinge of the war into modernity; its tone is elegiac and bleak’ Observer

The Makioka Sisters (Vintage Classics Japanese Series)

VINTAGE JAPANESE CLASSICS – following on from the success of Vintage Russian Classics and European Classics, these are covetable new editions of the best Japanese writers on the Vintage list

An exquisite novel about four sisters living though a turbulent decade...I'd put it in the 10 greatest books of the 20th century' David Mitchell 
 
 'A near-perfect novel' Hanya Yanagihara 
 
 In the years leading up to the Second World War, four sisters live in dilapidated houses in Osaka and Ashiya, and each navigate their own complex, personal relationship to the fading lustre of the Makioka family name. Rich with breathtaking descriptions of ancient customs and an ever-changing natural world, Junichiro Tanizaki evokes in loving detail a long-lost way of life even as it withers under the harsh glare of modernity. 
 
 TRANSLATED BY EDWARD SEIDENSTICKER 
 
 VINTAGE JAPANESE CLASSICS - five masterpieces of Japanese fiction in gorgeous new gift editions.

An exquisite novel about four sisters living though a turbulent decade, during the Forties and Fifties, I'd put it in the 10 greatest books of the 20th century

One of the books I return to frequently is Junichiro Tanizaki’s The Makioka Sisters: a near-perfect novel

A complex, detailed and agreeably gossipy book...The author's obvious nostalgia for this vanished world does not prevent him from looking objectively at its darker side and this, together with his artful blend of the exotic and the mundane, creates an absorbing and richly textured story

A classic novel of a whole country about to turn on the terrible hinge of the war into modernity; its tone is elegiac and bleak

The work of Tanizaki offers to us in the West one of the most valuable keys to understanding the Japanese crisis of identity

An extraordinary book which can truly be said to break new ground

The outstanding Japanese novelist of the century...The Makioka Sisters is his greatest book

'An exquisite novel about four sisters living though a turbulent decade...I'd put it in the 10 greatest books of the 20th century' David Mitchell 
 
'A near-perfect novel' Hanya Yanagihara 
 
In the years leading up to the Second World War, four sisters live in dilapidated houses in Osaka and Ashiya, and each navigate their own complex, personal relationship to the fading lustre of the Makioka family name. Rich with breathtaking descriptions of ancient customs and an ever-changing natural world, Junichiro Tanizaki evokes in loving detail a long-lost way of life even as it withers under the harsh glare of modernity. 
 
TRANSLATED BY EDWARD SEIDENSTICKER 
 
VINTAGE JAPANESE CLASSICS - five masterpieces of Japanese fiction in gorgeous new gift editions.

Hailed as the greatest Japanese novel of the Twentieth century, THE MAKIOKA SISTERS is a subtle tale of domestic oppression worthy of Balzac or Chekhov, In this saga of the once prosperous but now declining Makioka family struggling to marry off one of their daughters, Tanizaki presents the picture of a family and a society striving to preserve their self-respect as they come to terms with disturbing new ways in a classic confrontation of innovasion and tradition. A wonderful portrait of Japanese life in the first half of the twentieth century.

Junichiro Tanizaki

These two novellas by the inimitable Tanizaki were among his favourites. 
 
The Secret History of the Lord of Musashi recounts the dark sexual obsessions of a sixteenth-century warlord, accidentally initiated in his youth into the morbid rites attendant upon battle. Based on invented documents that overlap with historical reality, the story unfolds a masterly balance of irony and melodrama, elegance and brutality. 
 
Arrowroot also touches on the pursuit of legend, but in a very different mode. Cast in the uniquely Japanese form of the ‘essay novel’, the narrative blends the stories of two friends on an expedition into the mountains south of Kyoto, one of them following the traces of a medieval myth, the other in search of a more recent, private past. 
 
‘After 20 years of writing novels in a fairly orthodox style, Tanizaki fused two interests - traditional Japanese storytelling and experimental narrative – into a unique style’ New York

Junichiro Tanizaki

Books by Junichiro Tanizaki

Articles featuring Junichiro Tanizaki

7 Vintage architecture and design books to inspire you

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