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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

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

The outstanding Japanese novelist of this century

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

In Praise of Shadows

Vintage Design Edition

A special edition of the famous and influential essay on Japanese culture and beauty, now beautifully produced and illustrated throughout.

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

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

Tanizaki suggests an attitude of appreciation and mindfulness, especially mindfulness of beauty, as central to life lived well

This has been an important book for my career. I’ve read it multiple times—it continues to be meaningful and I don't expect that will change. Shadows are more important than objects because they enter the realm of the mysterious. The white space is more important than the stroke of the pen. Shadows are the silent reason that objects are recognized; they give them shape. Shadows represent the soul of a place or object

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 -

This translation...reads like a glorious poem... The descriptions of interiors are much more evocative than any image could be - just stunning. They are words to live by

A fully illustrated, beautifully produced edition of Junichiro Tanizaki's wise and evocative essay on Japanese culture. 
 
 ‘We find beauty not in the thing itself but in the patterns of shadows, the light and the darkness, that one thing against another creates… Were it not for shadows, there would be no beauty.’ 
 
 This book is in fact a portal. Reading it, you will be led by Junichiro Tanizaki’s light touch into a mysterious and tranquil world of darkness and shadows, where gold flashes in the gloom and a deep stillness reigns. If you are accustomed to equate light with clarity, the faded with the worthless and the dim with the dreary, prepare for a courteous but powerful realignment of your ideas. 
 
 In Praise of Shadows is a poetic paean to traditional Japanese aesthetics – in a free-ranging style that moves from architecture to No theatre, and from cookery to lighting, Tanizaki teaches us to see the beauty in tarnished metal, the sombre dignity in unglazed pottery, the primacy of organic materials that bear witness to the regular touch of human hands. It is also astonishingly prescient, offering a gentle warning against the quest for airbrushed perfection, and reminding us that too much light can pollute and obscure our natural world. 
 
 In this special edition, the text is accompanied by specially selected images to complement Tanizaki’s reflections and further illustrate the pattern and beauty of shadows.

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

Series by Junichiro Tanizaki

Everyman’s Library Contemporary Classics

Articles featuring Junichiro Tanizaki

7 Vintage architecture and design books to inspire you

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