This is an essay on aesthetics by one of the greatest Japanese novelists. The text ranges over architecture, jade, food, toilets, and combines an acute sense of the use of space in buildings, as well as perfect descriptions of lacquerware under candlelight and women in the darkness of the house of pleasure. The essay forms a classic description of the collision between the shadows of traditional Japanese interiors and the dazzling light of the modern age.

Junichiro Tanizaki was born in 1886 in Tokyo where his family owned a printing establishment. He studied literature at Tokyo Imperial University and his first published work, a one-act play, appeared in a literary magazine in 1909. He received the Imperial Prize for Literature in 1949 and was elected an Honorary Member of the American Academy and the National Institute of Arts and Letters in 1964, the first Japanese to receive this honour. He died in 1965