Jun'ichirō Tanizaki

Tanizaki grew up in a once-prosperous Tokyo merchant family whose decline he later mined for fiction, and started out infatuated with Poe and Wilde, writing early tales of masochistic obsession like Naomi, in which a man remakes a café waitress into his ideal, and his tormentor.

The 1923 Great Kantō earthquake drove him from Tokyo to the Osaka region, and his aesthetic pivoted with him: Some Prefer Nettles weighs a failing marriage against the pull of old Japan, In Praise of Shadows is his essay-length defense of dim rooms and lacquerware over electric light, and The Makioka Sisters (written under, then finished after, wartime censorship) became his elegy for a genteel world the war erased.

He translated The Tale of Genji into modern Japanese three separate times and was nominated for the Nobel Prize repeatedly before his death in 1965.