wnyc.org / 93.9fm / am 820

In the rigid literary society of Japan, Junichiro Tanizaki stood out by constructing long narratives whose imaginative content, amplitude, and structure can rightly be called novelistic. He eschewed shishosetsu - the Japanese genre that most closely resembles the novel but includes autobiographical details - choosing instead to call attention to the fictionality of his texts. Translator Anthony Chambers will tell us why Tanizaki is considered one of the most important Japanese writers of the 20th century.

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