Junichiro Tanizaki was a Japanese prose writer, essayist and poet who lived from 1886 to1965. He is one of the major writers of modern Japanese literature. He is considered to be the second most popular Japanese novelist after Natsume Soseki.

J. Tanizaki was born into a Tokyo merchant’s family. In his early years he was infatuated with the modern Western life-style. He spent this stage of life in Yokohama, leading a bohemian lifestyle. J. Tanizaki debuted in 1910 but his reputation as a writer really began to take off when he moved to Kyoto in 1923.

The change of living place proved fateful to J. Tanizaki works: until then, he had written only about the modern world, but then, the author turned back towards traditional Japanese culture and connected these two trains of thought, seemingly from opposite poles. The change in his attitude is seen in how he rewrote the classic 11th century Japanese literary work, “the Genji tale” into the contemporary Japanese and also in his masterpiece “Sasameyuki” (A Light Snowfall), a tale about four daughters of a waning merchant.

The early novels of J. Tanizaki depict the rich life of the 1920s Tokyo and Osaka bourgeois and the exclusively rich atmosphere of those cities. However during the 1930s, Tanizaki turned away from contemporary affairs, with its seemingly impermanence and unsteadiness, and turned back to the Japan's feudal past. This change was driven by the growing militarism and political atmosphere. However, World War II returned J. Tanizaki back to contemporary affairs and revealed an uncommon talent as a prose writer. Until his death in 1965, J. Tanizaki had been regarded as Japan's greatest living author.

In 2005, the publishing house “Versus aureus” published the novel by J. Tanizaki Raktas (The Key).