Quotes About Tanizaki

The novelist Natsume Soseki counted his morning trips to the toilet a great pleasure, 'a physiological delight' he called it. And surely there could be no better place to savor this pleasure than a Japanese toilet where, surrounded by tranquil walls and finely grained wood, one looks out upon blue skies and green leaves.

But whether the death is that of a tubercular husband in "The Moon on the Water," a mystical figure such as Y?ko in Snow Country, or the drugged girl lying beside an old man in House of the Sleeping Beauties, death always has richly poetic implications in Kawabata's work, in contrast to the meticulously clinical deteriorations in Tanizaki's novels and the murderous destruction in Mishima's.