This captivating short novel exemplifies why Tanizaki is considered an innovator of modern Japanese literature. The prose is cunning and compelling, evoking classic Asian folklore and elements of Don Quixote.

Publishers Weekly

Now in paperback, a suspenseful early novella from “the outstanding Japanese novelist of this century” (Edmund White)

Included in the Japanese Masters bundle Get the bundle

Devils in Daylight

Fiction by Junichiro Tanizaki

Translated from Japanese by J. Keith Vincent

One morning, Takahashi, a writer who has just stayed up all night working, is interrupted by a phone call from his old friend Sonomura. Barely able to contain his excitement, Sonomura claims that he has cracked a secret cryptographic code based on Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Gold-Bug” and now knows exactly when and where a murder will take place—and they must hurry if they want to witness the crime, because it will be committed later that very night! Sonomura has a history of lunacy and playing the amateur detective, so Takahashi is reluctant to believe him. Nevertheless, they stake out the secret location, and through tiny peepholes in the knotted wood, become voyeurs at the scene of a shocking crime…

Atmospheric, erotic, and tense, Devils in Daylight is an early work by the master storyteller who “created a lifelong series of ingenious variations on a dominant theme: the power of love to energize and destroy” (Chicago Tribune).

Paperback(published Jul, 30 2019)

ISBN
9780811228756
Price US
12.95
Trim Size
5x8"
Page Count
96pp

Paperback(published Jul, 30 2019)

ISBN
9780811228756
Trim Size
5x8
Page Count
96

Clothbound(published Apr, 25 2017)

ISBN
9780811224918
Price US
17.95
Price CN
23.95
Trim Size
5 x 8
Page Count
96

Portrait of Junichiro Tanizaki

Junichiro Tanizaki

Japanese writer

This captivating short novel exemplifies why Tanizaki is considered an innovator of modern Japanese literature. The prose is cunning and compelling, evoking classic Asian folklore and elements of Don Quixote.

Publishers Weekly

Dreamlike immediacy. You have entered that place between realms, where the novelist Junichiro Tanizaki so comfortably dwells.

John Biscello, Riot Material

Devils in Daylight, from 1918, reads like a breathless snuff film cowritten by Poe and Simenon.

Pico Iyer, The New York Review of Books

A writer of wicked subtlety and grace.

Sunday Times (London)

What unfolds is a murder mystery that is an homage to the classic American writer Edgar Allen Poe, and a meditation on the art of fiction. The author, Junichiro Tanizaki, was arguably Japan’s greatest twentieth-century novelist.

Caravan

A rumination about the nature of fiction itself.

Kirkus

Tanizaki is one of my favorites. His books are about love and very often perverse aspects of love.

Henry Miller

Tanizaki was a great writer. He understood the fetish-making fecundity of love, and the satisfactions it offers even while giving pain, and its perverse, inverse accountings.

John Updike

The outstanding Japanese novelist of this century.

Edmund White