Authors We Follow

One of the most internationally recognized Japanese novelists. His Tokyo — jazz bars, quiet cafés, city walks — is a recurring backdrop across his fiction.

Tanizaki lived out much of what he wrote in Naomi: in the early 1920s he moved to Yokohama's Westernized Yamate district and took up the same ballroom dancing and fashion he later gave his characters, before the 1923 Great Kanto Earthquake forced him to relocate to the Kansai region.

Widely considered the most important novelist of modern Japan. His novels map onto real places he lived and taught — from a Shikoku bathhouse to a Tokyo cemetery where he's actually buried.

Dazai's memoir Tsugaru retraces his rural hometown in northern Japan, from his family's preserved mansion in Kanagi to the remote coastal village of Kodomari.