ABSTRACT
Junichiro Tanizaki was born in Tokyo in 1886.5 He was above all else a writer deeply engaged with the aesthetical possibilities of the articulation of style, jouissance, eroticism and death. His profoundly erotic novels together with a fascination with the West would be intermingled with the traditional Japanese way. The characters of his novels undergo ordeals, in which their doomed future is foretold, but there is nothing unconvincing either about them, or their desires being often subverted by jouissance. Needless to say that Tanizaki did not wait for J. Lacan, or for that matter for any psychoanalytic discovery, in order to convey the dissimilarity and articulation of desire to jouissance. Much as his themes of life and death, desire and jouissance are empowered, they remain confined, embodied, so to speak, on paper.
