In 1995, on the thirtieth anniversary of Tanizaki Jun’ichiro’s death, Adriana Boscaro organized an international conference in Venice that had an unusally lasting effect on the study of this major Japanese novelist. Thanks to Boscaro’s energetic commitment, Venice became a center for Tanizaki studies that produced two volumes of conference proceedings now considered foundational for all scholarly works on Tanizaki. In the years before and after the Venice Conference, Boscaro and her students published an abundance of works on Tanizaki and translations of his writings, contributing to his literary success in Italy and internationally. The Grand Old Man and the Great Tradition honors Boscaro’s work by collecting nine essays on Tanizaki’s position in relation to the “great tradition” of Japanese classical literature. To open the collection, Edward Seidensticker contributes a provocative essay on literary styles and the task of translating Genji into a modern language. Gaye Rowley and Ibuki Kazuko also consider Tanizaki’s Genji translations, from a completely different point of view, documenting the author’s three separate translation efforts. Aileen Gatten turns to the influence of Heian narrative methods on Tanizaki’s fiction, arguing that his classicism, far from being superficial, “reflects a deep sensitivity to Heian narrative.” Tzevetana Kristeva holds a different perspective on Tanizaki’s classicism, singling out specific aspects of Tanizaki’s eroticism as the basis of comparison. The next two essays emphasize Tanizaki’s experimental engagement with the classical literary genres—Amy V. Heinrich treats the understudied poetry, and Bonaventura Ruperti considers a 1933 essay on performance arts. Taking up cinema, Roberta Novelli focuses on the novel Manji, exploring how it was recast for the screen by Masumura Yasuzo. The volume concludes with two contributions interpreting Tanizaki’s works in the light of Western and Meiji literary traditions: Paul McCarthy considers Nabokovas a point of comparison, and Jacqueline Pigeot conducts a groundbreaking comparison with a novel by Natsume Soseki.

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From his debut in 1923, Edogawa Ranpo (1894-1965) acknowledged the influence of Tanizaki Jun’ichirō and often referred to his works. Tanizaki had published several short stories characterised by tantei shumi between 1911 and 1927, yet the link between the two authors lies not only in their choice of the narrative genre. Tanizaki was a great admirer of Edgar Allan Poe and translated many of his stories including “The Domain of Arnheim”. Ranpo, too, was overtly inspired by Poe’s stories “The Domain of Arnheim” and “Landor’s Cottage”, which can be seen in the plot and descriptions of Panoramatō kidan. The aim of my investigation is therefore to examine the path that leads us from Poe’s “The Domain of Arnheim”, to Tanizaki’s Konjiki no shi, and from Poe and Tanizaki to Ranpo’s Panoramatō kidan.

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