Anthony H. Chambers

Anthony H. Chambers came to Tanizaki translation almost by accident—a graduate student assignment that refused to release him. While studying Japanese literature in the 1980s, he encountered a particular challenge: how to render the obsessive, sensual prose of Jun'ichiro Tanizaki into English without flattening its baroque intensity or surrendering to exoticizing flourish. Most translators, he noticed, treated Tanizaki as either a puzzle to solve or a museum piece to display. Chambers chose a third path: he would translate for the page as it feels, not as it means.

This philosophical commitment reveals itself immediately in Naomi, his 1995 translation of Tanizaki's most notorious novel. Where previous English versions had softened the narrator's obsession with his adopted daughter—rendering it palatable to Western sensibilities—Chambers preserves the architectural precision of Tanizaki's sentences, their slow architectural accumulation of desire and delusion. The prose moves with unsettling momentum, the way the obsession itself moves. A reader doesn't observe the narrator's descent; they inhabit it. This fidelity to psychological texture, rather than plot summary, became his signature.

Chambers expanded his Tanizaki project with The Reed Cutter and Captain Shigemoto's Mother (1995), two novellas that demanded entirely different registers—one spare and elegiac, the other steeped in historical depth. Then came The Secret History of the Lord of Musashi and Arrowroot (2003), a dual-novel collection that tested his range further still. In each, he negotiates Tanizaki's notorious difficulty: the author's syntactical complexity, his nested narratives, his deliberate ambiguities about whose desire we're reading. Chambers doesn't resolve these ambiguities for the reader; he preserves them as the very substance of the work.

What distinguishes his approach is an almost scholarly precision paired with genuine literary tact. He refuses both the stiffness of academic translation and the looseness of "creative" adaptation. Reading Chambers's Tanizaki, one feels the original's Japanese sentence structure humming beneath the English—not obtrusively, but perceptibly, like a second instrument in a composition. His work has established him as the essential English-language guide to Tanizaki's psychologically complex modernism, a translator patient enough to let difficulty remain difficult, and trusting enough to believe readers will follow.