From a Japanese master of romantic and sexual obsession come two novels that treat traditional themes with sly wit and startling psychological sophistication. In The Secret History of the Lord of Musashi, Junichir Tanizaki reimagines the exploits of a legendary samurai as a sadomasochistic dance between the hero and the wife of his enemy. Arrowroot, though set in the twentieth century, views an adult orphan s search for his mother s past through the translucent shoji screen of ancient literature and myth.
Both works are replete with shocking juxtapositions....

Junichiro Tanizaki's Naomi is both a hilarious story of one man's obsession and a brilliant reckoning of a nation's cultural confusion.
When twenty-eight-year-old Joji first lays eyes upon the teenage waitress Naomi, he is instantly smitten by her exotic, almost Western appearance. Determined to transform her into the perfect wife and to whisk her away from the seamy underbelly of post-World War I Tokyo, Joji adopts and ultimately marries Naomi, paying for English and music lessons that promise to mold her into his ideal companion. But as she grows older, Joji discovers that Naomi...

With a precision and brilliance unmatched perhaps by any other novelist of the twentieth century, Junichiro Tanizaki interweaves a sense of his country's deep past with the kind of pathologies and obsessions we are likely to think of as modern. Here, in two eerie and beautiful novellas, he displays this skill at its most elegant and affecting.
The Reed Cutter has a contemporary setting, though it might have taken place any time in the past thousand years. On a fine September evening, the narrator decides to make a solitary excursion to the site of an ancient imperial palace south...

Quicksand is a silkily nuanced novel of erotic gamesmanship and obsession. Sonoko Kakiuchi, an Osaka lady of a good family, married to a dully respected lawyer, tells a story of temptation and betrayal. Sonoko is infatuated with the beautiful art student and femme fatale Mitsuko, a woman so seductive and heartless she can even turn Sonoko's husband into her own accomplice. Filled with intrigue and treacherous romance, readers will be entranced by Tanizaki's seminal novel.
At once savagely funny and timorously exact in its portrayal of sexual enthrallment, Quicksand is...

Junichiro Tanizaki's Seven Japanese Tales collects stories that explore the boundary at which love becomes self-annihilation, where the contemplation of beauty gives way to fetishism, and where tradition becomes an instrument of voluptuous cruelty.

A beautiful blind musician exacts the ultimate sacrifice from the man who is both her disciple and her lover. A tattooist turns the body of an exquisite young girl into a reflection of her predatory inner nature. A young man is erotically imprisoned by memories of his absent mother. Shocking in its content and lyrical in its beauty,...

Junichirō Tanizaki's magisterial evocation of a proud Osaka family in decline during the years immediately before World War II is arguably the greatest Japanese novel of the twentieth century and a classic of international literature.
Tsuruko, the eldest sister of the once-wealthy Makioka family, clings obstinately to the prestige of her family name even as her husband prepares to move their household to Tokyo, where that name means nothing. Sachiko compromises valiantly to secure the future of her younger sisters. The shy, unmarried Yukiko is a hostage to her family's exacting...

An essay on aesthetics by the Japanese novelist, this book explores architecture, jade, food, and even toilets, combiningan acute sense of the use of space in buildings. The book also includes descriptions of laquerware under candlelight and women in the darkness of the house of pleasure."

Two short novels, published initially in the 1930s. Musashi deals with the dark obsessions of a 16th-century warlord. Arrowroot also touches on the pursuit of legend, but in a different mode, that of the uniquely Japanese form of the essay novel.

An essay on aesthetics. It explores architecture, jade, food, toilets, and combines an acute sense of the use of space in buildings, as well as perfect descriptions of lacquerware under candlelight and women in the darkness of the house of pleasure.

"Das ästhetische Testament Japans" (NZZ)§Wie entsteht ein Meisterwerk? Spielerisch und wortgewandt führt uns Tanizaki Jun'ichiro die grundlegenden Unterschiede von östlichem Streben nach "Meisterschaft" und westlichem "Kunst"-Verständnis vor Augen. Sein Essay ist eine echte Entdeckung für alle Freunde asiatischer Lebensart und eröffnet im Verständnis des Fremden einen neuen Blick auch auf die eigene Kultur.§Übung von Kindesbeinen an, Unvoreingenommenheit und die perfekte Nachahmung des Tradierten sind für Tanizaki Jun'ichiro Voraussetzungen für meisterliches Gelingen. Nur so...