From the publisher
The decadent tales in this dazzling collection span forty-five years in the extraordinary career of Japan's master storyteller, Jun'ichiro Tanizaki (1886-1965). Tanizaki's major novels-Naomi, The Makioka Sisters, A Cat, a Man, and Two Women, and The Key, for example-have already appeared in English, but some of his finest works are short stories, only a handful of which have been translated. The stories presented here, all of them translated into English for the first time, vividly explore an array of human passions. In "The Children," three mischievous friends play sado-masochistic games in a mysterious Western-style mansion. The sybaritic narrator of "The Secret" experiments with
cross-dressing as he savors the delights of duplicity. "The Two Acolytes" evokes the conflicting attractions of spiritual fulfillment and worldly pleasure in medieval Kyoto. In the title story, the seductive tastes, aromas, and textures of outlandish Chinese dishes blend with those of the seductive
hands that proffer them to blindfolded gourmets. In "Mr. Bluemound," Tanizaki, who wrote for a film studio in the early 1920s, considers the relationship between a flesh-and-blood actress and her image fixed on celluloid, which one memorably degenerate admirer is obsessed with. And, finally,
"Manganese Dioxide Dreams" offers a tantalizing insight into the author's mind as he blends-in the musings of an old man very like Tanizaki himself-Chinese and Japanese cuisine, a French murder movie, Chinese history, and the contents of a toilet bowl. These beautifully translated stories will intrigue and entertain readers who are new to Tanizaki, as well as those who have already explored the bizarre world of his imagination.
Some twenty years have passed since then.
About the author
JUN'ICHIRO TANIZAKI was born in central Tokyo in 1886. After becoming an overnight celebrity with his literary debut in 1910, he produced a steady stream of novels, short stories, essays, plays, poetry, and translations for the next fifty-five years. His versatility is further demonstrated by the
film scenarios he wrote for a Yokohama studio in 1920-21. The 1923 Tokyo earthquake forced him to move to the Kansai region, where he chose to remain for most of the rest of his life. Trips to Korea and China in 1918 and to Shanghai in 1926 were his only overseas experiences. By 1948, when he
completed The Makioka Sisters, he was widely considered the preeminent Japanese novelist. In 1949 he received the Order of Culture, the highest honor the emperor can bestow on an artist. He married three times; his third wife, Matsuko, shared the last thirty years of his life. Even in his seventies he was still startling readers with audacious fiction like The Key and Diary of a Mad Old Man, and a year before his death in Atami in 1965 he was elected to the American Academy and
Institute of Arts and Letters, the first Japanese to be so honored. Translations of his work began to appear as early as 1917, and by now his novels have been published in at least twenty different languages. Donald Keene's assessment appears to be coming true: "It is likely that if any one writer of the period will stand the test of time and be accepted as a figure
of world stature, it will be Tanizaki." ANTHONY H. CHAMBERS, Professor of Japanese at Arizona State University, has translated a number of classical and modern writers. His Tanizaki translations include Naomi, Arrowroot, The Reed Cutter, The Secret History of the Lord of Musashi, and Captain Shigemoto's Mother. He is the author of The
Secret Window: Ideal Worlds in Tanizaki's Fiction. PAUL McCARTHY, Professor of Comparative Cultures at Surugadai University, has translated Tanizaki's "The Little Kingdom," "Professor Rado," Childhood Years, and A Cat, a Man, and Two Women, which won the Japan-America Friendship Commission Prize. He has also translated Takeshi Umehara's Lotus and
Other Tales of Medieval Japan and Zenno Ishigami's Disciples of the Buddha.
