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.
Tanizaki died in 1965..
By 1930 he had gained such renown that an edition of his complete works was published, and he was awarded Japan\'s Imperial Prize in Literature in 1949.
Among his works are Naomi (1924), Some Prefer Nettles (1928), Quicksand (1930), Arrowroot (1931), A Portrait of Shunkin (1933), The Secret History of the Lord of Musashi (1935), modern versions of The Tale of Genji (1941, 1954, and 1965), Captain Shigemoto\'s Mothe r (1949), The Key (1956), and Diary of a Mad Old Man (1961).
About author(s): Junichiro Tanizaki was born in Tokyo in 1886 and lived there until the earthquake of 1923, when he moved to the Kyoto-Osaka region, the scene of his novel The Makioka Sisters (1943-48).
How Shihei succeeds in taking Kunitsunes\' wife away from him in the course of a bizarre and drunken party is a story as shocking--and memorable--as anything Tanizaki ever wrote.
Beginning in an almost whimsical vein with an account of the amorous exploits of a Heian Don Juan called Heiju, it gradually shifts mood to focus on three people--Shihei, the powerful Minister of the Left; his doddering uncle Kunitsune; and Kunitsune\'s ravishing and much-younger wife, a woman known only as Shigemoto\'s mother.
It takes place in tenth-century Kyoto, in a world in which poetry and brutality, power and sexual impulse, shape the lives of the courtiers.
Captain Shgemoto\'s Mother is more violent but no less strange.
A strange man joins him and begins to tell a most extraordinary tale about his father, about a scene glimpsed in a moonlit garden forty years before, and about a mysterious woman who has become a lasting obsession.
Suddenly he is surprised to discover that he is not alone.
Musing upon old poems, passages of history, and topographical antiquities, he eventually finds himself among the reeds of a sandbar sipping sake from the bottle he has brought with him, watching the moon rise over the river, and scribbling bits of verse in his notebook.
On a fine September evening, the narrator decides to make a solitary excursion to the site of an ancient imperial palace south of Kyoto, a place now lost and overgrown near the banks of a river.
The Reed Cutter has a contemporary setting, though it might have taken place any time in the past thousand years.
Here, in two eerie and beautiful novellas, he displays this skill at its most elegant and affecting.
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
