Book Condition: Near Fine. Vintage First Edition. 9th Printing. Sonoko Kakiuchi is a cultured Osaka lady, unfortunately widowed young. But her story is unsettlingly at odds with her image. It is a tale of infatuation and deceit, of eliberate evil. Its theme is humiliation, its victim Sonoko's mild-mannered husband. At is centre - seductive, manipulating, enslaving - is one of Tanizaki's most extraordinary characters, the beautiful and corrupt art student, Mitsuko. Originally published in 1947, this fine, startling novel by the renowned Japanese writer (1886-1965) appears for the first time in English. Sonoko Kakiuchi, the bored and willful upper-class wife of an Osaka lawyer, recounts the story of her desperate love in the year 1927 for a willowy young woman named Mitsuko. When Sonoko discovers the presence in Mitsuko's life of a man, the elusive Watanuki, she is surprised by enormous feelings of jealousy and soon finds herself "sinking deeper and deeper into the quicksand" of the couple's lies. But Sonoko is no saint: in an attempt to gain time and attract sympathy she fakes a suicide attempt that draws her husband into the affair. The romantic quadrangle lurches to a tragic, quintessentially Japanese conclusion. Tanizaki's prose, seamlessly translated by Hibbett, is as icy and lovely as a winter morning. It's also interesting to note how the author propels the plot and develops characters through their use of pharmaceuticals, a device he later employed with great effect in his masterpiece, The Makioka Sisters. Bunraku is the unique puppet theater of Japan, in which nearly life-size puppets, manipulated by visible puppeteers in black, mime the classic melodramas of Chikamatsu while the narrative is chanted to the accompaniment of the shamisen. Most famous of all Bunraku plays is "The Lovers' Suicide", a piece of theater as central to Japanese culture as The Iliad was to Greek or Goethe's faust is to German. 20th C writer Junichiro Tanizaki would have known ever detail of The Lovers' Suicide from Buraku and Kabuki, and however bizarre and modernistic Tanizaki might seem to an English reader, he was profoundly aware of his place in Japanese tradition. "Quicksand", a novel written in the middle of his career, is Bunraku to the core -- a tale of a lovers' triangle, of obsession and jealousy, and of suicide, with just a hint of "possession" by fox-spirits. Even the narrative structure smacks of puppetry; the central figure of the lovers' triangle 'chants' the events to an audience of one, presumably the novelist himself. What begins as erotic teasing evolves slowly into masochistic hysteria and emotional pornography. It would be easy to hate this novel if it were written by an Italian or an Icelander, but from within the insular semiotics of Japanese literature, it makes a kind of gaudy sense. Western readers will inevitably interpret it as a 'psychological' depiction of obsession, to which a Japanese reader might respond "so be it, but then all of Japanese history is a depiction of obsession." Are you ready to perceive beauty in an overwrought, maudlin desperation? Possibly then you are Japanese enough to appreciate Tanizaki.
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