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Junichiro Tanizaki was one of Japan's greatest twentienth century novelists. Born in 1886 in Tokyo, his first published work - a one-act play - appeared in 1910 in a literary magazine he helped to found. Tanizaki lived in the cosmopolitan Tokyo area until the earthquake of 1923, when he moved to the Kyoto-Osaka region and became absorbed in Japan's past. All his most important works were written after 1923, among them Some Prefer Nettles (1929), The Secret History of the Lord of Musashi (1935), several modern versions of The Tale of Genji (1941, 1954 and 1965), The Makioka Sisters, The Key (1956) and Diary of a Mad Old Man (1961). He was awarded an Imperial Award for Cultural Merit in 1949 and in 1965 he was elected an honorary member of the American Academy and the National Institute of Arts and Letters, the first Japanese writer to receive this honour. Tanizaki died later that same year.
The narrator, Sonoko, a respectable young woman who is bored with her lawyer husband, embarks on a relationship with beautiful art student Mitsuko. Their liaison sets in motion a series of events that have far-reaching, eventually tragic consequences. Through her obsessive love for the clever, manipulative Mitsuko, Sonoko is drawn into a web of lies, secrecy and deception. Matters grow complex when Watanuki, Mitsuko's handsome but impotent boyfriend, persuades Sonoko to enter into a pact with him whereby they agree to 'share' Mitsuko's love. But when Mitsuko refueses to marry him he becomes dangerously embittered and reveals all to Sonoko's husband, who also falls under Mitsuko's spell. Coaxing and threatening by turns, Mitsuko now exerts control over the lives of both Sonoko and her husband in order to test their devotion to her. They submit to her demands, seeking no other happiness but to see her. Set in Osaka, Japan, during the 1920s, this psychological drama epxlores the relationship between physical attraction and power. A compelling satisfyingly, complex story. (Kirkus UK)
