Michael P. Cronin is an associate professor of Japanese studies at the College of William and Mary in Virginia. He is the author of Osaka Modern (Harvard East Asian, 2017), a study of Japan’s merchant capital as imagined in literature, cinema, and popular culture of the transwar period, from the 1920s to the 1950s. Born and raised in greater Boston, he lived in Western Japan for eight years.
Translated by Michael P. Cronin
The Maids, Tanizaki’s final novel, sparkles like a jewel. Over the years—before, during, and after WWII—many young women work in the pampered, elegant household of the famous author Chikura Raikichi, his wife, and her younger sister. Though the family’s quite well-to-do, the house is small: the proximity of the maids helps perhaps to explain Raikichi’s extremely close, and somewhat eroticized, observation of all their little ways.
In the sensualist patrician Raikichi, Tanizaki offers a richly ironic self-portrait, but he presents as well an exquisitely nuanced chronicle of change and loss: centuries’ old values and manners are vanishing, and here—in the evanescent beauty of all the small gestures and intricacies of private life—we find a whole world passing away.
