The final novel of the greatest Japanese novelist of the twentieth century. It is also—as Michael P. Cronin’s translation, the first into English, shows—one of his best. Written with Tanizaki’s usual narrative brio and sly intimacy, with a focus on the pleasure and drama of everyday life so all-encompassing that when the eruptions of history intrude—in the form of the second Sino-Japanese war and World War II—they ring, as desired, like pistol shots at a party. Even without these cataclysms, we come to see—Tanizaki is an insistently elegiac writer—that the world is always in flux. Tanizaki’s great success is to make us see how it is not only the masters who mourn the passing of such a world, but also the old maids.

The Wall Street Journal

A major discovery: Tanizaki’s wonderful final novel—now available as a paperback

The Maids

Fiction by Junichiro Tanizaki

Translated from Japanese 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.

Paperback(published Jul, 30 2019)

ISBN
9780811228749
Price US
15.95
Trim Size
5x8"
Page Count
176pp

Clothbound(published Apr, 25 2017)

ISBN
9780811224925
Price US
22.95
Price CN
30.95
Trim Size
5 x 8
Page Count
224
Portrait of Junichiro Tanizaki

Junichiro Tanizaki

Japanese writer

The final novel of the greatest Japanese novelist of the twentieth century. It is also—as Michael P. Cronin’s translation, the first into English, shows—one of his best. Written with Tanizaki’s usual narrative brio and sly intimacy, with a focus on the pleasure and drama of everyday life so all-encompassing that when the eruptions of history intrude—in the form of the second Sino-Japanese war and World War II—they ring, as desired, like pistol shots at a party. Even without these cataclysms, we come to see—Tanizaki is an insistently elegiac writer—that the world is always in flux. Tanizaki’s great success is to make us see how it is not only the masters who mourn the passing of such a world, but also the old maids.

The Wall Street Journal

A writer of wicked subtlety and grace.

Sunday Times (London)

The Maids is altogether lighter, freer, and more playful than The Makioka Sisters—a busily peopled and remarkably sensual group portrait. The short novel teems with life and has a flavor all its own, a joyful, comic, improvisational quality rupturing the elegiac tone announced in its opening pages. Tanizaki’s remarkably fresh and intimate voice is speaking to us across a gulf of years and cultures.

Edmund Gordon, The Times Literary Supplement

This slender book is reminiscent of the best of Turgenev: A small gem for admirers of Mishima, Oe, and other midcentury modernists.

Kirkus

It’s as if David Lynch wrote a season of Mad Men, with an emphasis on the women. Tanizaki’s a really great writer.

David Mitchell

Skillfully and subtly, Tanizaki brushes in a delicate picture of a gentle world that no longer exists.

San Francisco Chronicle

Tanizaki is a very brilliant novelist.

Haruki Murakami