Quicksand - Hardcover

Tanizaki, Junichiro

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 039458547X ISBN 13: 9780394585475

Publisher: Alfred a Knopf Inc, 1994

Synopsis

The voice is insistent, attractive, persuasive - the voice of a cultured Osaka lady, unfortunately widowed young. Sonoko Kakiuchi's story, however, is unsettlingly at odds with her image. It is a tale of infatuation and deceit, of deliberate evil. Its theme is humiliation, its victim Sonoko's mild-mannered lawyer husband. And at its center - seducing, manipulating, enslaving - is one of the most extraordinary characters ever created by the great Japanese novelist Junichiro Tanizaki, the beautiful and totally corrupt art student Mitsuko.
Partly a black comedy - the plot sometimes resembles bedroom farce - partly an exploration of sexual obsession and pain, Quicksand is the last major Tanizaki novel to be translated, largely because of the extreme difficulty in capturing the narrator's precise tone in English. In this Howard Hibbett has succeeded brilliantly. As a master-work on the level of Some Prefer Nettles and Diary of a Mad Old Man, and as a triumph of the translator's art, Quicksand is both important and utterly engrossing.

About this title

Review:

Tanizaki proffers a story that poses as a confession given to the author (with occasional interventions by the narrator) about a woman who becomes obsessed with the beautiful art student Mitsuko and gets lost in the lies the lovers weave to deceive themselves about love.

Love, like any narrative--Tanizaki seems to be saying--is multilayered, devious, mannered and obsessively self-referential. Love is an interrogation of the stories we tell each other, or a succumbing. It is a question about the veracity of our lies. The lesbian affair Mrs Kakiuchi has with Mitsuko, and Mitsuko's complicated arrangements with her fiancé and Mrs Kakiuchi's husband, do not allow for easy moralisms. This is a novel of observation, in which Tanazaki reserves comment and allows the characters to play out the fate they have chosen by denying their bourgeois concerns and buying into the danger of passion. As ever sex and death are linked, with the possibility of ritual suicides present at every turn. We are left wondering whether death is the height of orgiastic success, the failure of life in love, or the erotic commingling of the two. --Mark Thwaite

Review:

"Quicksand reads like a mixture of James Cain and Vladimir Nabokov [and] teases us with forbidden pleasures" (Washington Times)

"Beautifully and mysteriously contrived" (Newsday)

"A harrowing black comedy of love and death" (Chicago Tribune)

About this edition

• Publisher: Alfred a Knopf Inc
• Publication date: 1994
• ISBN 10: 039458547X
• ISBN 13: 9780394585475
• Binding: Hardcover