The Secret History of the Lord of Musashi and Arrowroot - Two Novels

Zusatztext “These fictions! subversive and self-referential! join the already dazzling canon of Tanizaki’s work. They are masterpieces.” -- The Nation “Japan's great modern novelist...[Tanizaki] created a lifelong series of ingenious variations on a dominant theme: the power of love to energize and destroy.” -- Chicago Tribune “Junichiro Tanizaki may well prove to be the outstanding Japanese novelist of this century.”--Edmund White! The New York Times Book Review “ Arrowroot is related with a delightful deftness! in the blunt easy tone of a born writer.” -- John Updike! The New Yorker “With the publication of these two novellas one of the major lacunae in Tanizaki’s English translation . . . has been filled. (And with great grace and elegance–the translation is first-rate.) Tanizaki! with his wonderful imagination! his complete artistry! his honesty . . . his classical aesthetic restraint! is one of the great Japanese writers of this century.” --Donald Richie "[A] master of death and eros. . . . The unthinkable is made breathtakingly real by Tanizaki's eye for detail! which can operate clinically . . . or like that of a primal shaman artist who knows how to turn an ordinary object into a fetish." -- L.A. Weekly “Tanizaki transforms the page into the ritual of Kabuki theater." -- Newsday "One of Japan's most prized novelists of this century." -- The Wall Street Journal "Tanizaki's spare and elegant prose draws us into a society at once familiar . . . and exotic. The disjunction! the remoteness are . . . entrancing." --New York Magazine Informationen zum Autor Junichiro Tanizaki, translated by Anthony H. Chambers Klappentext From a Japanese master of romantic and sexual obsession come two novels that treat traditional themes with sly wit and startling psychological sophistication. In The Secret History of the Lord of Musashi , Junichir Tanizaki reimagines the exploits of a legendary samurai as a sadomasochistic dance between the hero and the wife of his enemy. Arrowroot , though set in the twentieth century, views an adult orphan's search for his mother's past through the translucent shoji screen of ancient literature and myth. Both works are replete with shocking juxtapositions. Severed heads become objects of erotic fixation. Foxes take on human shape. An aristocratic lady loves and pities the man she is conspiring to destroy. This supple translation reveals the full scope of Tanizaki's gift: his confident storytelling, luminous detail, and astonishingly vital female characters.Book I Concerning the Nun Myokaku's "The Dream of a Night" and the Memoirs of Doami There is no way of knowing exactly who the nun Myokaku was or when she wrote "The Dream of a Night," but it is clear from the text that she was once in the service of the Lord of Musashi. After the fall of the lord's clan, she shaved her head and retired "to a thatched hut deep in the mountains, where there was nothing to do but pray to the Buddha day and night." Thus it would seem that she recorded her memoirs of the past in the idleness of old age. But why would a nun with "nothing to do but pray to the Buddha" want to compose such a memoir? She gives this explanation: After pondering the conduct of the Lord of Musashi, I understand that men are neither good nor evil, heroic nor timid. The grand are sometimes base and the brave sometimes weak; he who yesterday crushed a thousand foes on the battlefield is lashed today at home by the fiends of hell. The most graceful woman may show a ferocious temper; the most valiant warrior may suddenly turn into a beast. Perhaps the Lord of Musashi was a compassionate Buddha or Bodhisattva who, demonstrating in his own person the inexorable law of cause and effect and the cycle of transmigra...

Product details

• Authors: Junichiro Tanizaki, Jun'ichiro Tanizaki
• Publisher: Vintage USA
• Languages: English
• Product format: Paperback / Softback
• Released: 11.03.2003
• EAN: 9780375719318
• ISBN: 978-0-375-71931-8
• No. of pages: 224
• Dimensions: 132 mm x 203 mm x 13 mm
• Series: Vintage International; Vintage International
• Subject: Fiction > Narrative literature