The Gourmet Club
A Sextet
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- $19.99
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- $19.99
Publisher Description
The decadent tales in this collection span 45 years in the extraordinary career of Japan’s master storyteller, Tanizaki Jun’ichiro¯ (1886–1965), the author of Naomi, A Cat, a Man, and Two Women, and The Makioka Sisters. Made accessible in English by the expertise of translators Anthony H. Chambers and Paul McCarthy, the stories in The Gourmet Club vividly explore an array of human passions. In “The Children,” three mischievous friends play sadomasochistic games in a mysterious Western-style mansion. The sybaritic narrator of “The Secret” experiments with cross-dressing as he savors the delights of duplicity. “The Two Acolytes” evokes the conflicting attractions of spiritual fulfillment and worldly pleasure in medieval Kyoto. In the title story, the seductive tastes, aromas, and textures of outlandish Chinese dishes blend with those of the seductive hands that proffer them to blindfolded gourmets. In “Mr. Bluemound,” Tanizaki, who wrote for a film studio in the early 1920s, considers the relationship between a flesh-and-blood actress and her image fixed on celluloid, which one memorably degenerate admirer is obsessed with. And, finally, “Manganese Dioxide Dreams” offers a tantalizing insight into the author’s mind as he weaves together the musings of an old man very like Tanizaki himself-Chinese and Japanese cuisine, a French murder movie, Chinese history, and the contents of a toilet bowl. These beautifully translated stories will intrigue and entertain readers who are new to Tanizaki, as well as those who have already explored the bizarre world of his imagination.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Obsessed by themes of eroticism, the grotesque and the fantastically horrible, Tanizaki (1886 1965) was revered in his native Japan for such works as The Makioka Sistersand Diary of a Mad Old Man. His able translators have collaborated to reintroduce Tanizaki to a new audience with an eclectic sampling of his highly unclassifiable work. In six stories, presented chronologically, the reader is taken through the spasms of Tanizaki's career, from the early story "The Children" (1911), with its inflated language and mannered suspense, to the last, "Manganese Dioxide Dreams" (1955), which delineates the frankly tedious scatological fixation of an aging author. Some stories, with their high tone and artificial setups, could have been written by Edgar Allan Poe, such as "The Secret," in which the young world-weary narrator, withdrawing from the world around him, enters a monastery, encircles himself with books "rich in weird tales and illustrations" and begins to go out in the evening dressed as a woman. Yet it's not his dressing as a woman that carries the story, but the narrator's thrill at being conducted, blindfolded, to his mistress's house. In "Mr. Bluemound," a famous young actress reads her dead husband's diary, in which he relates that he is dying because he has met a fan who knows her more intimately than he does (and recreates her, horrifyingly, in rubber) without ever having actually met her. The title story about a group of potbellied men "who can't live a day without eating something really good" and whose quest for new tastes leads them in ever weirder directions is the most successful. This curious find should help to expand, if modestly, the author's American readership.
