The Reed Cutter & Captain Shigemoto's Mother
1949
First Published
3.66
Average Rating
180
Number of Pages
One of the great novelists of the twentieth century, Junichiro Tanizaki wrote about love—and sex—with a breathtaking suppleness of style and a vast depth of literary allusion. In these two novellas, brilliantly translated by Anthony H. Chambers and appearing in paperback for the first time, Tanizaki probes the translucent screen that separates idealized yearning from humiliating obsession in a society of impenetrable decorum.
Avg Rating
3.66
Number of Ratings
225
5 STARS
21%
4 STARS
38%
3 STARS
30%
2 STARS
10%
1 STARS
2%
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Author
Junichiro Tanizaki
Author · 36 books
Jun'ichirō Tanizaki (谷崎 潤一郎) was a Japanese author, and one of the major writers of modern Japanese literature, perhaps the most popular Japanese novelist after Natsume Sōseki. Some of his works present a rather shocking world of sexuality and destructive erotic obsessions; others, less sensational, subtly portray the dynamics of family life in the context of the rapid changes in 20th-century Japanese society. Frequently his stories are narrated in the context of a search for cultural identity in which constructions of "the West" and "Japanese tradition" are juxtaposed. The results are complex, ironic, demure, and provocative.
