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The Gourmet Club
Jun'ichiro Tanizaki
Translated by Anthony H. Chambers,
Paul McCarthy
Paperback 202 pages
218 x 142mm 320g
ISBN : 978-4-7700-2972-0 / 4-7700-2972-1
Publish : Oct, 2003
Price : $15.00 |
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[ About the Book ]
The decadent tales in this dazzling collection span forty-five years in the extraordinary career of Japan's master storyteller, Jun'ichiro Tanizaki (1886-1965).
Tanizaki's major novels—Naomi, The Makioka Sisters, A Cat, a Man, and Two Women, and The Key, for example—have already appeared in English, but some of his finest works are short stories, only a handful of which have been translated.
The stories presented here, all of them translated into English for the first time, vividly explore an array of human passions. In "The Children," three mischievous friends play sado-masochistic 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 blends—in 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.
Reviews
"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 Sisters and 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."
—Publishers Weekly
"These six stories, though chosen from the beginning, middle, and end of the long career of Japan's first Nobel laureate in literature, are all fundamentally sensual. The characters' motivation is appetite, their goal is gratification, and moral niceties are for readers to worry about. In "The Children," three schoolmates and the sister of one of them play games of domination and punishment in which power gradually shifts, and the boys become the girl's slaves. In 'Mr. Bluemound,' a movie director married to his star meets a fan of hers who has memorized her body; the man puts the husband to the test as to who knows his wife more thoroughly, destroying the director's elan vital. In the title story, which has classic written all over it, the count, one of a set of rich friends preoccupied with fine food, discovers an exclusive club of Chinese in Tokyo, led by an outlandishly inventive gourmet; obtaining recipes, the count becomes the center of his own circle of connoisseurs. Rich fare from a modern master. "
—Booklist
"Tanizaki seems present in his fictional voluptuaries ... giving the impression ... he would rather rule in hell than serve in heaven."
—The Daily Yomiuri
"The long awaited collection of six of Jun'ichiro Tanizaki's shorter works ... by two of the most eminent of Tanizaki's translators. "
—The Japan Times
"His fiction continues to draw us in through an intricate, masterly grasp of the psychology of male desire.... Excellent translators. "
—The Village Voice
"... sure to unsettle readers overly enamored of the standard bromides about what moral life and serious literature must be."
—The Asahi Shimbun
"... a magician's knack for seizing the audience's attention quickly, leading us deeper and deeper into his world of shadows."
—The Washington Post
"Tanizaki strings the reader along with oddities and quirky bits, finally concluding in a shattering and disturbing revelation."
—Foreword Magazine
"... fascinating glimpses into the obscurer corners of [Tanizaki's] art." —The New York Times Book Review
"... overlooked treasures from a modern master." — St. Petersburg Times
"Translated ... with all the care and panache that the author himself would have appreciated." —Persimmon
Previous Praise for Tanizaki's Writing
"Even his lighter-hearted fictions ... make us hold our breath, and the endings don't let us quite exhale."
—John Updike, New Yorker
"The outstanding Japanese novelist of this century." —Edmund White, New York Times Book Review
"World-class." —Christian Science Monitor
"The remarkable sensibility of a great artist." —Punch
"One of the greatest of twentieth-century novelists, of the rank of Thomas Mann." —New Statesman
"The writing is inventive, allusive, moving with assurance and skill." —Times Literary Supplement
"A relaxed rhythm and heft, a directness and simplicity suddenly condensing into poetry and symbol, an imaginative reach that even while encompassing twists of erotic oddity ... still seems robust."
—John Updike, New Yorker
About the Authors
JUN'ICHIRO TANIZAKI was born in central Tokyo in 1886. After becoming an overnight celebrity with his literary debut in 1910, he produced a steady stream of novels, short stories, essays, plays, poetry, and translations for the next fifty-five years. His versatility is further demonstrated by the film scenarios he wrote for a Yokohama studio in 1920-21. The 1923 Tokyo earthquake forced him to move to the Kansai region, where he chose to remain for most of the rest of his life. Trips to Korea and China in 1918 and to Shanghai in 1926 were his only overseas experiences. By 1948, when he completed The Makioka Sisters, he was widely considered the preeminent Japanese novelist. In 1949 he received the Order of Culture, the highest honor the emperor can bestow on an artist.
He married three times; his third wife, Matsuko, shared the last thirty years of his life. Even in his seventies he was still startling readers with audacious fiction like The Key and Diary of a Mad Old Man, and a year before his death in Atami in 1965 he was elected to the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, the first Japanese to be so honored.
Translations of his work began to appear as early as 1917, and by now his novels have been published in at least twenty different languages. Donald Keene's assessment appears to be coming true: "It is likely that if any one writer of the period will stand the test of time and be accepted as a figure of world stature, it will be Tanizaki."
ANTHONY H. CHAMBERS, Professor of Japanese at Arizona State University, has translated a number of classical and modern writers. His Tanizaki translations include Naomi, Arrowroot, The Reed Cutter, The Secret History of the Lord of Musashi, and Captain Shigemoto's Mother. He is the author of The Secret Window: Ideal Worlds in Tanizaki's Fiction.
PAUL McCARTHY, Professor of Comparative Cultures at Surugadai University, has translated Tanizaki's "The Little Kingdom," "Professor Rado," Childhood Years, and A Cat, a Man, and Two Women, which won the Japan-America Friendship Commission Prize. He has also translated Takeshi Umehara's Lotus and Other Tales of Medieval Japan and Zenno Ishigami's Disciples of the Buddha.
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