Customer Reviews

Quicksand

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This is a wonderful work of literary fiction and in my opinion, one of Junichiro Tanizaki's best works. Here he weaves love, lust, deceit, extortion and human suffering into a compelling and gripping novel. The story centers around Mrs. Sonoko Kakiuchi a woman who is bored with her husband and has recently started taking courses at an art school. She eventually meets a beautiful student named Mitsuko and the two carry on an affair. Everything seems fine at first but Mitsuko soon starts acting strange and before Mrs. Kakiuchi knows it, she is thrust into a strange, surreal world filled with deception, suspicion, botched abortions, fake pregnancies, blood oaths and secret rendezvous. This is a fantastic book that will pull you right into the story. It almost makes one feel like they're a silent accomplice to all of secret goings-on while at the same time making them thankful that they're not involved at all. The story becomes more and more engrossing with each chapter. When a twisted love triangle and suicide pact are introduced, the situation takes a sinister turn until the entire affair ends in tragedy. The story has an interesting melodramatic, film-noir like quality that adds to the atmosphere. A highly recommended novel! Another recommendation is "The Key" also written by Junichiro Tanizaki.

I did not find this book as nearly emotionally involving as the book jacket suggested it would be - like other Tanizaki books I've read, the author describes very emotionally disruptive situations with intentionally cool detachment. What I found most interesting however was the curious social warfare depicted in the book, as each of the books characters try to best each other through more and more agressive lying and blackmail. One pauses to wonder - is this an accurate description of Japan in the 1920s - Japan today - Asia today - the entire world of human relations - or simply a product of Tanizaki's morbid imagination - no more (or less) an accurate description of his time and place than Kafka's of post World War I Prague. I certainly don't agree that Mitsuko is the best written femme fatale in literature, but some kind of award should be given to her first male lover for most agressively social warrior male I've seen depicted so far. If you want to read an intricate serious soap opera in a Japanese pre-War context, this is your book.

Sonoko, a bored housewife in 1920s Osaka and the first-person narrator of this story, has a passionate affair with the beautiful Mitsuko. At first, this seems like a fairly straightforward account of forbidden passion, but then we discover the existence of Mitsuko's male lover, Watanuki. At this point, the figure of Mitsuko becomes increasingly enigmatic as the reader attempts to discern which of her actions are motivated by passion and which are calculated to keep herself enshrined as an object of desire at the center of a convoluted human drama. The schemes and manipulations become ever more outrageous until, by the end, we are forced to conclude that "Quicksand" is a very dark comedy, despite author Junichiro Tanizaki's cold, controlled style. The suspicions that the narrator reveals on the very last page of the novel shows just how tenuous her grip on reality has become.

Sonoko Kakiuchi has a problem. She is bored with her husband that her family is supporting through law school. So she found a lover but he has become worthless to her. To waste some time she begins to attend art classes and that's where she begins to become obsessed with the most beautiful woman she has ever seen, Mitsuko. What follows are affairs, deceit, puzzles within puzzles, lies, and everything that comes along with extra marital affairs. You can only read in amazement as Mitsuko slowly devours the lives of everyone around her. Beneath the simple plot, there are deep issues about love and trust explored in this book. As the book progresses, reality also comes more into question. For a work of "literature", this book is a real page turner. It almost reads like a mystery novel with elements of James Ellroy and Paul Auster. This is my first exposure to Tanizaki, so I look forward to reading his other works. He seems like a real master of the novel.

Okay, so Tanizaki began his career with decadent, sadomasochistic short stories like "The Tattooer," "Children," and "The Secret," and ended it with affectionate novels like A Cat A Man and Two Women and Diary of a Mad Old Man. In the middle, there's some variation in the tone of his work (though self-destructive erotic obsession remained a near-constant), but there's a common thread of humanity throughout: even at their most degraded, the author allows his characters to retain some sense of dignity; the reader rarely gets the sense that Tanizaki is *enjoying* their suffering. Even a novel as aggressively twisted as The Secret History of the Lord of Musashi ends on a redemptive note.

His first major novel, Naomi, is no exception to this, but if you had to choose, you would probably call it his most "cruel." Then came Some Prefer Nettles, which represents a major leap in artistic maturity and is probably his best work outside The Makioka Sisters. And then, the current novel under consideration, Quicksand. The strong impression I got from it is that Tanizaki wasn't sure in what direction he wanted to go, thematically. So most of the novel consists of a typically elegant clandestine love affair, only to culminate in a lugubriously grotesque denouement reminiscent of his earliest work. In my opinion, these two aspects of the novel sit together very uneasily; they do not seem to me to form a coherent artistic whole.

I find it unsurprising that Quicksand remained untranslated for so long. It's interesting for those who want to chart the author's artistic development, but I wouldn't recommend it to the inexperienced Tanizaki reader without some heavy caveats. Pick up The Makioka Sisters, Some Prefer Nettles, or Seven Japanese Tales instead.

I've been reading a lot of Junichiro Tanizaki lately, and the most recent book I read was Quicksand. It was another love triangle penned from the point of view of an unreliable narrator, which is similar to The Key and Diary of a Mad Old Man. It is yet another story of obsession, desire, and death. It is a love triangle between a married woman, her husband, and a corrupt, manipulative femme fatale. It was one of his more compelling stories for sure.

This book is very good for a number of reasons. It is funny and maliciously dark, yet at the same time shows humanity and it's weaknesses. What makes it even more interesting, though, is the translation: Idiomatic phrases like "I knew something was up" crop up all over the text, and though I really don't know what I am talking about, as I don't know Japanese, I can't help thinking that Howard Hibbet deserves some sort of award for such a cool translation.

Bunraku is the unique puppet theater of Japan, in which nearly life-size puppets, manipulated by visible puppeteers in black, mime the classic melodramas of Chikamatsu while the narrative is chanted to the accompaniment of the shamisen. Most famous of all Bunraku plays is "The Lovers' Suicide", a piece of theater as central to Japanese culture as The Iliad was to Greek or Goethe's faust is to German. 20th C writer Junichiro Tanizaki would have known ever detail of The Lovers' Suicide from Buraku and Kabuki, and however bizarre and modernistic Tanizaki might seem to an English reader, he was profoundly aware of his place in Japanese tradition. "Quicksand", a novel written in the middle of his career, is Bunraku to the core -- a tale of a lovers' triangle, of obsession and jealousy, and of suicide, with just a hint of "possession" by fox-spirits. Even the narrative structure smacks of puppetry; the central figure of the lovers' triangle 'chants' the events to an audience of one, presumably the novelist himself.

What begins as erotic teasing evolves slowly into masochistic hysteria and emotional pornography. It would be easy to hate this novel if it were written by an Italian or an Icelander, but from within the insular semiotics of Japanese literature, it makes a kind of gaudy sense. Western readers will inevitably interpret it as a 'psychological' depiction of obsession, to which a Japanese reader might respond "so be it, but then all of Japanese history is a depiction of obsession." Are you ready to perceive beauty in an overwrought, maudlin desperation? Possibly then you are Japanese enough to appreciate Tanizaki.

I'd love to be able to read Tanizaki in Japanese. I studied the language furiously for several years, I lived in Kyoto for a year, I became fluent enough to have meaningful conversations with Japanese friends though never fluent enough to follow their exchanges with each other, but I never came close to knowing enough "kanji" characters to read Tanizaki. I noticed, curiously, that the more fluent I became in Japanese, the more skeptical my Japanese friends became of my communication. At a certain point, it seemed, my access to the culture had to be all or nothing, an impossible assimilation which would have required me to stop being myself. Reading Japanese novels - Tanizaki, Kawabata, Oe - often gives me the same eerie feeling of being ineluctably foreign, a "gai-jin" to the soles of my feet.

I've rated this novel at four stars solely in comparison to Tanizaki's other masterpieces - The Makioka Sisters, Some Prefer Nettles, Naomi - rather than on an absolute scale. Compared to a Dan Brown or a Joyce Carol Oates, even a laundry list from Tanizaki would deserve a whole constellation of stars.

The book deals with many of Tanizaki's usual themes: erotic obsession, deceipt, manipulation, a man who cannot but submit itself to his wife so much his desire for her is overwhelming, etc. One of the author's usual theme that I do not remember was very present is Westernization.

While by no mean a bad bood, I was dissapointed reading it. I think that the book lacks some of the intensity and natural flow of the author's author main work such as Naomi, The Key and Diary of an Mad Old Mad. The story line seemed a bit coerced at times. I must however concede my personal bias of having read perhaps too much of his work within a short time.