The Maids - Hardcover

Tanizaki, Junichiro

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0811224929 ISBN 13: 9780811224925

Publisher: New Directions, 2017

Synopsis

A major discovery: Tanizaki’s wonderful final novel―now in English

The Maids is a jewel: an astonishing complement to The Makioka Sisters, set in the same house, in the same turbulent decades, but among the servants as much as the masters. The Maids concerns all the young women who work―before, during, and after WWII―in the pampered, elegant household of the famous author Chikura Raikichi, his wife Sanko, and her younger sister. Though quite well-to-do, Raikichi has a small house: the family and the maids (usually a few, sharing a little room next to the kitchen) are on top of one another. This proximity helps to explain Raikichi’s extremely close observation of the maids and their daily lives, although his interest carries with it more than a dash of the erotic, calling to mind Tanizaki’s raciest books such as Diary of a Mad Old Man and The Key.

In the sensualist, semi-innocent, sexist patrician Raikichi, Tanizaki offers a richly ironic self-portrait, but he presents as well a moving, nuanced chronicle of change and loss: centuries-old values and manners are vanishing, and here―in the evanescent beauty of the small gestures and intricacies of private life―we find a whole world to be mourned.  And yet, there is such vivacity and such beauty of writing that Tanizaki creates an intensely compelling epic in a kitchen full of lively girls.

Ethereally suggestive, sensational yet serious, witty but psychologically complex, The Maids is in many ways The Makioka Sisters revisited in a lighter, more comic mode.

About this title

About the Author:

Author of The Makioka Sisters, In Praise of Shadows, and A Cat, a Man, and Two Women, Junichiro Tanizaki (1886–1965) is arguably the greatest Japanese writer of the twentieth century. 

Michael P. Cronin is assistant professor of Japanese at the College of William and Mary.

Review:

"The Maids illuminates from within the huge social changes that occurred during that time, reflected in the changing relationships between the maids and the members of the family. These relationships are shown with heartfelt precision, and the narration is enriched with many allusions, not only to the time of the setting but to earlier, classical Japanese literature. The translator handles all this masterfully, and his afterword should not be missed." The American Literary Translators Association (ALTA), 2018 Lucien Stryk Asian Translation Prize shortlist

About this edition

• Publisher: New Directions
• Publication date: 2017
• ISBN 10: 0811224929
• ISBN 13: 9780811224925
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 224