The Maids

by Junichiro Tanizaki, Michael P. Cronin (Translator)

Overview

A major discovery: Tanizaki’s wonderful final novel—now available as a paperback

The Maids, Tanizaki's final novel, sparkles like a jewel. Over the years—before, during, and after WWII—many women work in the pampered, elegant household of the famous author Chikura Raikichi, his wife, and her younger sister. Though the family's quite well-to-do, the house is small; the proximity of the maids helps perhaps to explain Raikichi's extremely close, and somewhat eroticized, observation of all their little ways. In the sensualist patrician Raikichi, Tanizaki offers a richly ironic self-portrait, but he presents as well an exquisitely nuanced chronicle of change and loss: centuries' old values and manners are vanishing, and here—in the evanescent beauty of all the small gestures and intricacies of private life—we find a whole world passing away.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780811228749
Publisher:	New Directions Publishing Corporation
Publication date:	07/30/2019
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	176
Sales rank:	1,062,574
Product dimensions:	5.30(w) x 7.90(h) x 0.60(d)

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.

Editorial Reviews

"The final novel of the greatest Japanese novelist of the twentieth century. It is also—as Michael P. Cronin’s translation, the first into English, shows—one of his best. Written with Tanizaki’s usual narrative brio and sly intimacy, with a focus on the pleasure and drama of everyday life so all-encompassing that when the eruptions of history intrude—in the form of the second Sino-Japanese war and World War II—they ring, as desired, like pistol shots at a party. Even without these cataclysms, we come to see—Tanizaki is an insistently elegiac writer—that the world is always in flux. Tanizaki’s great success is to make us see how it is not only the masters who mourn the passing of such a world, but also the old maids."

The Wall Street Journal

"The Maids is altogether lighter, freer, and more playful than The Makioka Sisters—a busily peopled and remarkably sensual group portrait.  The short novel teems with life and has a flavor all its own, a joyful, comic, improvisational quality rupturing the elegiac tone announced in its opening pages.  It is no bad thing to be reminded from time to time that Jun’ichiro Tanizaki’s remarkably fresh and intimate voice is speaking to us across a gulf of years and cultures."

They Couldn’t Cover Up - The Times Literary Supplement - Edmund Gordon

"Tanizaki is a very brilliant novelist."

Haruki Murakami

"It’s as if David Lynch wrote a season of Mad Men, with an emphasis on the women. Tanizaki’s a really great writer."

David Mitchell

02/27/2017
In this new translation of the final novel of Tanizaki’s illustrious career, he seeks to personify rapidly changing Japanese culture through a series of portraits of the “many, many maids” who “worked for the Chikura household” between 1937 and 1961. After beginning with the compliant but “high-strung” Hatsu, the eccentric cast grows to include Ume, whose epileptic seizures leave her “frothing at the mouth like a crab,” and Setsu, who is fired for being a lesbian after a neighbor witnesses her engaging in a “dreadful form of writhing” with Sayo, the “weirdly calm and excessively polite” maid she replaced. These scandals are already far from the trouble caused by Hatsu’s earlier habit of inviting delivery men in for sukiyaki, which once fed worries she had “fallen in with a bad crowd.” Gin, who arrives in the ’50s, takes things even further when she begins a love affair with a taxi driver. Even as its subjects approach the contemporary, Tanizaki’s narration, at turns demure and illuminating, serves as a charming reminder of times past. “The girls today can all find better conditions working in offices or factories,” Tanizaki writes, wistfully. “Even if one does come once in a while, she never settles down for long.” (Apr.)

Publishers Weekly

"Skillfully and subtly, Tanizaki brushes in a delicate picture of a gentle world that no longer exists."

San Francisco Chronicle

2017-02-02
Final work by Tanizaki (Red Roofs & Other Stories, 2016, etc.), one of the greatest 20th-century Japanese novelists.Chikura Raikichi isn't a voyeur, not exactly. A celebrated writer, he's more of an anthropologist behind his own doors, and now, observing the ways of his maids and the night-crawling young men of the district, he's in a nostalgic mood, as a doyenne in Alabama might have been in the 1960s. "We no longer call the household help ‘maids,' "he sighs, "and we can't simply address them by their given names, as we did in the old days." As the narrator notes, Raikichi does not approve of such innovations as calling a maid "Sister," since it's a term used for the sake waitresses at the beef shops of old, too. Tanizaki, who died in 1965, focuses closely on all the changes that came over Japan after the war, when country girls stopped hiring on in service to fine households, harder work in all than finding a job in a factory or secretarial pool—and certainly stopped hiring on for life. "Today's girls stay for six months or a year," the narrator laments, "thinking it good training for married life, then they hear from home about a marriage prospect, and they're gone." In between moments of ponderous reflection, Raikichi delights in the simple ways of some of his servants, such as one who spoke in amusing dialect ("the jabbering of southern barbarians") and another who, witnessing dogs copulating, was thrown by the subject until having it explained to her, whereupon "whenever she heard that two dogs were going at it, she would go to watch." There's a faintly musty exoticism to the whole enterprise, but Tanizaki, as always, is a keen student of human ways and admirable for his attention to detail; the slender book is reminiscent of the best of Turgenev, if without the Russian writer's arch humor. A small gem for admirers of Mishima, ?e, and other midcentury modernists.

Kirkus Reviews