The Secret History of the Lord of Musashi and Arrowroot

Praise

“These fictions, subversive and self-referential, join the already dazzling canon of Tanizaki’s work. They are masterpieces.” —The Nation

“Japan’s great modern novelist…[Tanizaki] created a lifelong series of ingenious variations on a dominant theme: the power of love to energize and destroy.” —Chicago Tribune

“Junichiro Tanizaki may well prove to be the outstanding Japanese novelist of this century.”–Edmund White, The New York Times Book Review

“Arrowroot is related with a delightful deftness, in the blunt easy tone of a born writer.” —John Updike, The New Yorker

“With the publication of these two novellas one of the major lacunae in Tanizaki’s English translation . . . has been filled. (And with great grace and elegance–the translation is first-rate.) Tanizaki, with his wonderful imagination, his complete artistry, his honesty . . . his classical aesthetic restraint, is one of the great Japanese writers of this century.” –Donald Richie

"[A] master of death and eros. . . . The unthinkable is made breathtakingly real by Tanizaki’s eye for detail, which can operate clinically . . . or like that of a primal shaman artist who knows how to turn an ordinary object into a fetish." —L.A. Weekly

“Tanizaki transforms the page into the ritual of Kabuki theater." —Newsday

"One of Japan’s most prized novelists of this century." —The Wall Street Journal

"Tanizaki’s spare and elegant prose draws us into a society at once familiar . . . and exotic. The disjunction, the remoteness are . . . entrancing." –New York Magazine