The Maids

By Jun'ichirō Tanizaki

Book Overview

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.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0811228746
• ISBN13: 9780811228749
• Release Date: July 2019
• Publisher: New Directions Publishing Corporation
• Length: 176 Pages
• Weight: 0.50 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 5.3" x 7.9"