Junichiro Tanizaki may well prove to be the outstanding Japanese novelist of this century, rivaled only by Yasunari Kawabata…. Both writers presided over the obsequies of traditional Japan, and both responded to its demise with a strong but ironic nostalgia….

For Tanizaki, "Arrowroot" (1932) and "The Secret History of the Lord of Musashi" (1935), now admirably translated into English for the first time, mark the period when, after 20 years of writing novels in a fairly orthodox style, he fused two interests—traditional Japanese storytelling and experimental narrative—into a unique style. But their themes are mirrored in many of his other stories….

Sadism—or more exactly sexual coercion, quietly engineered and often taking place among members of the same family—is a theme that fascinated Tanizaki. He managed to exclude it altogether only from "The Makioka Sisters," as though he had determined not to mar his masterpiece with anything too recherché. But even in those pages, the grim relish with which diseases, operations and natural disasters are described seems a bit suspect….

[Many of Tanizaki's] plots, if baldly summarized, sound merely pornographic. But what must be kept in mind is that the erotic maneuvers in a Tanizaki novel are performed in a tight, almost claustrophobic society based on filial deference and an equally strong parental sense of responsibility for children. If such roles form the tight mesh of the backdrop, the "lighting" of the scenes is always esthetic. We are never far from the powerful Buddhist response to nature (thus time in "The Bridge of Dreams" is marked by the flowering of seasonal plants) nor from Tanizaki's taste for whatever is old, shadowy, rustic, tarnished, even filthy—that constellation of qualities summed up by the Japanese word wabi. That quality is explicated by Tanizaki in his essay, "In Praise of Shadows," which he starts off by rejecting the Western bathroom, of all things, for its harsh light and shiny tiles and fixtures. He goes on to praise light-absorbing Japanese paper and the "muddy" Japanese complexion. He ends by stating: "I would call back at least for literature this world of shadows we are losing. In the mansion called literature I would have the eaves deep and the walls dark, I would push back into the shadows the things that come forward too clearly, I would strip away the useless decoration."

Virtually all the elements of Tanizaki's vision—its sexual kinkiness, its swift narrative thrust, its gaudy display of violence against a muted grisaille of nature—appear in "The Secret History of the Lord of Musashi." The book purports to be a reconstruction, based on "secret documents," of a 16th-century warrior's intimate life.

Anyone who has ever contemplated writing a historical novel will admire Tanizaki's serious solutions to the real (as opposed to the routine) problems of the genre. The greatest temptation and the one almost always succumbed to is to put new wine into old bottles, modern psychology into period costume. The second most common sin is to make historical characters perpetually conscious of their high destinies, to make them breathe at all times the ozone of purpose, of will, of heroism. Tanizaki avoids both mistakes. His men and women are quite palpably different from whatever their modern counterparts would be. These characters are more impulsive, more mettlesome, more aware of their rank and dignity and more adult at an early age (p. 8)

[What Terukatsu, the Lord of Musashi,] most longs to see is a sadistic woman make love to a noseless man. The origin of this strange taste is carefully explained, and within the confines of the tale the explanation is believable. Indeed, the function of obsessive sexuality in this book is to lend credibility to the entire story. For if most historical novels seem unreal because the characters are too conscious of their noble destinies, these characters are convincing because they are motivated by thirst for revenge and lust, the two most systematic emotions, which find their clues and spin their designs everywhere.

In no sense is "The Secret History" pornographic. It is not written out of prurience or for the reader's delectation. Both the writer and reader stand back in solemn amazement at the characters' demonic energy and aristocratic freedom from guilt.

"Arrowroot" explores another aspect of Tanizaki's psychology—his search for the lost mother. Tanizaki first sounded this note in his 1919 story "Reminiscence of My Beloved Mother."… In "Arrowroot," a young man named Tsumura searches for the relatives of his deceased mother and finally finds them in the rustic mountain fastness of Yoshino. He even marries a distant relative who resembles his mother. Thus the dead mother once again merges with the figure of the beloved.

This drama occurs in a cold, luminous mountainscape where, centuries before, a pretender to the throne had taken refuge: "He was always accompanied by two doubles, so that no one could tell which was the real King. The pursuers asked an old village woman who chanced to come by. She told them, 'That one, whose breath is white, is the King.'" It is through that sort of detail, plain in language but poetic in conception, that the blood of Tanizaki's rich and mysterious art pulses. (pp. 8, 22-3)