"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
