The Maids

by Junichiro Tanizaki, Michael P. Cronin (Translator)

Overview

A major discovery: Tanizaki’s wonderful final novel—now in English

The Maids is a jewel: an astonishing complement to The Makioka Sisters, set in the same house, in the same turbulent decades, but among the servants as much as the masters. The Maids concerns all the young women who work—before, during, and after WWII—in the pampered, elegant household of the famous author Chikura Raikichi, his wife Sanko, and her younger sister. Though quite well-to-do, Raikichi has a small house: the family and the maids (usually a few, sharing a little room next to the kitchen) are on top of one another. This proximity helps to explain Raikichi’s extremely close observation of the maids and their daily lives, although his interest carries with it more than a dash of the erotic, calling to mind Tanizaki’s raciest books such as Diary of a Mad Old Man and The Key.

In the sensualist, semi-innocent, sexist patrician Raikichi, Tanizaki offers a richly ironic self-portrait, but he presents as well a moving, nuanced chronicle of change and loss: centuries-old values and manners are vanishing, and here—in the evanescent beauty of the small gestures and intricacies of private life—we find a whole world to be mourned.  And yet, there is such vivacity and such beauty of writing that Tanizaki creates an intensely compelling epic in a kitchen full of lively girls.

Ethereally suggestive, sensational yet serious, witty but psychologically complex, The Maids is in many ways The Makioka Sisters revisited in a lighter, more comic mode.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780811224925
Publisher:	New Directions Publishing Corporation
Publication date:	04/25/2017
Pages:	224
Product dimensions:	5.70(w) x 8.30(h) x 3.50(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

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

"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."— Edmund Gordon The Times Literary Supplement

"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

"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

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

"Tanizaki is a very brilliant novelist."— Haruki Murakami

From the Publisher