Club Protocol Release: Quicksand KINDLE MOBI by Junichiro Tanizaki H.A.

Junichiro Tanizaki's Quicksand, translated and released in English in 1995, and which is particularly difficult to translate, takes place in 1920s Osaka and describes love--heterosexual, lesbian, adulterous, conjugal--in its multifarious convolutions of impotence and obsession, frankness and shame, happiness and tragedy. The four main characters indulge in the games and schemes of the idle rich obsessively directed by one of them: the beautiful and cruel, yet loving and lovable, Mitsuko.
Originally published in 1947, the story centres on Sonoko Kakiuchi, the bored and willful upper-class wife of an Osaka lawyer, who recounts the story of her desperate love in the year 1927 for the willowy young woman named Mitsuko. When Sonoko discovers the presence in Mitsuko's life of a man, the elusive Watanuki, she is surprised by enormous feelings of jealousy and soon finds herself "sinking deeper and deeper into the quicksand" of the couple's lies. But Sonoko is no saint: in an attempt to gain time and attract sympathy she fakes a suicide attempt that draws her husband into the affair. The romantic quadrangle lurches to a tragic, quintessentially Japanese conclusion. Tanizaki's prose, seamlessly translated by Hibbett, is as icy and lovely as a winter morning. It's also interesting to note how the author propels the plot and develops characters through their use of pharmaceuticals, a device he later employed with great effect in his masterpiece, The Makioka Sisters. (Please check my uploads for The Makioka Sisters! )

Idea: Add Advanced Search Function for Country of Origin and Language for BOOKS!