Quicksand – Tanizaki Džuničiró (1994)

Sonoko Kakiuchi is a cultured Osaka lady, unfortunately widowed young. But her story is unsettlingly at odds with her image. It is a tale of infatuation and deceit, of deliberate evil. Its theme is humiliation, its victim Sonoko's mild-mannered husband. At its centre - seductive, manipulating, enslaving - is one of Tanizaki's most extraordinary characters, the beautiful and corrupt art student Mitsuko. Review "A riveting tale of malevolent corruption fatally masked by a terrible and deceptive beauty: fatal attraction in a 1920s Japanese setting" (Kirkus Reviews) "Quicksand reads like a mixture of James Cain and Vladimir Nabokov and teases us with forbidden pleasures" (Washington Times) "A harrowing black comedy of love and death" (Chicago Tribune) "Beautifully and mysteriously contrived" (Newsday) "Quicksand reads like a mixture of James Cain and Vladimir Nabokov [and] teases us with forbidden pleasures" (Washington Times) About the Author Junichiro Tanizaki was one of Japan's greatest twentieth century novelists. Born in 1886 in Tokyo, his first published work - a one-act play - appeared in 1910 in a literary magazine he helped to found. Tanizaki lived in the cosmopolitan…