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Recent Reviews
Jun'ichirō Tanizaki, Tr. Anthony Chambers and Paul McCarthy
Positive The Times Literary Supplement (UK) \'Longing\' is haunting, surreal and rather frightening ... \'Sorrows of a Heretic\'...[is] gripping and blackly funny ... \'The Story of an Unhappy Mother\' is...a slight story but blackly humorous. In all of these three very different stories we hear Tanizaki’s distinctive voice and enjoy the products of his overwrought imagination. This translation is a valuable addition to the canon.
Amy Stanley
Rave The Times Literary Supplement (UK) At the heart of Stanley’s book is the extraordinary and terrible story of Tsuneno, whose life went against the grain not only of what was expected of women in her day but also of what we assume life was like for women at that time ... This book is clearly intended to appeal not to specialists but to as wide a readership as possible ... detailed documentation ... Stanley brings all this vividly to life—clothing, laundry, the pecking order, right down to salaries and prices and precisely what people of different incomes could and couldn’t afford ... Tsuneno’s story takes us into virtually every corner of this remarkable society on the brink of change...plunges us alongside her right inside Japanese society, taking us into the very different worlds she brushed up against, making us smell the smells and experience the details.
Ruth Ozeki
Positive The New York Times Whenever the word 'time' comes up — 'wasting time,' 'about time,' 'in time' — the reader must stop and think about the many angles of approach to that subject in Ruth Ozeki’s delightful yet sometimes harrowing new novel, A Tale for the Time Being ... Nao’s future reader, Ruth, has left Manhattan to live with her husband on the aptly named Desolation Sound in a community of refugees from the modern world. There she reads the diary slowly, at the same speed she imagines Nao wrote it, and gradually the teenager’s world impinges more and more on Ruth’s ...elements of Nao’s story — schoolgirl bullying, unemployed suicidal “salarymen,” kamikaze pilots — are among a Western reader’s most familiar images of Japan, but in Nao’s telling, refracted through Ruth’s musings, they become fresh and immediate, occasionally searingly painful ... All are drawn into the stories of two 'time beings,' Ruth and Nao, whose own fates are inextricably bound.