The Gourmet Club: A Sextet offers the English-reading world six stories by Jun'ichiro Tanizaki, one of the twentieth-century's outstanding Japanese, indeed world, novelists. The stories that comprise this collection span the author's long literary career: Two stories ("The Children" and "The Secret") date from 1911, the year after Tanizaki's literary debut. The final story, "Manganese Dioxide Dreams" (1955) gives tantalizing autobiographical glimpses of the artist as an old man, written ten years before his death in 1965.

Filmmaker Kurosawa once wrote, "To be an artist means never to avert your eyes." In that spirit, we enter Tanizaki's world and share bizarre imaginings: Plagued by insomnia, indigestion, and an irregular heartbeat, the narrator of "Manganese Dioxide Dreams," for example, sees a fecal clump floating in this Western-style toilet as the actress Simone Signoret's face. This powerful literary imagination--floored and flat-out--often with an erotic twist, is a signature of Tanizaki's work. Importantly, and what elevates his fiction above sensationalism, Tanizaki never loses control, always deftly drawing the reader into larger meditations on human passion and obsession.

"Mr. Bluemond" is a riveting tale about Nakada, a movie director whose young actress-wife, Yurako, is the star of his films. At a bar one night, Nakada meets an unnamed "Mr. Bluemond" (a probable wordplay on the legendary Bluebeard), a fan of the celluloid version of his wife, Yurako. But as Nakada learns, the fan's obsession with Yurako is from the realm of hyper-imagination. In Mere Christianity, C. S. Lewis used a wondrous analogy with gluttony to illustrate such a voyeuristic sexual appetite run amok: Would people pay to see a turkey drumstick on stage? In its shocker finale, this story argues a similar, comic reductio ad absurdum effect. But not before giving us an astonishing, richly imagined narrative sweep that deconstructs the celluloid Yurako (Mr. Bluemond's obsession partly feeds on film frames snipped from copies of Nakada's films later respliced by bribed movie projectionists), that invokes Platonic shadow vis a vis true essence, and that makes Nakada realize, despite his intimate relations with Yurako, Mr. Bluemond's assertion that he knows Yurako better might be true.

The title piece in this collection, "The Gourmet Club," considers decadence of yet another appetite. Count G. presides over a club of five independently wealthy men who pass their days gambling between outings for their next novel food experience. Sadly, these "foodies" have devoured the known culinary delights of Tokyo and those in many outlying regions too. In his personal life, Tanizaki reputedly was a gourmet and sometime gourmand. Thus, folding food into literature, Tanizaki brings to the story of Count G.'s fortuitous discovery of a Chinese "gourmet club" even more advanced (and decadent) than his own, an earned wisdom: Food obsession taken too far consumes the obsessed well before the appetite to consume quits.

The balance of the collection includes "The Young Children," a startling, but familiar picture of sadomasochistic games among the young (yes, children do play those games of bondage and misplaced trust); "The Secret," in which a jaded man retreats from his world of routine into a neglected Tokyo neighborhood where he experiments with cross-dressing; and "The Two Acolytes," an account of two teenage youths in medieval times, separated from parents at birth, raised in a mountain monastery, who differ about following Amida Buddha's spiritual path to the Pure Land once the desire to know about women wakes in each.

The Gourmet Club: A Sextet adds to the body of Tanizaki's work available in English--up-to-now, almost exclusively novels. It's high-energy writing in the short-story form that this reviewer obsessively finished at one sitting.

The Secret History of the Lord of Musashi is a masterpiece of dysfunction. A lord who becomes obsessed with 'woman heads,' noseless heads collected at the ends of mighty battles. The samurai are to collect the heads of fallen foes during battle, but the more kills, the harder it is to carry all the heads, so instead they take noses, and it is the job of a group of women to fit the noses back onto the voided faces. It is this ritual the young Lord of Musashi comes across, and the rest makes for a great read!

The plot development in this book is virtually non-existent. To cap it all off, the ending sucks. You are led to believe that the book might get interesting in the end, but NO! I would not recommend this book to anyone because it is awful. A good ending could have saved it, but the ending was terrible.

Tanizaki's powers of description are as potent here as in passages of "Sasame Yuki." As usual he brings time and place to vivid and delicately observed life.

His characters are also convincing - seemingly without effort. The messiness inside them is in no way culturally specific to Japan of a certain era - whether or not it is meant to comment upon the riot of societal changes that usually provide the petri dish in which Tanizaki's protagonists are swimming.

This book is worth reading slowly.

It is also worth someday reading again.

This is one of my all-time favorite novels, and I have read it about once a year for the last ten. It is a beautiful illustration of cultural struggle, as well as the personal frustrations of a marriage falling apart. It ends in classic Japanese style-- uncertainly-- allowing the reader to wonder and imagine what happens next.

Aside of his novels, I have Richard Brautigan to thank for introducing me to Junichiro Tanizaki (he dedicated "Sombrero Fallout" to Tanizaki).

"Diary of a Mad Old Man" was the first book by him I read (figuring that it was very short, less than a hundred pages, and concluding that - even if it was terrible - it would not take me all that long to read).

It tells the story of Utsugi (the mad old man of the title) and his relationship with his son's neglected wife, a former dancing girl called Satsuko. Now, on the surface at least, it appears that Satsuko, tired of the neglect imposed by Utsugi's son, decides to torment (perhaps torment is too strong a word - perhaps I mean tease - perhaps I mean something halfway between teasing and torment) Utsugi, inviting him into her shower, letting him kiss her bare foot.

The thing is. That title. "Diary of a Mad Old Man." We are reading the old man's diary and the old man is mad. Or at least, that is what the title would have us presume. And yet, the old man (our narrator after all) does not SEEM mad. Yes, okay, he is consumed by lust, at times, for Satsuko (but what old man wouldn't be?), but madness? The title leads me to doubt what I read. I wonder at times if we are inhabiting the dream world of a certain old man. (It would certainly account for why Satsuko is hot and cold and hot and cold.)

Still. There is a cool sensuality to the writing and it is without doubt a good introduction to an old master.

This is an interesting book about an elderly man named Utsugi who's in poor health; however, his sexual urges are pretty strong. He's infatuated with his daughter-in-law Satsuko, a former dancer with a murky past. He shares his thoughts about her with us in his diary along with his health afflictions, the various medications he takes and the different treatments he undergoes. This is a pretty good book that will hold your attention. While it is a good book, it isn't one of Junichiro Tanizaki's best. I recommend you start elsewhere with one of his other novels first like "The Key", then move on to some of his other works if you decide you like his writing.

This book is incredibly entertaining.

This books contains two novellas by Junichiro Tanizaki and tranlated by Anthony Chambers. Tanizaki wrote these in 1930 and they are suppose to be his favorite.

The Secret History of the Lord of Musashi is filled with scandel. The subject is of a great lord whose sexual fixations includes a sick obsession in severed heads, espcially those without noses. This is more of a horror story of old.

Arrowroot is meditative, poetic, it describes the journey of two friends traveling together. One is looking for information about a lost imperial court from the 15th centuary, the other is trying to understand his dead mother.

Bound in _A Cat, a Man, and Two Women_ are three stories by one of Japan's most esteemed modern writers, Junichiro Tanizaki. For anyone who has followed Tanizaki's work, the stories are ostensibly by a younger Tanizaki; the stories capture hints of the perverse and psychological drama, which he has mastered in his later work. I must admit, having read many of his later novels first, I found the stories in the collection a bit slow. Nonetheless, as admier of Tanizaki's literature, I felt the collection gave me a better understanding of his progression and maturity as a writer. His attention to the psychology of the women characters vis-à-vis the male protagonist in the title story, "A Cat, a Man, and Two Women," reminded me of his novel _Quicksand_, written much later. The story "Professor Rado" is arguably a nascent version of _A Diary of a Mad Old Man_, which centralizes trans-generational desire and foot fetishes. Out of the three stories, "The Little Kingdom" was my favorite -- it gives the impression that Tanizaki is both an astute and creative social critic. The story reminded me of the novel _Nip the Buds, Shoot the Children_, by another notable Japanese author, Kenzaburo Oe, where children rule the adult world around them. The collection is worth a read.

Although extremely well written, the point of these stories escapes me. And this coming from someone who has a fair familiarity with and appreciation for Japanese literature. Despite the book's short length, it took me several weeks to get through it -- my interest and intellectual curiosity were never truly aroused. I was particularly dismayed by the stories' endings, which struck me as rather arbitrary and gratuitously abrupt. To be sure, it is nowhere written in stone that a story must always provide some sort of resolution. That doesn't mean, however, that it should end more or less in mid-sentence -- and with a 'ho-hum' from the reader.

tanizaki is my most favorite author ever since reading some of his works in college. therefore, i have read "a cat, a man, and two women" for leisure. i would have to say this is one of tanizaki's shortest works but not short of complexities of relationships of all sorts. the main part of this book deals with the complexity of not only the relationship between a man and his present wife (cousin) and an ex-wife but with a long time cat companion named Lilly. i don't know if i can call this a love triangle, more like a love rectangle. the cat, Lilly, is used and abused in this story. Lilly becomes the reasons and emotional links of all the problems between the man (Shozo) and his women, Shinako and Fukuko. A helpless animal is being "abused" by these characters, the cat can be used to represent Shozo's "actual" wife, the cat was "used" to make both wives jealous by Shozo without him directly trying, and the cat was snatched by ex-wife to lure Shozo back to her. focus is driven away from the human players in this story and is mainly on helpless Lilly. I felt Shozo never needed a wife in first place, all he needed was Lilly, Shozo is a real cat lover and tanizaki did well describing all the feelings dealing with loving a feline.