The Gourmet Club: A Sextet

tanizaki is a real favorite of mine. this is one of my preferred books of his.

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 wel