Hey Baka-Raptor, Strawberry Panic isn’t proper Japanese literature, this is.
After reading Junichiro Tanizaki’s book Quicksand, I was so convinced of the believability of the female characters in the book, that I was mistaking Tanizaki for a woman. The mark of a good author who writes a story about female characters is if you question their own gender. It also didn’t help that Junichiro sounded like a girly name, but thanks to Wikipedia we can now be more certain of author gender. WIKIPEDIA: Thwarting Anthony Gidden’s theory of fluid identity since as long as I can remember.
Anyway, Baka-Raptor, if you say that literature is only good if it has lesbians in it, you’re missing out on a lot of good stuff which may not have lesbians in it, but lucky for you, this is actual Japanese literature about lesbians which isn’t a yuri light novel. So literary it doesn’t even have a manga adaptation (something The Tale Of Genji can no longer claim) and so compelling in the backstabbing and trickery you’d think you’re not reading a boring stuffy literary book at all, if you want to try Japanese literature (the old school stuff that is) but still aren’t ready to try anything that doesn’t have lesbians yet, this is the book for you.
Let’s see what we’ve got here:
Sonoko is married to a boring lawyer husband. But when she meets Mitsuko, a femme fatale who Sonoko insists poses for her paintings in her artist class at a crooked academy that wants to extort more money out of students, she is enraptured in passion and much pre-acceptable yuri in a time where yuri could get you kicked out of good standing society ensues.
However, Sonoko’s husband becomes suspicious of their activities together, and at first is unaware of the insatiable lusting Sonoko and Mitsuko have for one another. To top it all off there’s a dude called Watanuki who Mitsuko plans to marry as a cover-up for her passion for another woman, but there’s a catch: Watanuki is sterile and can’t have babies, so if Mitsuko does marry him she will be shamed either way. Which is why she frequently implies she is going to have a suicide pact with Watanuki and Sonoko. Hoo Boy. It gets depressing from here, but it’s a good read. Mitsuko was a yandere character before yandere was made popular by anime shows like School Days, but the real strength in Quicksand as a book is that it keeps you guessing how Mitsuko is going to screw people over next, and whether the web of lies that entangles everybody is going to get worse.
I really didn’t see the ending coming, so I won’t spoil it here because you REALLY won’t see it coming. I mean Day-Mn. To say any more about it would be too much, read it yourself and make up your own mind.
I found it quite a read and I only really put it down three times and that was because I needed to go to dinner. It’s something that has to be experienced, and because I haven’t read much Japanese literature on the level of Tanizaki before (I have read the novel Train Man before, twice even) so I can’t really compare it to much. It’s very different to Train Man, I can say that, and it’s much more bleak and introspective of a woman’s lot in a time in Japanese society where reputation was everything. Try it if you want to know what Japan was like before the word “otaku” was even invented.
3 comments ↓
It’s not an unbiased review unless you list an equal number (greater than zero) of things that suck and things that rock.
[...] Here is the original: Junichiro Tanizaki’s Quicksand: An Unbiased Review [...]
@Baka-Raptor:
I suck at emulating your style of reviewing because sometimes I can be biased, and sometimes I’m not biased enough, and other times I’m too biased. Take for example my stance on Read Or Die. It’s changed, I once saw Yomiko Readman as a gleaming example of nerdy womanhood but now she seems creepy and stalkerish to me.
I just wanted to jump on the book review bandwagon before it set sail, because there hasn’t been a book review like yours since the “Shiznat in the Rye” post you did.
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