Quicksand

Quicksand by Junichiro Tanizaki is a novel about deceit, jealousy and betrayal. Written between 1928 and 1930 as a serial for a magazine, the story is narrated by a young Osaka woman named Sonoko, who becomes infatuated and then in love with another woman, the childish but cunning Mitsuko. Sonoko is married, while Mitsuko is secretly involved with an impotent playboy who proves even more deceitful, at least according to Sonoko. Sonoko recounts the entire story of these two women and two men to an author figure (presumably Tanizaki). She talks and talks, at times like a garrulous teenager, describing the minutiae of a love triangle plus one. What’s remarkable is how seamlessly Tanizaki weaves this tangled web, convincingly revealing each connection and twist and turn, of which there are many.

After reading a collection of short stories by Ryunosuke Akutagawa, who died in 1927, a year before Quicksand appeared, it was interesting to compare the two authors and see how much more modern Tanizaki feels in terms of style and subject matter. Again, though, the theme of suicide as an expression of pure love, or a fatal form of commitment, appears here as well, as it did in Akutagawa’s work and in that of many other Japanese writers and filmmakers of the time and after, including Yukio Mishima, Nagisa Oshima, and, to a lesser extent, Haruki Murakami.

There’s a 1964 film, Manji, based on Quicksand. The original serial was also titled Manji, but as Howard Hibbett notes in his foreword, the title doesn’t translate well into English, since it refers to the Buddhist swastika, whose four prongs in Quicksand represent the four lovers.