The Maids

Junichiro Tanizaki's last novel was The Maids (posthumously published in Japanese in 1974, but has just been published in English in 2017). It can be seen as a companion piece to his greatest triumph, The Makioka Sisters. It is the keenly observed lives of several maids who worked for a well-off author and his family, Raikichi Chikura (a stand in for the author) through the post war years and three house holds (Sumiyoshi in Kobe, Atami in Shizuoka, and Yuagara in Kanagawa). It also calls to mind the sexually infused novels of observation like The Key and Diary of a Mad Old Man in his obsessive observations and considerations of the young maids that have lived among the Chikuras over time. There are a number of episodic vignettes about the different maids that are essentially character portraits. Tanizaki is a displaced Tokyo-ite who moved to the Kansai area and immersed himself in Japanese culture. The fact that the majority of the maids in this tale come from Kagoshima in the southern most main island of Kyushu allows for him to list the characteristics of the women from the region as well as note the dialect much like an ethnographer. I think it belies Tanizaki's preoccupation with the fairer sex-although Raikichi is absent from sexual escapes some stories recount how certain maids were wooed for marriage and in one case he recounts how two maids who end up in a lesbian affair that scandalizes everyone. I found it entertaining and full of life. There's an informative afterword by translator Michael P. Cronin included as well.