Lesley Downer
At Your Service
Junichiro Tanizaki, who was born in 1886, is one of the giants of 20th-century Japanese literature. His work ranges from epic novels such as The Makioka Sisters, delving deep into the lives of four wealthy sisters in western Japan up to and including the early years of the Second World War, to the celebrated In Praise of Shadows, an essay on Japanese aesthetics. The Maids is his last novel and the last of his works to be translated into English.
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Perception is a weird thing. Lawrence Durrell saw Hydra as a ‘great horned toad’ but Henry Miller thought it resembled a ‘huge loaf of petrified bread’. Niko Ghika painted it as a series of neat white and orange squares.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/the-call-of-the-wine-dark-sea
The minimalist Fumio Sasaki 'confesses that as he began to purchase fewer consumer goods, his meals shrank in size. He decluttered and lost weight. Accumulation is not just an economic way of life but a form of embodiment too. Enlightenment is reduction.'
https://literaryreview.co.uk/gardens-of-emptiness
'The river’s desecration mirrors Colombia’s long history of violence: "for years we treated it like a sewer," says Ahmed, a survivor of a particularly brutal paramilitary massacre, "just like we treated each other".'
Patrick Wilcken on the Magdalena.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/troubled-waters-3