"The Maids is altogether lighter, freer, and more playful than The Makioka Sistersa busily peopled and remarkably sensual group portrait. The short novel teems with life and has a flavor all its own, a joyful, comic, improvisational quality rupturing the elegiac tone announced in its opening pages. It is no bad thing to be reminded from time to time that Junichiro Tanizakis remarkably fresh and intimate voice is speaking to us across a gulf of years and cultures." -- Edmund Gordon - The Times Literary Supplement "The final novel of the greatest Japanese novelist of the twentieth century. It is alsoas Michael P. Cronins translation, the first into English, showsone of his best. Written with Tanizakis usual narrative brio and sly intimacy, with a focus on the pleasure and drama of everyday life so all-encompassing that when the eruptions of history intrudein the form of the second Sino-Japanese war and World War IIthey ring, as desired, like pistol shots at a party. Even without these cataclysms, we come to seeTanizaki is an insistently elegiac writerthat the world is always in flux. Tanizakis great success is to make us see how it is not only the masters who mourn the passing of such a world, but also the old maids." -- The Wall Street Journal "Its as if David Lynch wrote a season of Mad Men, with an emphasis on the women. Tanizakis a really great writer." -- David Mitchell "Skillfully and subtly, Tanizaki brushes in a delicate picture of a gentle world that no longer exists." -- San Francisco Chronicle "Tanizaki is a very brilliant novelist." -- Haruki Murakami
