8 July 2020
'Yoshino Arrowroot' by Jun'ichirō Tanizaki: A New Translation
Categorised under: Books & Publications, Staff
In the fourteenth installment of the Daiwa Anglo-Japanese Foundation’s Weekly Isolation Inspiration newsletter, the Foundation’s Director General Jason James proposed to publish his translation of “Yoshino Kuzu” by Jun’ichirō Tanizaki at the rate of one chapter a week (there are six chapters in total).
Yoshino Kuzu, which he will be translating under the title Yoshino Arrowroot, is a less well-known Tanizaki work, and is a short – but very dense – novella of around 60 pages. It describes a trip by the narrator, together with a friend called Tsumura, up the Yoshino River into the mountains in the early 1910s.
Read the novel here:
1 CHAPTER ONE - The Rightful Prince
2 CHAPTER TWO - Mount Imo and Mount Se
3 CHAPTER Three - The Hatsune Drum