The Maids is Tanizaki’s companion piece to his better known novel The Makioka Sisters, with the same general portrayal of an elite household stumbling through pre and then postwar Japan. The difference is that Sisters is concerned about with the daughters of the house, Maids as one could guess is focused on the hired help that runs the various mansions the Raikichi familiy inhabits over the years, told through the voyeuristic gaze of Patriarch of the family and accomplished author Chikura Raikichi. Raikichi is a paper thin stand in for Tanizaki, in a self effacing parodic manner but to what extent I am not entirely sure. Raikichi goes from stern master of the house, interacting with the maids in a rather paternalistic traditional manner, giving the young countrywomen he scouts for the job a nom de emploi that he deems fit to even managing their engagements and later marriages, and gets more and more personally involved as time progresses to a climax where he entertains all his former help in a drunken party as an old man. Im no Tanizaki scholar but this seems to be almost counter to his popular image, from occidentophile dandy to an impassioned regionalist, but I suspect that this is a flattening of the historical character for a practical narrative for marketing’s sake. In dealing with the book itself, the narrative is largely concerned with their quirks and affairs of the maids (including a particularly entertainingly dramatic lesbian tryst between two maids recalling Tanizaki’s Quicksand) but these are all prisms reflecting Chikura’s (and I suspect Tanizaki himself) adaptation to the post-WW2 order in Japan. In the book Chikura remarks with a restrained sadness that even with the few women who are willing to be hired on as maids, the rest content to more lucrative work in factories and offices, they do not accept the old traditions he implicitly expects. Toward the end of the book he is letting the children of his ex-maids doodle with stationary he previously fired a maid for daring to touch. That is the core of the book.

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The maids (2017)

The maids (2017)