Childhood Years

“Unlike many of his contemporaries, Tanizaki was a consummate literary craftsman acutely concerned with form and structure and unity. This side of the writer is suppressed in Childhood Years, where the freedom of the zuihitsu genre sometimes becomes an excuse to ramble. Yet Tanizaki's reminiscences are imbued with the self-irony that enlivens the comedy in his fiction, and he often succeeds in evoking the textures of childhood experience to striking effect. The translation conveys the vitality of the original, using deft touches of interpolation and substitution where needed. Paul McCarthy has made available in English a memoir suffused with longing, which shows Tanizaki engaged in the act of remembrance that illuminated so much of his writing.”
— Ken Ito, University of Michigan