'Quicksand reads like a mixture of James Cain and Vladimir Nabokov [and] teases us with forbidden pleasures." - Washington Post
From one of the greatest writers of twentieth-century Japan comes a silkily nuanced novel of erotic gamesmanship and obsession. The voice–cultured, ingenuous, and with a touch of coquetterie–is that of Sonoko Kakiuchi, an Osaka lady of good family married to a dully respectable lawyer. The story she has to tell leads the reader into a maze of temptation and betrayal. For Sonoko has become infatuated with the beautiful art student Mitsuko–a femme fatale as seductive and corrupt as any in the history of fiction, and a deceiver so heartlessly accomplished that she can turn even Sonoko's husband into her accomplice.
At once savagely funny and timorously exact in its portrayal of sexual enthrallment, Quicksand is a masterpiece of the caliber of Tanizaki's The Makioka Sisters and Some Prefer Nettles.
"Beautifully and mysteriously contrived... a shadow ballet of shifting pairs and triangles, of seductions, betrayals, and inventions that leaves us wonderfully unsure of who is the seducer and who the seduced." - Newsday
