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Japan Today . Third edition. By Roger Buckley. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999. xiv, 218 pp. $49.95.

Instead, there is a broad tendency to view Tanizaki on aesthetic grounds, valorizing him as a figure of resistance while overlooking the less savory aspects of his conservatism. These criticisms are minor, arising mainly from a wish to see the contributors develop their ideas at greater length. Given the aims of the symposium, even the occasional lapses into uncritical appreciation are understandable, for critical distance is hard to establish with a writer like Tanizaki. As Irmela Hijiya-Kirschnereit aptly notes, "the pleasure of reading Tanizaki's works, then, lies to a great extent in a complicity between narrator and reader, effectively established by the author's wellhoned narratorial devices" (p. 104). Thus, an act of critical imagination is needed to get beyond the allure of Tanizaki's prose, and the volume on the whole succeeds in engaging his work on equal terms. Indeed, the book provides several models of critical appreciation, notably Howard Hibbett's elegant essay. Hibbett historicizes Tanizaki's oeuvre in terms of his personal life and the literary tradition he drew upon, and reveals to us the intricate and precarious equilibrium Tanizaki achieves between the control provided by his mastery of narrative and the anarchy of his comic impulses. The volume is superbly edited and handsomely produced. The title, however, can only be read ironically for the book is more a sampler than a feast, whetting rather than sating the appetite for Tanizaki's work. In my view this is what it should do.