THE SECRET HISTORY OF THE LORD OF MUSASHI and ARROWROOT

Not grand vintage Tanizaki, like The Makioka Sisters or Some Prefer Nettles, these two newly translated short novels from the early Thirties are nonetheless lovely works: both are modeled after Stendhal's Italian Chronicles, and both deal with the peculiarly Japanese transformation of obsession into mini-tradition. The Secret History tells the ""real story"" behind a neatened-up chapter in traditional Confucian history. A young warrior of the 16th Century, Terukatsu, gets all fired-up as a boy upon seeing ladies-in-waiting preparing and combing enemy samurai heads--which are severed and taken in battle. The heads without noses (""woman-heads"") particularly excite him; he's inspired to take such a head of his own at the first possible chance. As it happens, however, he gets only a nose. Yet this, later on, will prove to be a passport into the affections of Lady Kikyo, the daughter of the general whose nose Terukatsu cut off! Furthermore, Lady K. is now the wife of a lord whom she'd like to see with a similar Terukatsu nose job. And all this bizarre material--meetings within the lady's toilet, the gradually disappearing face of the lord-husband, Terukatsu's nose-o-philia--is daubed in by Tanizaki with only the driest, most mocking strokes. . . until it comes to seem like anti-history. Arrowroot, done in a slightly different, essayistic style, is the story of an excursion to a mountainous district near Kyoto. The narrator is looking for material for a novel. His companion is admittedly after more--his past: his dead mother hailed from these high villages, from a family of papermakers. . . but all he has to go on is an old letter. Elusive, pale, pure, this tale is semi-circular--it seems to rock itself forward. And, taken together, these two very different novels provide a good introduction to Tanizaki's special brilliance: his grace, his antic flair, his off-handed richness.