The Siren’s Lament

The sage Confucius visits a cultured duke, whose pursuit of virtue is threatened by the desires of his dazzling, malicious consort. A nave servant elopes with his master’s daughter, only to be plunged headlong into a world of murder and corruption. Exhausted by a lifestyle of never-ending debauchery, a young prince finds himself obsessed with a sorrowful, beguiling mermaid. These three stories, translated by Bryan Karetnyk, distil the essence of Jun’ichiro Tanizaki’s shorter fiction: the commingling of Japanese and Chinese mythologies, the dark side of desire and the paper-thin line between the sublime and the depraved.