A Portrait of Shunkin

Shunkin was born into the Mozuya merchant house in nineteenth-century Osaka, and blinded by illness as a child. As she grew into mastery of the koto and shamisen, she became the teacher of Sasuke, her family's devoted servant. What followed between them - across decades of music, discipline, silence, and submission - could barely be called a love story in any ordinary sense. Jun'ichiro Tanizaki's 1933 novella unfolds as a reading of a fragmentary memorial text, its narrator piecing together a life from biographical scraps, uncertain traditions, and quietly unreliable testimony. What emerges is a portrait of two people whose bond exceeded what language could hold - and of a devotion so absolute it crossed into something neither wholly painful nor wholly beautiful. One of the masterworks of modern Japanese prose.