[.ca] A Cat, a Man, and Two Women (ISBN 4770016050)

the man & the cat, the cat & the women, man & the women...:
Tanizaki is one of my favourite eastern writers. He writes with a charming simplicity some of the most complicated relationships between human beings. The present story involves a man and his pet cat, his wife and the other woman. The master and the pet are very attached to each other, so much so that the wife begins to feel antagonistic towards the cat. Can this antagonism drive her husband towards the other woman? Is the other woman able to accept the cat in its superior role in the eyes of man? The charaters are by themselves rather mute and colourless, only in relationship to each other do they evolve to paint a passionate picture of love and hate. The treatment of the various relationships: the man and the cat, the cat and the wife, the cat and the other woman, the two women towards each other, the man and the wife and finally the man and the other woman continue to evolve throughout the book. This is like an Updike's short story where the relationships surpass the boundaries of country and tradition....become all too familiar and all too fearful.

for the "love" of the cat:
tanizaki is my most favorite author ever since reading some of his works in college. therefore, i have read "a cat, a man, and two women" for leisure. i would have to say this is one of tanizaki's shortest works but not short of complexities of relationships of all sorts. the main part of this book deals with the complexity of not only the relationship between a man and his present wife (cousin) and an ex-wife but with a long time cat companion named Lilly. i don't know if i can call this a love triangle, more like a love rectangle. the cat, Lilly, is used and abused in this story. Lilly becomes the reasons and emotional links of all the problems between the man (Shozo) and his women, Shinako and Fukuko. A helpless animal is being "abused" by these characters, the cat can be used to represent Shozo's "actual" wife, the cat was "used" to make both wives jealous by Shozo without him directly trying, and the cat was snatched by ex-wife to lure Shozo back to her. focus is driven away from the human players in this story and is mainly on helpless Lilly. I felt Shozo never needed a wife in first place, all he needed was Lilly, Shozo is a real cat lover and tanizaki did well describing all the feelings dealing with loving a feline.

Three Stars for Three Stories:
Bound in _A Cat, a Man, and Two Women_ are three stories by one of Japan's most esteemed modern writers, Junichiro Tanizaki. For anyone who has followed Tanizaki's work, the stories are ostensibly by a younger Tanizaki; the stories capture hints of the perverse and psychological drama, which he has mastered in his later work. I must admit, having read many of his later novels first, I found the stories in the collection a bit slow. Nonetheless, as admier of Tanizaki's literature, I felt the collection gave me a better understanding of his progression and maturity as a writer. His attention to the psychology of the women characters vis-à-vis the male protagonist in the title story, "A Cat, a Man, and Two Women," reminded me of his novel _Quicksand_, written much later. The story "Professor Rado" is arguably a nascent version of _A Diary of a Mad Old Man_, which centralizes trans-generational desire and foot fetishes. Out of the three stories, "The Little Kingdom" was my favorite -- it gives the impression that Tanizaki is both an astute and creative social critic. The story reminded me of the novel _Nip the Buds, Shoot the Children_, by another notable Japanese author, Kenzaburo Oe, where children rule the adult world around them. The collection is worth a read.

Bit Of A Snoozer:
Although extremely well written, the point of these stories escapes me. And this coming from someone who has a fair familiarity with and appreciation for Japanese literature. Despite the book's short length, it took me several weeks to get through it -- my interest and intellectual curiosity were never truly aroused. I was particularly dismayed by the stories' endings, which struck me as rather arbitrary and gratuitously abrupt. To be sure, it is nowhere written in stone that a story must always provide some sort of resolution. That doesn't mean, however, that it should end more or less in mid-sentence -- and with a 'ho-hum' from the reader.

A Cat and Japanese culture:
I picked this book up because I had previously read and enjoyed some of the author's other works. The title of the book basically says what the main story it is about A Cat, a Man, and Two Women. The Cat belongs to the man. One of the Women is the Man's ex-wife and the other Woman is the Man's wife. The man pays too much attention to the cat and not enough to his wife. For example he has his wife cook the cat gourmet meals and feeds it to the cat. I have a cat and really liked this book because it tells you how cats think and act. But you might not like it if you don't have a cat.