Books in the Vintage International series

Junichiro Tanizaki's Naomi is both a hilarious story of one man's obsession and a brilliant reckoning of a nation's cultural confusion. When twenty-eight-year-old Joji first lays eyes upon the teenage waitress Naomi, he is instantly smitten by her exotic, almost Western appearance. Determined to transform her into the perfect wife and to whisk her away from the seamy underbelly of post-World War I Tokyo, Joji adopts and ultimately marries Naomi, paying for English and music lessons that promise to mold her into his ideal companion. But as she grows older, Joji discovers that Naomi is far from the naïve girl of his fantasies. And, in Tanizaki's masterpiece of lurid obsession, passion quickly descends into comically helpless masochism.

An accomplished debut, The Flower Boy is the tragically romantic story of people from two cultures, one ruling the other, and the human passions that defy and nearly overcome social taboos.In the colonial society of 1930s Ceylon, the separation between servant and master is clearly drawn. Young Chandi, however, knows that the baby born to his mother’s mistress will be his friend. And, indeed, their friendship blossoms in the lush gardens of the tea plantation on which they live. Many, English and Ceylonese, are troubled by the friendship, but the English planter is charmed by the children’s bond, and ultimately by Chandi’s mother, Premawathi. But the world encroaches on their Eden. Beautifully observed, compellingly plotted, The Flower Boy is a compassionate novel of a lost world and those who struggled to hold on to it.

Nobel Prize winner Yasunari Kawabata's The Sound of the Mountain is a beautiful rendering of the predicament of old age - the gradual, reluctant narrowing of a human life, along with the sudden upsurges of passion that illuminate its closing. By day Ogata Shingo, an elderly Tokyo businessman, is troubled by small failures of memory. At night he associates the distant rumble he hears from the nearby mountain with the sounds of death. In between are the complex relationships that were once the foundations of Shingo's life: his trying wife; his philandering son; and his beautiful daughter-in-law, who inspires in him both pity and the stirrings of desire. Out of this translucent web of attachments, Kawabata has crafted a novel that is a powerful, serenely observed meditation on the relentless march of time.

This novel won both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award in 1955. An allegorical story of World War I, set in the trenches in France and dealing ostensibly with a mutiny in a French regiment, it was originally considered a sharp departure for Faulkner. Recently it has come to be recognized as one of his major works and an essential part of the Faulkner oeuvre. His descriptions of the war "rise to magnificence," according to The New York Times, and include, in Malcolm Cowley's words, "some of the most powerful scenes he ever conceived."

The Mansion completes Faulkner's great trilogy of the Snopes family in the mythical county of Yoknapatawpha, Mississippi, which also includes The Hamlet and The Town. Beginning with the murder of Jack Houston, and ending with the murder of Flem Snopes, it traces the downfall of this indomitable post-bellum family, who managed to seize control of the town of Jefferson within a generation.

Compared by critics across the country to War and Peace for its memorable characters and sweep, and to Dr. Zhivago for its portrayal of Stalin's Russia, Generations of Winter is the romantic saga of the Gradov family from 1925 to 1945. "A long, lavish plunge into another world."--USA Today.

When a breach birth leaves Paulo severely disabled, his father, the articulate, unsentimental Professor Frigerio, struggles to come to terms with his son’s condition. Face to face with his own limitations, Frigerio confronts the strange way society around him handles Paolo’s handicaps and observes his surprising gifts. In spare, deeply affecting episodes, the professor of language explores the nuanced boundaries between “normal” and “disabled” worlds.A remarkable memoir of fathering, winner of the 2001 Strega Prize, Italy’s most prestigious literary honor, Born Twice is noted Italian author Guiseppe Pontiggia’s American debut. Sometimes meditative, often humorous, and always probing, Pontiggia’s haunting characters linger and resound long after the book is done.

With a precision and brilliance unmatched perhaps by any other novelist of the twentieth century, Junichiro Tanizaki interweaves a sense of his country''s deep past with the kind of pathologies and obsessions we are likely to think of as modern. Here, in two eerie and beautiful novellas, he displays this skill at its most elegant and affecting.   The Reed Cutter has a contemporary setting, though it might have taken place any time in the past thousand years. On a fine September evening, the narrator decides to make a solitary excursion to the site of an ancient imperial palace south of Kyoto, a place now lost and overgrown near the banks of a river. Musing upon old poems, passages of history, and topographical antiquities, he eventually finds himself among the reeds of a sandbar sipping sake from the bottle he has brought with him, watching the moon rise over the river, and scribbling bits of verse in his notebook. Suddenly he is surprised to discover that he is not alone. A strange man joins him and begins to tell a most extraordinary tale about his father, about a scene glimpsed in a moonlit garden forty years before, and about a mysterious woman who has become a lasting obsession.   Captain Shgemoto''s Mother is more violent but no less strange. It takes place in tenth-century Kyoto, in a world in which poetry and brutality, power and sexual impulse, shape the lives of the courtiers. Beginning in an almost whimsical vein with an account of the amorous exploits of a Heian Don Juan called Heiju, it gradually shifts mood to focus on three people—Shihei, the powerful Minister of the Left; his doddering uncle Kunitsune; and Kunitsune''s ravishing and much-younger wife, a woman known only as Shigemoto''s mother. How Shihei succeeds in taking Kunitsunes'' wife away from him in the course of a bizarre and drunken party is a story as shocking—and memorable—as anything Tanizaki ever wrote.