An amusing story about a man's obsession and a brilliant exploration of a nation's cultural confusion – by a master of Japanese literature.

When twenty-eight-year-old Joji sees the youthful waitress Naomi for the first time, he is immediately captivated by her exotic, almost Western appearance. Determined to transform her into the perfect woman and rescue her from the shabby environment of post-World War I Tokyo, Joji adopts Naomi and eventually marries her, while paying for English and music lessons that promise to shape her into his ideal companion. However, as she grows older, Joji discovers that Naomi is far from the naive girl of his fantasies. In Tanizaki's masterpiece of lustful obsession, passion quickly turns into comically helpless masochism.

Junichiro Tanizaki was born in Tokyo in 1886 and lived in the city until the earthquake of 1923, after which he moved to the Kyoto-Osaka region, the setting for one of his most famous novels, The Makioka Sisters.