A Portrait of Shunkin
A narrator piecing together an old Osaka biography describes Shunkin, a blind samisen prodigy of a merchant family, cruel to her pupils and to none more than Sasuke, the apprentice who leads her and takes his own lessons before dawn. Someone scalds her face in the night, and the household closes around the injury. Written without quotation marks or paragraph breaks, and the purest statement of Tanizaki's great theme.
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