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[Junichiro Tanizaki] (1886-1965) was a worshiper of women. He worshiped his mother; he worshiped Kannon, the Buddhist goddess of mercy, and his third wife, Matsuko, and probably many other women too. The men in his fiction are, if anything, even more extreme than their creator in their worship of the female sex. Some dream of being trampled on by the delicate feet of their idols. To others, like Heiju, one of the characters in the 1949-50 novella "Captain Shigemoto's Mother," the smell of their lovers' excrement is like the perfume of the finest incense. Mitsuko, the object of desire in Tanizaki's 1928-30 novel "Quicksand," casts such a spell on her lesbian lover, and the lover's husband, that they long to die for her. Obsessive eroticism is also the theme of the two novellas "The Reed Cutter" and "Captain Shigemoto's Mother," translated in one volume by [Anthony H. Chambers]. In both stories, the author has become the consummate connoisseur of Japanese tradition. When he wrote "Captain Shigemoto's Mother" in the late 1940's, Tanizaki had completed a modern Japanese version of the 11th-century classic "The Tale of Genji." "Captain Shigemoto's Mother" is a masterly and witty attempt to bring the medieval aristocratic world, with all its arcane court rankings and rituals, alive. If it reads more easily in English than "Quicksand" does, this is not just because of Mr. Chambers's fine translation. The Heian period is almost as remote to modern Japanese as it is to modern Americans. So, in a way, Tanizaki's story is already a kind of translation. The story is told in a peculiar mishmash of literary quotation -- Tanizaki in the guise of a pedantic literary scholar -- and fantasies that are unmistakably Tanizaki's own. The same is true of "The Reed Cutter," in which the storyteller appears and then disappears as mysteriously as the ghost in a Noh play. Both stories begin with tales of erotic love. In "The Reed Cutter," a stranger talks about his father's love for the widow, Lady Oyu, who will not "betray" her late husband by marrying again. So the father marries her younger sister instead, just to be close to Oyu, but refuses to consummate the marriage out of loyalty to his idol. Only after Oyu finally consents to marriage with a rich old man does the father turn to his own wife, who bears him a son. This grown-up son, the storyteller, is now on his way to hear Oyu play music at her mansion during the full moon. When the author expresses his astonishment, since by his calculations Oyu must be at least 80 years old by now, the narrator is already gone, "as though he had melted into the light of the moon."