The last of Tanizaki's major novels translated into English, it concerns a four-way bisexual love affair between upper-crust denizens of Osaka.
At the start of the novel she lives comfortably with her husband Kotaro, and attends art classes at a local women's school.
The effeminate, impotent Watanuki reveals that Mitsuko had intended to marry him, but now refuses unless he allows her affair with Sonoko to continue.
Knowing that their ménage à trois is doomed, Sonoko, Kotaro, and Mitsuko form a suicide pact, in which they will kill themselves with poison-laced sleeping powder.
In the event, however, Sonoko wakes up, realizing that Kotaro and Mitsuko have withheld the poison from her dose, a final betrayal.
The first was the 1964 film Manji, directed by Yasuzo Masumura, written by Kaneto Shindo and starring Ayako Wakao and Kyōko Kishida.