Arf, She Said

This is The End:

I love Junichiro Tanizaki’s The Makioka Sisters but, even allowing for cultural differences, it has to have the most peculiar final sentence in all literature: “Yukiko’s diarrhoea persisted through the twenty-sixth, and was a problem on the train to Tokyo.” That is not the way one wants to finish a book before giving a happy sigh and putting the light out.