Quicksand is a novel told as a confession by a married woman in Osaka. She describes how, while studying art, she becomes fascinated by a beautiful young woman named Mitsuko, and how the friendship grows into an obsessive entanglement that draws in her husband as well. The narrator speaks to a teacher in a spoken, intimate voice, and the reader is never certain how far to trust her. The book is a bold study of desire, jealousy and manipulation, and it is admired for its voice and its slow, hypnotic tension.