Title: The Makioka Sisters Author: Jun'ichirō Tanizaki
Published: April 1, 1948
Genre(s): Literary Fiction
Page Count: 530
Rating:
Summary from Goodreads:In Osaka in the years immediately before World War II, four aristocratic women try to preserve a way of life that is vanishing. As told by Junichiro Tanizaki, the story of the Makioka sisters forms what is arguably the greatest Japanese novel of the twentieth century, a poignant yet unsparing portrait of a family–and an entire society–sliding into the abyss of modernity.
Tsuruko, the eldest sister, clings obstinately to the prestige of her family name even as her husband prepares to move their household to Tokyo, where that name means nothing. Sachiko compromises valiantly to secure the future of her younger sisters. The unmarried Yukiko is a hostage to her family’s exacting standards, while the spirited Taeko rebels by flinging herself into scandalous romantic alliances.
Serialized between 1943 and 1948, Jun’ichirō Tanizaki’s The Makioka Sisters (Sasemeyuki in Japan) details life for a middle-class Japanese family between the years 1936 and 1941. The book is focused mostly on seemingly mundane, daily actions and occurrences, and though the book is slow-moving, the picture the reader gets is quite all-encompassing. The Makioka Sisters is a wonderfully written exploration of family dynamics.
The titular sisters the novel portrays are Tsuruko, Sachiko, Yukiko, and Taeko. The eldest, Tsuruko, is barely a presence in the story—usually her younger sisters refer to her in passing only, and she appears in very little scenes of her own. Tsuruko’s husband was adopted into the Makioka family, and is now the acting family head; together they have six children and, midway through the novel, move from Osaka to Tokyo, which is stressful for everyone. The second-eldest is Sachiko, and if anyone in The Makioka Sisters is the “protagonist”, it’s her. Tanizaki spends nearly every possible scene from Sachiko’s perspective. Her husband was also adopted into the Makioka family, and they have one daughter and live in the suburbs of Osaka. Sachiko and her husband, Teinosuke, have a strong marriage, which was one of the highlights of the book. Though it’s socially proper that the younger, unmarried sisters live with Tsuruko in the “main house”, they prefer to live with Sachiko. The third sister is Yukiko, and she’s the cause of all the family’s turmoil—at 30 years old, she is not yet married. She is shy, old-fashioned, reticent, delaying, and unreliable. My modern, American sensibilities might be influencing my take on her character, but I found Yukiko very frustrating, and really identified with Sachiko’s resentment towards her. Anyway, then the last sister, Taeko, is sort of a loose cannon. She opens up a studio and sells hand-crafted dolls, then starts taking classes to become a dressmaker, as well as secretly having a lover/sponsor for over a decade.
What’s probably most interesting about The Makioka Sisters is that the main conflict is finding Yukiko a husband, not the mounting aggressions and tension in Europe and Asia. Everyday life for the Makiokas seems to carry on just as before; they’re hardly inconvenienced by the threat or actuality of war. This might seem strange, but when I consider that the United States has been at war for more than 10 years at this point and my daily life hasn’t been much more affected than my father’s more frequent military deployments, this book starts to make a lot more sense. The mundanity of The Makioka Sisters is rather the point Tanizaki is trying to make. The book ends with a sentence describing Yukiko’s diarrhea, and it is quite in keeping with the rest of the text. War changes everything, and yet it seemingly changes nothing. For these sisters, however, more definite change is coming, as in 1941, the destruction of Japan and its former way of life is only beginning. It’s interesting to consider that from a retrospective, knowing, as Tanizaki did, exactly what was in store for these stubborn, set-in-their-ways characters. Nothing good, I’m sure.
Throughout the five years that The Makioka Sisters details, there is a sense of authenticity and reality that really speaks to the author’s knowledge and insight. As a foreign reader, I felt that I gained a great deal of knowledge, in terms of what pre-war Japanese life was like for the middle class, and I really liked that. Aside from that, The Makioka Sisters is also exceptionally well-written (though the 1957 translation is quite out of date—modern readers do not need extensive footnotes explaining what “sushi” is). Though it’s slow-moving and details events the seem trivial in context, this book is nevertheless a wonderful, engrossing read, and it’s well worth it to be patient with the text.
