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39 of 41 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
The Private world of a vicious dicatorship, March 17, 2001
The Makioka Sisters is a special novel for two reasons. Much of Japanese literature this century is very taut and relatively short. One thinks of Soseki, Mishima, Dazai, Kawabata and the two most important of Tanizaki's other novels, Some Prefer Nettles and Diary of a Mad Old Man. Instead of being 150-200 pages, this book is around 500 pages. The popular description of this book, about a merchant family in decline, might imply a book like Budenbrooks. Yet this book is very different from Thomas Mann's fine novel. For a start it only covers four years, not a couple of generations. More important the theme of decline is not a primary one, and Mann's theme of cultural enervation is absent.What we have instead is a book that seeks to be a work of "photographic realism." It seeks to be "real" not in the sense that Flaubert or James or Tolstoy are realistic. Instead of portraying complex themes and ideas while keeping an eye on what would be actually plausible, Tanizaki seeks to describe what actually happens. This sort of realism is not highly valued since it is often unimiginative and often psychologically shallow. And indeed in this book it can often appear tedious and unrewarding. But a closer examination reveals certain virtues. In a sense Tanizaki's book is "like life." The story of Taeko of of the youngest sister who cannot marry because custom dictates she must wait for her older sister Yukiko to be married. The story of her two possible fiancess and the eventual pre-marital pregnancy appear, not as part of a complex, organic scheme as, say, the story of Anna Karenina, but as a series of discrete events, moved often by coincidence and chance. A flood becomes a crucial event, one character is killed by a quack doctor, Taeko becomes ill with dystentry at a crucial moment, a proposal is botched because Yukiko cannot summon the courage to answer the telephone. Since this is often how life happens it is not unrealistic and indeed has a special value of perspective. Tanizaki's sense of style and detail are also interesting. For example there is little on food (by contrast one remembers the Christmas dinner in Buddenbrooks). There is the Japanese emphasis on the intense aesthetic absorption in a taut, sparsely described expression of nature. Two of the leading incidents in the book describe watching cherry trees bloom and having a firefly hunt in the night. At one point Sachiko, the second sister and the most important one in the novel, watches her young daughter and her German friends plays with dolls and the German girl accurately tells where babies come from. It is interesting that Sachiko approves of this realism. Most interesting is the fact that this book takes place from 1936 to 1940, during, of course, the Japanese invasion of China. Tanizaki itself stared writing the book during the second world war, and his publication was delayed on the grounds that it apparently did not help the war effort enough. It was not actually published until 1948, when Japan was occupied by the American occupation. How much did this change the political tone? Perhaps not as much as one might think, since the Makiokas write their German friends that they are pleased that their ally is doing so well in the summer of 1940. Yet at the same time the absence of ideology and fanaticism is striking. The Makiokas naturally agree with the austerity campaigns, they refer to the invasion as the "China Incident" like everyone else, and they vaguely wish for peace. This is not unrealistic per se (the Makiokas are probably too old to worry about conscription) and the absence of politics is also not unrealistic. After all women did not have the right to vote at this time. Before commenting on how the Makiokas have escaped the trap of ideology, and before making comparisons to Jane Austen, one should consider while reading this novel the idea that such privatism is essential to such a regime. Instead of totalitarianism smashing individuals and transforming themselves into empty masses, one should consider the insights of Rudy Koshar and William Sheridan Allen that regimes feed off this sort of privatism and political isolation.
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26 of 27 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
The world in a grain of sand, November 5, 2005
The Makioka Sisters (Sasame Yuki, Light Snow), first published in 1948, was written by Junichiro Tanizaki (1886-1965). Tanizaki wrote The Makioka Sisters after translating the Tale of Genji into modern Japanese and the Murasaki novel is said to have influenced his own. It tells of the declining years of the once powerful Makioka family and their last descendants, four sisters. It has been translated by Edward G. Seidensticker in 1957. Powerfully realistic, it mourns the passing of greatness while celebrating in wonderfully evocative detail the beauty of a particular time and place, Osaka in the 1930s. In its creation of beauty out of sadness it can be compared to another family saga, The Maias (1888), by the Portuguese master Eça de Queiroz (1845-1900).
Why is this long book, largely concerned with trivial family procedures, one of the finest novels written? It is not concerned with great events, causes or philosophies. It has little concern with the war Japan was fighting with China, and then the USA, when the book was first published. Indeed its characters don't think about the war, and in a positive way, which doesn't trivialise their concerns at all (most people in fact don't think about the reasons for a war: perhaps it's better that way). This doesn't mean the book is escapist or superficial, just as the concern with women's lifestyle, dress, makeup, etiquette or social vanity make it something written just for women (books and films were once made - by men - to capitalise on what were considered women's 'little' concerns). Tanizaki does that wonderful thing a great artist can do, he finds the universal in the most exact examination of the particular, and makes a work of relevance to us all. Read another family saga, The Brothers Karamazov (1880) and my candidate for the greatest novel yet written (though I'm more than cynical about the word 'great') and marvel at the many routes artists find to the universal.
My review is impossibly partial: The Makioka Sisters is the most beautiful novel I've ever read. The language (translation) is so smooth and flowing, the characters and situations so gentle and muted, yet precise and meaningful, that reading the book is like seeing the universe in a drop of water - you see, which is moving, and awareness of where and how you see brings amazement and then a real pleasure.
In this beautiful book the characters have a greater degree of reality than many real people - Tanizaki is a great master of characterisation. I know more about them than I do about most of the people I know. It is done by the accumulation of enormous amounts of detail, but detail which, trivial though it may appear, is just right. The result is the creation of a most ethereal and delicate beauty, a lovely world crumbling to extinction yet all the more precious because of its inevitable passing away.
Sachiko, the second sister and her husband Teinosuke are that rare achievement, a convincing depiction of really good and admirable people, though in no way heroic. They are very ordinary people, but their goodness, their little troubles and worries, their faults, even weaknesses, all serve to charm and captivate. Of all the characters in the book these two are the loveliest. It is a real affirmation of humanity to have created two such kind and gentle and sensitive people, and to have made them so real and convincing.
The careworn life of Tsuruko (first sister), the hesitations of Yukiko (third sister), the unhappiness of Taeko (Koi-san, fourth sister) all gain from contrast with the stability and happiness of Sachiko and Teinosuke. And what an evocation of the old ways of Japan. Changing rapidly even as Tanizaki writes of them.
Detail by detail - Etsuko's games with the German girl Rosemarie, Itakura's leather coat, the 'old one', Koi-san's mimicry and mingled love and resentment of Yukiko...there are literally thousands of details. Teinosuke's love of Spring in his garden, the vitamin injections the sisters take, the forthrightness of Itani - all, everyone, is so precise, not random at all, chosen to evoke mood, reveal character, show milieu.
So powerful and evocative has the book been - yet nothing really happens, except to Koi-san. The war approaches, the old Japan changes, Yukiko gets married - unforgettable!
I've seen advertised a TV serialisation of The Makioka Sisters, but can't imagine how it could succeed. So much of the book's effect is through language. Visually, certain scenes stand out, such as the cherry blossom viewing or the flood. The narrative though is largely uneventful, small actions that dramatically and convincingly reveal a character's state of mind, early history or personality.
Written with love, a strong love of people and place, the book creates love in the reader. Because of Tanizaki I have loved Osaka in the late 1930s and have learned to treasure and respect its people. For those hesitating to undertake reading such a 'Japanese' work as The Makioka Sisters there is the perfect bridging novel The Wind-up Bird Chronicle (Nejimaki-dori kuronikuru, 1995) by Haruki Murakami, which does mention the war - and Charlie Parker and 'hard-boiled' detective stories and Jungian archetypes and the surreal: a roller coaster of a novel and one of the best as well.
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16 of 18 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A sensational story told in beautiful, delicate detail, September 28, 1999
By A Customer
THE MAKIOKA SISTERS tells the story of the lives and relationships of four sisters in the late 1930's and early 1940's in Osaka, Japan. Tsuruko, the oldest, who is married, acts as the head of the household by nature of her age. Sachiko, the second oldest, also married, is a sensitive and intelligent woman who watches over her younger sisters. Yukiko, unmarried, is extrmeley shy and reserved, and extremely dependent upon Sachiko. The youngest, also unmarried, is Taeko (nicknamed Koi-san), a free spirit who finds that she must break with tradition to be happy. It is the responsibility of Sachiko and her husband Teinosuke to find a suitable husband for Yukiko, who must marry before Taeko as custom dictates.The book takes us through several years in the lives of the Makioka family (curiously, since there were only daughters and no sons, both sisters' husbands took the name Makioka), as they experience the joys and disillusions of life in an extremely close-knit family. As their wealth and prosperity wane, they realize that you sometimes must make sacrifices. It was wonderful to read this book knowing that not only was it written by a native Japanese, but that it was also written in that time period, in the early 1940's. Knowing that every description and every conversation was authentic made this an amazing book. I would highly reccomend this to anyone who has an interest in Japanese customs, society and way of life. It was fascinating.
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