The Makioka Sisters [Paperback]

Junichiro Tanizaki (Author)

Book Description

Release date: September 26, 1995

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. Filled with vignettes of upper-class Japanese life and capturing both the decorum and the heartache of its protagonist, The Makioka Sisters is a classic of international literature.


From the Hardcover edition.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

The four Makioka sisters lead very complicated, strenuous lives, although on the surface nothing much ever happens to them. Part of a fading Japanese aristocracy in the years leading up to World War II, they cannot escape the wide net of the family name--something always brings them back to the reality of "being a Makioka." Running out of money, living in falling-apart houses, growing older beneath the sunlight of the modern world, they do their best to preserve the rituals of the past. The two older sisters work diligently to arrange a marriage for the third sister, Yukiko. Desperate to find someone to take care of her, they keep lowering their standards. One night they find themselves out with a drunk, selfish crackpot who has no money, but who is supposed to be related to a man who works for an important utility company. The fact that he is even a candidate for their sister's hand is a sign of how far they have fallen.

There are other signs in this remarkable, utterly compelling Japanese epic. At one point, a flood overwhelms their small town of Osaka. The youngest sister, Taeko, is having tea at the impeccably decorated home where her sewing teacher, Mrs. Tamaki, lives with her son Hiroshi. When the rain first appears beneath the door,

the three were still rather enjoying themselves, shouting at each other in the best of spirits. They all had a good laugh when Hiroshi, reaching to grab the briefcase in which he had brought home his school books, bumped his head on the bobbing radio. But after perhaps a half hour, there came a moment when the three fell silent. Almost immediately, Taeko remembered afterwards, the water was above her waist. As she clutched at a curtain, a picture fell from over her head; the curtain had probably brushed against it. It was a picture Mrs. Tamaki was especially fond of.

Junichiro Tanizaki wrestled throughout his career with the idea of a country where tribes of aristocrats live as relics, grasping at the past through gestures, manners, small and intricate private laws. The narrative suspense of The Makioka Sisters is rooted in this single-minded nostalgia, this strict attention to the details of domestic life as the outer world becomes more and more incomprehensible. Pages are devoted to musing about whether Yukiko should "risk" meeting a potential husband when there is a spot above her eye--maybe she should play it safe and go to the doctor about it; maybe the potential husband will interpret it as bad luck. Tanizaki manages to make the struggle over this small, dark spot wildly compelling. I could not sleep until I discovered its fate.

If epic literature is based in the dramatic and forward-moving narrative of a male hero's journey, The Makioka Sisters is a female epic of inaction--trying to figure out what to wear, crying for no reason at the same time every afternoon. With each perilous, pathetic step, the sisters are heroes setting out for the new world. They're like Odysseus, except without the ship and without the sea. --Emily White

Review

Praise for Junichiro Tanizaki's The Makioka Sisters

“A masterpiece of great beauty and quality.” –Chicago Tribune

“Skillfully and subtly, Tanizaki brushes in a delicate picture of a gentle world that no longer exists.” –San Francisco Chronicle


From the Hardcover edition.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 544 pages
• Publisher: Vintage; Trade Paperback Edition edition (September 26, 1995)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0679761640
• ISBN-13: 978-0679761648
• Product Dimensions: 5.5 x 0.9 x 8.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 15.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (53 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #75,746 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

43 of 45 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars The world in a grain of sand November 5, 2005

By Phillip Kay

Format:Paperback

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. Read more ›

54 of 59 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars The Private world of a vicious dicatorship March 17, 2001

By [e-mail]

Format:Paperback

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. Read more ›

22 of 26 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

Format:Paperback

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.

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Revisiting Tanizaki's greatest novel. June 6, 2004

By Angry Mofo

Format:Paperback

The first time I read The Makioka Sisters, I called it "fragile and lovely." Recently, I read it again. It's not really fragile and lovely. Actually, it's very matter-of-fact. The narrative mostly recounts events and the characters' reactions to the events. There isn't much description or imagery, like in Kawabata. Even big events like the Osaka flood are recounted straightforwardly, with precision instead of lyricism.

But the book is very perceptive about its characters. Tanizaki knew everything about the social class of the Makioka family. The book is full of countless trivial little details about their daily habits, mannerisms, styles of dress and conversations. For example, during one of the family's attempts to marry off the third sister Yukiko, the prospective husband is concerned that she seems moody, and the whole family tries to dissuade him in writing and on the phone. Tanizaki perfectly captures the frantic, businesslike quality of the negotiations, simply by describing their arguments at length. He is so perfectly attuned to the routine of a family of this class that, just by describing it, he can recreate a whole period of history. And his extensive knowledge of small details also makes the narrative very lively, and often funny. The book moves slowly, but I found it addictively readable, both the first time and now.

The book is much more than a period piece. It captures the superficiality and transience of a sense of closeness between people. The four Makioka sisters are surely very close to one another. They've been together since they were little, and they get along very well. The three younger sisters live under the same roof until they're all well over thirty. Basically they're each other's closest friends.... And yet, the second sister Sachiko has no idea whatsoever about what goes on in her youngest sister Taeko's life. She spends much of the book misinterpreting Taeko's motivations. Taeko also remains friendly towards Sachiko throughout the book, which of course does not in any way prevent her from telling Sachiko nothing of her inner thoughts.

Similarly, Sachiko has a very good husband, by any standard. He's very capable, treats his wife well, agrees to support her sisters even though there's really no good reason why he should do so, and engages in self-sacrifice when the situation calls for it. Sachiko should be very close to him, and their marriage is overall harmonious. But their relations are "comfortable" more than they are "close." Sachiko is closer to her younger sisters than to her husband, and we already know the real value of that.

The oldest sister Tsuruko grows particularly estranged from the others, since she lives separately from them and also has the formal duty of managing the family. Possibly the most touching moment in the book is a tiny episode in which Sachiko visits Tokyo and goes to the Kabuki without inviting Tsuruko to come along. And Yukiko is the most "traditional" of the sisters, but she's not particularly fragile. Actually, she's the most physically resilient. And in the ending, she rewards her family's efforts in trying to find a match for her by acting grumpy and aloof toward everyone. Tanizaki subtly points out that she comes to be excited by the prospect of marriage, but what makes this observation so amazingly accurate is that she's excited by the prospect itself, not by any individual man.

All this is perhaps the root of the feeling of "fragility" that I had when I first read the book. It is true that Tanizaki's characters are members of a declining noble family, and that the setting is just before World War II. We know that the Makiokas' comfortable lives will shortly be obliterated, and this is poignant knowledge. But the true "decline" in the book is not so much one of material wealth or social standing, because Sachiko's husband is still very successful, and Yukiko can still find an attractive match, and hey, their chances of surviving the war are as good as anyone's. The true "decline" is in the way the book gradually reveals that its characters are not really all that close to each other. Furthermore, it suggests that this particular decline is not a product of modernity, war, or lack of tradition, but rather that it is simply the natural state of things. Read more ›