The Makioka Sisters

I read this book in college and still recall it vividly.

A family seeks to marry off its daughters in prewar Japan, but while the world around them is evolving, they cling to tradition, insisting that the betrothals and marriages must happen in order. The youngest has a suitor and is eager to move forward with her life, but the first in line isn’t interested in being matched or hurried, which provokes a cascade of crises. Although the goal is finally achieved, there’s no sense of triumph.

Even in translation, the story is rich, complex, and naturalistic, and the characters… show more.

Set in Japan in the period just before World War II, this is the story of Sachiko and her three sisters.

Yukiko is in need of a husband, but she is stiff in her old-fashioned habits. Taeko, by contrast, is a rebel who sleeps with men and becomes pregnant. Sachiko, modeled by Tanizaki on his pretty and spirited wife, loves all of her sisters and feels responsible for them.

I found the picture of the sisters’ daily life, which was by turns cosmopolitan, traditional, and modern, fascinating in its detail. One thing follows another, open-ended, surprising, and completely authentic in… show more.

This long, beautifully written novel about four sisters in pre-WWII Japan is so immersive and engaging, I felt throughout as if I’d been transported to another world.

In fact, the world it describes—Japan caught between tradition and the encroaching social and political changes of modernity—no longer exists. However, the romantic complications and the emotional struggles and squabbles of the Makioka family all ring true and remain relevant to any reader.

It’s episodic (it was originally published in installments) but coheres into a lush reading experience that I hated to leave behind and found impossible to forget. Despite the drama—and there’s… show more.

Ostensibly a social novel about a cash-poor aristocratic family that lives outside of Osaka, this book in fact contains some of the best writing about nature and natural disasters in all of twentieth-century fiction.

Two major disasters, a Tokyo earthquake and a massive tsunami that strikes Osaka, provide pivotal hinge points for the narrative, and the tsunami episode in particular is a masterstroke.

At the same time, Tanizaki shows how the rhythm of the seasons influences the mood of the contemplative Makioka family, drawing the family out of the house in spring for communion with nature and forcing them back… show more.

Although longer than most Japanese novels in English translation, The Makioka Sisters was a novel that in my college years helped solidify my interest in Japan and helped put me on the path of a novelist whose own works are set in that country. This has long been a novel I’ve greatly admired and is far and away my favorite work by Tanizaki. The novel, set mostly in Osaka, tells one of the most emotionally resonant and deeply engaging family stories I’ve encountered in the Japanese canon. It’s a classic story of a well-to-do family in decline at the same… show more.

A doorstop of a book over 800 pages, covering the time period 1936-41, the novel explores the waning fortune of the well-to-do Makioka family and the lives of four women, who each represent changes in the female psyche. The plight of one of the sisters to get married before she is deemed an old spinster is the major challenge facing the family. Written in lush and poetic prose, the reader is drawn into the daily concerns of this family.