At an Average of 130 Pages Per Sister, It Ran a Bit Long

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	• The Makioka Sisters Junichiro Tanizaki Vintage, 1995 - 544 pages average customer review:based on 35 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Outstanding

This book is an immediate pleasure to read from the moment a bretrothal is attempted to be found for Yukiko through to the last page.
Set just before World War Two, the Makioka family is of an old and fast fading aristocratic line. The world is rapidly changing around them, yet they continue to burden themselves with centuries old etiquettes and live in a state of denial of their own fading light.
This-like the works of Yukio Mishima- is what can only be described as a work of art.There is something unique about Japanese literature that (thankfully!) isn't lost in translation.
The Makioka sisters is a book you want to last forever. I cannot wait to buy more of Tanizaki's work.

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Family drama in every detail

Before soap operas or movie dramas, Japan had to rely on books. The Makioka Sisters is about four sisters living in pre-World War Two Japan. The sisters are from a Samurai family which is declining in fortunes. Two of the sisters are married and spend most of the three books trying to get the other two sisters married. The book really allows us to see Japanese daily life, from interaction between families, worries about employment, the traditions, the holidays, the fashions and even problems a normal family had. The book, funny enough, got the author in trouble because it was about nothing. It neither attacked the government or military nor did the book support or help the national war effort. It was thought of as a waste of paper.
The chronology in the front of the book is very useful to understand what is happening during the author's life. If you want a taste of Japanese life, this is it. But it isn't a bus or train book. It is 498 pages of small print, complex plots and twisted sisters. Not easy, no matter how much you love Japanese culture. But worth it.

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Every Family Has Their Ups and Downs

This beautiful novel set in pre-World War II Osaka completely transported me to it's time and place. Mr. Tanizaki has drawn the characters of the Makioka family with great care and precision. I sat bolt upright when he first puts Yukiko together with her domineering little niece Etsuko, a scene that perfectly illustrates the personalities of both characters with subtle directness. At that point Mr. Tanazaki had an attentive reader and so I remained. It is said that this is a "novel about nothing" but that couldn't be further from the truth, it's about life as perceived through the eyes and experiences of one family, principally the four sisters. Life is often about nothing much, I suppose that's why we have the desire to read. The writing has a beautiful ethereal quality, I am reminded of fog or mist or cigarette smoke and yet at the same time it is robust and gripping. The details of the city, Japanese arts, kimono and nature are superb giving great ambience and sense of place. The pace is leisurely but a sense of urgency is implied through the nerve wracking task of getting the recalcitrant Yukiko married off and the knowledge of the cataclysm of war that is lurking but never delved into. I suppose this is a work for a particular audience that can revel in the slower pace of sixty plus years ago in a tightly confined social structure but Mr. Tanizaki rewards the reader again and again with flights from the ordinary into the sublime. The Everyman version with translation by Edward G. Seidensticker is a good choice.

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At an Average of 130 Pages Per Sister, It Ran a Bit Long

Considered Tanizaki's best novel, this work has been called a textbook of Japanese behavior. The author began writing it around 1942-3 in the midst of World War II. Magazine publication in installments was banned after the early chapters were judged insufficiently supportive of the war effort. The work was finally published in book form in 1948, a few years after the war's end. The English translation came out in 1957.

The novel began in the late 1930s among a formerly wealthy merchant family from Osaka and ended around 1940, before the outbreak of war with the United States. The family consisted of two married sisters, with their husbands and children, and two younger, unmarried sisters. Much of the novel dealt with the family's concerns about finding a suitable groom for the third sister and determining whether the fourth sister should be allowed to travel abroad, take up a trade, and continue meeting a suitor from the past. There was seemingly endless description of these two concerns, mainly from the second sister's point of view.

Determining a proper marriage candidate for the third sister meant endless rounds of negotiation with each successive prospect. Each point of discussion was passed up through the hierarchy of the family ranks for decision, with soundings carefully taken of everyone's potential reaction, and any eventual decisions that resulted then passed back down. Any unexpected development restarted the cycle. Throughout, it was essential to show outward respect for the proper forms, maintain the face appropriate to one's place in society and keep the family's name unsullied. The sister herself, the one on whose behalf the entire family was working, showed the least interest of all in tying the knot and was content to remain dependent. Given all this, it was no wonder she was long past marriageable age.

With the fourth sister, by tradition her conduct was regulated by the family of the first sister. The family heads were so stuck in the past, however, that their decisions for her bore little relation to what realistically she needed to do. Ready to marry, she wasn't free to act until a groom for the third sister was chosen. The second sister, her go-between within the family, sympathized with the predicament but wished to avoid a family upset. This meant endless thinking about how to divine everyone's true motives and spin discussions, avoiding confrontation while protecting the family name. And continued reproaches to herself or others -- thought but unexpressed -- for hesitation or lack of proper consideration. What happened in effect was continued avoidance of any clear resolution until too late, when events forced the family's hands, so to speak.

The author was skilled at setting up contrasts between the actions of the two younger sisters or the two older sisters, and at establishing situations where a character would condemn another for something and behave later in a similar way. When action on a larger scale occurred from time to time -- a flood, a medical crisis -- his powers of description were memorable. And the irony of the conclusion, after the family's endless consideration of its good name, was very pointed. Not to mention the irony of having the novel conclude, after more than 500 pages, with hoped-for events still in the future.

At the same time, what I could appreciate was affected eventually by the book's seemingly interminable proceedings. One wondered sometimes whether the author was intentionally drawing out things to the point of parody. I also had trouble figuring out exactly where the author's sympathies lay. With Teinosuke, the second sister's husband? Not with any of the four sisters, it seemed, most of whom were described from the outside, none of whom received compassion unmixed with mockery. The characters were almost entirely closed to each other, rarely if ever sharing their deeper thoughts. And how class-bound they were, so much of the time.

For reasons like these, I didn't enjoy the book all that much. Another novel read recently that was set in the past and focused on the lives of women -- The Doctor's Wife by Sawako Ariyoshi - with a far narrower scope, less mastery and much less detail but with clearer, unalloyed compassion, was preferred.

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reviews: page 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7

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