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Product Description

Product Description
The story of the extinction of a great family through pride and over-refinement. It is a nostalgic recreation of the sumptuous, intricate upper-class life of Osaka immediately before World War II.

About the Author
Junichiro Tanizaki was born in 1886 in Tokyo, where his family owned printing establishment. He studied Japanese literature at Tokyo Imperial University, and his first published work, a one-act play, appeared in 1910 in a literary magazine he helped to found. Tanizaki lived in the cosmopolitan Tokyo area until the earthquake of 1923, when he moved to the gentler and more cultivated Kyoto-Osaka region, the scene of The Makioka Sisters. There he became absorbed in the Japanese past and all his most important works were written from this point, among them Some Prefer Nettles (1929), Arrowroot (1931), The Secret History of the Lord Musashi (1935), several modern versions of The Tale of Genji (1941, 1954 and 1965), The Makioka Sisters (1943-48), Captain Shigemoto's Mother (1949), The Key (1956) and Diary of a Mad Old Man (1961). By 1930 he had gained such renown that an edition of his complete works was published and he was awarded an Imperial Award for Cultural Merit in 1949. In 1964 he was elected an honorary Member of the American Academy and the National Institute of Arts and Letters, the first Japanese citizen ever to recieve this honour. Tanizaki died in 1965.

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23 of 25 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The World in a Grain of Sand, 21 Oct 2006

By	Phillip Kay (Sydney) - See all my reviews

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 Ea 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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3 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars At an Average of 130 Pages per Sister, It Ran a Bit Long, 31 Jul 2008

By	Reader in Tokyo - See all my reviews

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 a few years after the war's end, in 1948. 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 Great Britain and 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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