The Makioka Sisters

Junichiro Tanizaki’s The Makioka Sisters is a great, graceful family novel about four sisters, old Osaka manners, marriage negotiations, social decline, seasonal rituals, illness, pride, beauty, money, propriety, and the delicate art of watching an entire way of life rearrange itself while everyone pretends the kimono has merely slipped. It is set in pre-war Japan, where the Makioka family still carries the memory of wealth and status, even as modernity, reduced fortunes and awkward practicalities keep turning up like guests who were not on the seating plan.

The sisters are Tsuruko, Sachiko, Yukiko and Taeko, each occupying a different place in the family machinery. Yukiko’s marriage prospects become one of the central occupations of the book, because in this world a marriage is not merely a romance but a social operation involving relatives, inquiries, reputation, timing, health, class, money, tact and the ability of everyone to remain polite while quietly panicking. Taeko, meanwhile, is younger, modern, wilful and considerably less inclined to let family expectations arrange her like furniture.

Tanizaki’s genius is to make small events carry enormous weight. A visit, a letter, a rumour, a failed match, a flood, an illness, a festival, a glimpse of cherry blossom, a change in clothing, a private disappointment: all of it matters. The novel proceeds with beautiful patience, not because nothing is happening, but because in a family like this everything is happening under the surface. The great dramas are often conducted through manners, and manners, as anyone from an old family knows, can be weaponised with appalling refinement.

There is a lovely irony in the book’s elegance. It is full of grace, ceremony and exquisite attention, yet underneath runs anxiety: the family’s status fading, daughters not marrying neatly, old codes losing authority, Japan itself moving toward a darker modern age. The Makiokas are not destroyed in some loud melodramatic crash. Their world erodes, beautifully, socially, domestically, one postponed decision at a time. Decline, here, has excellent taste.

This is not a novel for readers who require explosions by page twelve. It is for those who understand that a marriage interview can be as tense as a duel, that family reputation can behave like a fragile antique, and that a young woman choosing her own life may cause more alarm than a natural disaster. Tanizaki writes social change as domestic weather: quiet, persistent, impossible to ignore, and likely to ruin someone’s plans for the afternoon.

For lovers of Japanese literature, family sagas, social novels, pre-war Japan, literary fiction, sisters, rituals, class, and the beautifully terrible pressure of polite society, The Makioka Sisters is essential shelf material. It is a long, controlled, luminous portrait of a family trying to remain itself while history, money and desire quietly rearrange the room.

Good copy, as sold by Crappy Old Books. A solid Picador paperback of a major modern Japanese classic, ready for any shelf where cherry blossom, family duty, social embarrassment and exquisite decline are allowed to sit together in uncomfortable harmony.

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