The Makioka Sisters by Jun'ichirō Tanizaki

First published:Sasameyuki, 1943-1948, serial; 1949, book (English translation, 1957)

Type of work: Social and psychological realism

Time of work: 1938-1941

Locale: Kobe-Osaka district and Tokyo

Principal Characters:

• Tsuruko, the mistress of the senior or “main” house in Osaka
• Sachiko, her sister, the mistress of the junior house in Ashiya, a small city just outside Osaka
• Yukiko, their sister, thirty and still unmarried, shy and retiring, now not much sought after
• Taeko “Koi-San”, their sister, willful and sophisticated beyond her twenty-five years
• Tatsuo, Tsuruko’s husband, a cautious bank employee who has taken the Makioka name and who has become the active head of the family
• Teinosuke, Sachiko’s husband, an accountant with remarkable literary inclinations
• Etsuko, Sachiko’s precocious daughter
• O-Haru, Sachiko’s lazy, untidy maid
• Okubata “Kei-Boy”, the man with whom Taeko tried to elope at nineteen, and whom she still secretly sees
• Itakura, a man of no background to whom Taeko is attracted after her betrothal to Okubata is too long delayed

The Novel

The Makioka Sisters is the saga of a proud, refined Japanese family that declines in fortune. The novel re-creates the sumptuous and pleasure-filled upper-class life of Osaka—the commercial center of Japan—just before and during World War II. Jun’ichirō Tanizaki carefully creates a detailed portrait of four once-rich and haughty sisters, whose lives encompass a wide area of joys and sorrows, and he provides simultaneously a satirically accurate description of the whims and fancies of a vanished era.

The novel opens with a marriage prospect for the third sister, Yukiko, and ends with preparations and emblems for this sister’s ultimate wedding years later. Between these rituals lies a sequence of passions that fuse nostalgia and bitterness, tragedy and comedy. The Makioka sisters, although still proud and refined, have lost status in their society, for the luxury of their father’s last years and the dignity of ancestral reputation have been long reduced by extravagance and bad management of the family business. Consequently, it is now difficult to find acceptable suitors for Yukiko—especially as she is in the habit of rejecting men, has a blemish over her left eye, and is maligned in the local press for a scandal which really concerned Taeko, the youngest, most capricious sister.

The novel is divided into three parts. In the first, there is little dramatic incident beyond marriage proposals and negotiations, Sachiko’s attack of jaundice, the nervous prostration of Etsuko, a cherry blossom viewing, and Yukiko’s return to Tsuruko’s control in Tokyo. The second part opens a year later, and the action increases, particularly with the harrowing experience of a terrible flood, from which Etsuko and Taeko are miraculously saved. The third section begins with yet another marriage proposal for Yukiko who, at thirty-three, is still a cause of anxiety for her two eldest sisters. The Makiokas no longer enter a marriage negotiation with the former feeling of social superiority, and, indeed, for the first time in their history fail to satisfy the prospective groom’s family with their credentials. Although old rituals continue—a firefly hunt, visits in spring to Nara, commemorative services for their dead parents—family honor slides. Tsuruko threatens to expel Taeko from the family unless she returns to the senior house in Tokyo. Taeko, however, earns sympathy rather than reproof when she falls gravely ill and loses her youthful appearance. She looks like a fallen woman—the very thing her detractors always considered her to be—and she suffers from nightmares about deceased Itakura.

Human destiny, the Makiokas learn, is unpredictable—the very lesson that world events repeat. The Stolzes, former neighbors, have returned to Nazi Germany, where they cultivate an unrealistic optimism for the future. Taeko recovers from her illness to inherit more trouble. Yukiko, even in her wedding preparations, shows signs of having a nervous disorder. Nothing can be entirely harmonious or beautiful for the once-enviable Makioka sisters.

The Characters

The special beauty of this novel is the way in which Tanizaki evokes the very different personalities of the four sisters. There is a palpable sense of family heritage and pride, for the Makiokas are an old family, well-known in Osaka. Its best days, however, lasted only into the mid-1920’s, when extravagance and bad business management cut into its fortunes. The four sisters are in thrall to their family name, preserving their nostalgia with almost sacred zeal.

Tsuruko has six children and resembles her mother, a Kyoto woman. Lacking Yukiko’s delicate beauty, she has a certain hardness to her personality, although she is not as self-contained as she appears. In times of crisis, she stares vacantly into space, then busies herself in manic activity. During these hectic periods, she looks selfless, but is really too excited to know better. A manipulator, she uses Aunt Tominaga as a messenger to influence Sachiko in dealings with the two youngest sisters. Tsuruko is the most tradition-bound of the sisters.

Sachiko, more sympathetic than Tsuruko, dominates much of the book, simply because the two youngest sisters live with her for much of the time. The tallest, most strikingly beautiful Makioka, she is really more vulnerable than she appears—suffering as she does from a vitamin deficiency. She tires easily amid all the domestic complications created by Taeko and Yukiko, and she is almost as spoiled as her own daughter Etsuko. Yet Sachiko almost seems to exist to bring compassion to others. She wants desperately to give her husband a son, and when she suffers a miscarriage she is devastated. Like Taeko and Yukiko, she does not like Tokyo (except for the Palace and pine-covered grounds), and she aligns herself spiritually with the old ancestral place in Osaka. While Tsuruko is relatively authoritarian, Yukiko is diplomatic.

Diplomacy, however, does not go very far with the two youngest sisters. Yukiko, who looks like the most delicate one in the family, is the toughest physically. Docile and gentle on the surface, she is hard underneath. The most Japanese in appearance, she is really Westernized in her taste for French and music. Without a real home of her own, she is dependent on Sachiko. A mysterious blemish over her left eye is a handicap as far as marital prospects are concerned—as is her reluctance to please her suitors. Yukiko’s closest Western correspondence is probably to medieval maidens in ivory towers, because there is purity in her idealization of beauty, and she is distanced from much of the common life around her.

The least nostalgic or sentimental, as far as family pride is concerned, is Taeko. At age nineteen she eloped with a son of the Okubatas, an old Semba family and owners of a jewelry store. She was able to escape public notoriety only because her identity was mixed up with Yukiko’s in the newspaper report. Taeko, the most Western of the sisters, throws caution to the winds in her passionate affairs with Itakura and Okubata. In her quest for independence, she criticizes her family for its social prejudice and old-fashioned views. Her candor and open mind are sometimes tinged with rudeness and vulgarity, but she has no sense of nostalgia for the Makioka past, not having known much of her father’s prosperous past and not having anything but the dimmest memories of her mother who died just as Taeko was starting school. Basically good-natured, her quest for independence makes her risk all respectability and she becomes the scapegrace. When she is struck by illness, her beauty vanishes and she acquires the look of a fallen woman. She has nightmares of Itakura, her deceased lover. Taeko is a complicated character, whose failings are offset by her virtues—not the least of which are her ability to read people correctly, and her fascination with beauty via doll-making, dance, and fashion.

There are numerous subsidiary characters: Yukiko’s suitors; the various female go-betweens; O-haru, the lazy, untidy maid; the anxious brothers-in-law; the Stolzes; Taeko’s boyfriends. All these characters have roles to play in the great story. They are foils to the main characters and show how close or how far the sisters are from beauty, truth, and happiness.

Critical Context

Although his early novels suggest a bohemian spirit and appear to have been influenced by Edgar Allan Poe, Charles Baudelaire, and Oscar Wilde, Jun’ichirō Tanizaki is not a mannerist writer. A much-honored novelist—who won the Imperial Prize in Literature in 1949, and who was the first Japanese to be elected an Honorary Member of the American Academy and the National Institute of Arts and Letters in 1964—Tanizaki became absorbed in the Japanese past, abandoning his superficial Westernization. Some of his novels—such as Kagi (1956; The Key, 1960) and Futen rojin nikki (1961-1962; Diary of a Mad Old Man, 1965)—are about sexual desire and the will to live, but The Makioka Sisters is, perhaps, the most representative of his deepest themes. Its length shows Tanizaki’s marathon energy, concentration, and control. Some critics have asserted that he works on readers almost as much as he does on his characters. Yet despite the length of his novel, its painstaking fidelity to events and the surfaces of things, and its depiction of natural forces, Tanizaki is not a naturalistic writer. Cultural and social factors are not massive forces to be scientifically analyzed, but nagging irritants. The chronicling of society is undisturbed by the episodic nature of the writing.

Tanizaki’s art is subtler than it first appears. The blow-by-blow narrative gets bogged down in trivia and extraneous material, and the digressions on a variety of subjects appear to weaken the flow of the story. Yet there is a method to this arduous realism, and there is a commitment to the facts and truths of existence. Small talk is recorded with as much fervor as are major exchanges among characters. Clinical details of illness and disease are not curtailed. Tanizaki’s novel is loaded with conversations. His characters speak directly and freely, and reveal themselves in what and how they speak.

The often-colorless diction looks flat at times, but it demonstrates Tanizaki’s refusal to differentiate between practical and artistic language. His sentences are often long, sometimes dull, but always aimed at the revelation of character and society. The persuasiveness of the writing is finally indisputable.

Western readers will be most charmed by the satire and the almost courtly manners of the sisters at times. These qualities of comic charm and decorum have a distinctly Oriental flavor.

Bibliography

Falke, Wayne. “Tanizaki: Opponent of Naturalism,” in Critique: Studies in Modern Fiction. VIII, no. 3 (1966), pp. 19-25.

Petersen, Gwenn Boardman. “Tanizaki Jun’ichirō,” in The Moon in the Water: Understanding Tanizaki, Kawabata, and Mishima, 1979.

Ueda, Makoto. “Tanizaki Jun’ichirō,” in Modern Japanese Writers and the Nature of Literature, 1976.