The Makioka Sisters

By -
The Makioka Sisters, by Junichiro Tanizaki

The Classics Spin wouldn't help me out, so I finally got around to reading it on my own.  The back copy says that The Makioka Sisters "is arguably the greatest Japanese novel of the twentieth century," so wow!  I did in fact really enjoy it.

This is a long and deceptively quiet novel.  We have four sisters of a once-prominent Osaka family:

Tsuruko, the oldest, married with several children, she and her husband are the head branch of the family
Sachiko, also married, usually hosts her younger sisters and is the most active in their future plans,
Yukiko, elegant and quiet, "a real old-fashioned Osaka lady," but getting worryingly old for marriage arrangements,
Taeko, lively, modern, and independent, she has her plans already laid out.

In years past, the family has been too picky about marriage proposals for Yukiko and now they are not so frequent.  Getting Yukiko married to a good man is the spine of the story, but meanwhile life goes on, and it's often quite exciting; there's a flood and a typhoon, dance performances, and Taeko's career.  All this soap-opera stuff happens, but the style of writing is always quieter than an American would expect. Even the flood, which nearly kills one sister, is narrated in an understated way, at a volume of 6 instead of 11. 

The portrait of Japan just before World War II is pretty wonderful to read.  The lives of the Japanese upper class are given in great detail.  Everything is done so slowly and deliberately!  No one makes a decision without at least a few days to think it over, preferably weeks.  It takes days to decide to write a letter and hours to actually do it.  Everything is roundabout, subtle, quiet.  The men have work to do (mostly in banks) and the ladies study culture.  They have international friends, and every once in a while they travel (here, Tokyo is practically a foreign country and a visit is a big undertaking).  Traditional visits to natural beauty spots are important events--cherry-blossom viewing, or firefly chasing, or seeing Mt. Fuji--they are nearly rituals to be done in the proper manner and enjoyed to the full.

We start in about 1938, and at this point the war is in the background.  You know perfectly well that Japan has invaded China and Korea, but the only evidence in these lives is an occasional mention of "the current crisis" or, later, the Great Spiritual Crisis.  The novel ends in early 1941, so by then there is more about German victories in a European war.  Still, all the characters seem totally unprepared for the war that is about to change everything they know, and a reader has to wonder how, and if, they will survive.

Oddly, the novel just cuts off at the end.  Story lines are left dangling and it just ends abruptly.  I don't get that.

Altogether a very worthwhile novel.  I enjoyed it very much.


Hey, there's a movie!  From 1983.  I'd quite like to see it, though I think a movie would be awfully short.  You could produce a whole TV series from this book.





Comments

  1. EvaMay 29, 2015 at 12:51 PM

    I really liked this one, probably because it was structured so much like a Western novel, so I felt on familiar ground. :) Like you, I loved getting a peek into a specific class at a specific time & place! Although the ending was definitely not neat & tidy.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

I'd love to know what you think, so please comment!

Popular posts from this blog

The Four Ages of Poetry

By -
Image
  "The Four Ages of Poetry," by Thomas Love Peacock I am becoming fond of Thomas Love Peacock.  Besides his unbeatable name, he was a lot of fun.  Peacock was a minor literary figure of the early 19th century; he tried his hand at poetry but mainly succeeded in satire.  I read his short novel Nightmare Abbey last year, but at the time I didn't know that the young hero of the story, Scythrop, was modeled on Peacock's good friend Percy Shelley.  He and Shelley were quite close and Peacock was the executor of Shelley's will. Thomas Love Peacock Percy Bysshe Shelley "The Four Ages of Poetry," a tongue-in-cheek essay on the history and development of poetry, was published in 1820 in a new magazine called Literary Miscellany , which promptly died.  It would probably have been completely obscure and unknown--it nearly is anyway--but for Shelley.  Peacock sent a copy to his friend, who I guess didn't really have much of a sense of
Read more

A few short stories in Urdu

By -
Image
 Back in August, I got hold of a book of Urdu short stories translated into English.  It's a large book, so I wanted to read just the women authors for WIT, and that would still be a good amount.  August got away from me, and I only read one or two stories back then, but I've continued reading them since.  I've now finished all the short stories in the book that were written by women (luckily for me, there are short biographies in an appendix, since I could only tell from the name about half the time).  I'll just highlight a couple: "The Wagon," by Khalida Asghar, is a hallucinatory, apocalyptic story.  The narrator meets three strange men who are watching the evening sky and point out that it has become red.  No one had noticed until they said so, but the sky is now strangely red.  Then a smell arrives, so offensive and sickening that it causes real pain -- but only once it's pointed out.  And finally, a mysterious wagon, which may be the source of the s
Read more

Faerie Queen Readalong I: Redcrosse, the Knight of Holiness

By -
Image
I did it, I read all of Book I!  My minimum requirement was two cantos a day, but I managed three a couple of times.  I'm hoping to read ahead, because I'll be gone for two weeks in the middle of this event and I'd like to be able to prep a post ahead of time...but the schedule is already pretty demanding.  The reading is not terribly difficult, but it is slow.  I keep thinking that I've read a large chunk, only to look back and realize that in fact I have read six verses.  So here we go with analysis... Each book in the Faerie Queene features a knight, and a story, about a particular virtue.  The Redcrosse Knight, to be known as St. George after he accomplishes his feats, is all about Holinesse .  This does not mean that Redcrosse already exemplifies holiness; he doesn't.  Holiness is what he's working towards and struggling with.  His foes symbolize various forms of unholiness, and he falls into their clutches at least as often as he defeats or avoids th
Read more