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Title: The Makioka Sisters by Junichiro Tanizaki ISBN: 0-679-76164-0 Publisher: Vintage Pub. Date: 26 September, 1995 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $15.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.46 (26 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: A great classic.
Comment: Tanizaki set out, during the war years, to write a book like The Tale of Genji, in tribute to what was best about the Japanese past. The amazing thing is, that he succeeded. He was able to transfer the spirit of the Japanese masterpiece (which is also a world masterpiece) in modern times and delicately describe a whole civilization which had really been destroyed, even before the war was lost, in the dreadful militarism that caused the war in the first place. This book is beautifully written. As other readers have noted, it does go slowly. So does War and Peace. So do a lot of the other novels that really make you think about life, and love and important issues. The book echoes the leisurely pace of the Makiokas' lives and is very nostalgic--but it is realistic too and does not depict the old society as perfect. Each sister has her own, fascinating character. They do not easily fit into stereotypes. Particularly interesting to me is the character of Taeko, the youngest 'modern' sister who will not (or cannot) behave like her more decorous sister Yukiko, the perfect 'traditional' Japanese woman--who can't get married. Taeko behaves very badly by the standards of her time--and very normally by our standards today. It is interesting to see the tension, and the ways in which her behavior affects everybody around her. Not only are the sisters interesting, but there are many very wonderfully drawn secondary characters, like Saeko's cultured husband, and the foreigners, the Russians, the German family with the two children--
Just as interesting as the people though are the customs and the culture. There's cherry-blossom viewing, and a firefly hunt and descriptions of how to wear kimonos and many very wonderful descriptions of Taeko's traditional dance-- It's all a whole different mindset than the way we live today. Really civilized. And yet, at the same time, the Japanese army is committing the horrific atrocities in Nanking--
I would read this first, and then Genji, if you haven't done that (you'll really go back to another time). Also best, I think, in the Seidensticker translation.
Someone who likes this will probably also really like In the Shade of Spring Leaves, a translation of the stories of Higuchi Ichiyo, along with a biography of a fascinating woman who died way too young.
Rating: 5
Summary: Beautiful, evocative tale of pre-World War II Japan
Comment: This has to be considered Tanizaki's masterpiece. It is a beautifully written, deliciously observed tale of the decline of a privileged upper middle class Osaka family, told through the lives of four sisters. I have read this book three times and learn someting new each time. It is a thoroughly modern story with elusive and ghostly antecedents. Although the tale takes place only 60 years ago, on the eve of pre-war Japan, it describes a world now vanished. Tanizaki's writing is fluid and clear. His description of Kyoto during cherry blossom viewing makes me sorry I've never been there at that season. The sublety Tanizaki brings to the emotions and motives of each of the persons attending Yukiko's many miais is amazing. Unfortunately, the film of about a decade or so ago doesn't do the book justice. Thank you, Tanizaki-san, for giving us the Makioka Sisters.
Rating: 5
Summary: A masterpiece
Comment: "The Makioka Sisters" is generally considered to be Tanizaki's masterpiece, and there is no reason to disagree with this opinion. It is by far the richest and the most detailed of all his novels. At the same time, paradoxically, it is the least typical of his works. The world of Tanizaki's fiction is usually filled with characters pursuing a sexual obsession of one sort or another. Almost alone among his novels, "The Makioka Sisters" contains no erotic overtones. It is a tale of four sisters living in Western Japan in the prewar period. Japanese biographers of Tanizaki tend to agree that the novel is very thinly-disguised autobiography, a lovingly detailed recreation of the happiest period of the author's life: the early years of his marriage to his third wife Matsuko. This was a period when Matsuko's two beautiful unmarried younger sisters were frequent, almost permanent, visitors to the Tanizakis' home. As a worshipper of women and feminine beauty in all of its manifestations, Tanizaki must have been in seventh heaven. He always preferred the company of women to men, and loved to observe everything about them. Hence the abundance of rich detail about the lives of the three sisters. (Matsuko's older married sister played a much smaller part in Tanizaki's life, and in this work.) So intricate is his portrait of the Makioka sisters that a student of Japanese society will probably learn more about the nature of the Japanese family from this novel than from any number of sociological or anthropological works. And, to my mind, no other book delineates so clearly, and so succinctly, the lineaments of the Japanese sensibility. This is not to deny the literary value of the work. If a novel's worth is to be judged by richness of characterization, brilliant storytelling, and a vivid evocation of time and place, then surely "The Makioka Sisters" satisfies all these requirements. If I were forced to recommend just one work of Japanese literature as a must-read, this novel would be it.
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Title: Naomi : A Novel by Junichiro Tanizaki ISBN: 0375724745 Publisher: Vintage Pub. Date: 10 April, 2001 List Price(USD): $12.95 |
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Title: Kokoro by Natsume Soseki, Soseki Natsume, Edwin McClellan ISBN: 0895267152 Publisher: Regnery Publishing Pub. Date: May, 1996 List Price(USD): $14.95 |
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Title: Snow Country by Edward G. Seidensticker, Yasunari Kawabata ISBN: 0679761047 Publisher: Vintage Pub. Date: 30 January, 1996 List Price(USD): $12.00 |
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Title: The Key by Junichiro Tanizaki ISBN: 0679730230 Publisher: Vintage Pub. Date: 30 July, 1991 List Price(USD): $12.00 |
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Title: Thousand Cranes by Yasunari Kawabata ISBN: 0679762655 Publisher: Vintage Pub. Date: 26 November, 1996 List Price(USD): $11.00 |
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