After enjoying Naomi, I eagerly dived into The Makioka Sisters, arguably Tanizaki-san’s most famous novel. While Naomi skewers Japanese men obsessed with the West, The Makioka Sisters mourns the fading Kobe-Osaka aristocracy of the 1930s.

The Makiokas are an old Osaka family whose famous name hides a precarious financial situation. The inherited trappings of wealth (kimonos, furniture, houses) are paired with a reverence for tradition, including marriage negotiations. The main throughline of the novel is the struggle to find a husband for Yukiko, the third sister. However, there’s plenty else going on. The eldest sister Tsuruko struggles to care for her six children, as her banker husband doesn’t make near enough to support them. Our main narrator is the second eldest sister, Sachiko, and she balances social, household, and familial obligations with a pursuit of happiness. The youngest child Taeko is determined to become a modern woman, with her own job and husband of choice–if only that job paid enough and that man could be reliable. Looming over all is the long, lethal shadow of WWII. The novel feels like an Austenite book of manners with a rare sincerity; a domestic novel equivalent of calling my mom and asking how everyone’s doing. With the low stakes, focus on familial logistics, and one-family focus, I was also reminded of The Archers, a British radio program running country family stories since the 1950s.

While the novel expressed a quiet beauty, Edward G. Seidensticker was a bare bones translator. His introduction starts in media res an insulting inter-academic argument about the West “poisoning pure Japanese-ness.” If the racism isn’t enough, Seidensticker goes on to rate the beauty of the fictional sisters and Tanizaki’s real life acquaintances. The blistering misogyny and racism made me stop reading the introduction. In the text itself, Seidensticker insisted on very few paragraph breaks–an exhausting format if there ever was one. The footnotes are largely useless. Some footnotes identified something that was very obvious from context, like an instrument or a type of flower, or something ubiquitous like sushi. Meanwhile, euphemism and subtext were unexplained. The most egregious example regards the Stolz family.

Mr. Stolz loses his job, and he and his whole family have to return to Germany. The characters clearly talk around a subtextual second reason the family must return, but without cultural context, I can only guess what that reason is. His visa expired? Something to do with the upcoming world war? Why does a job loss predicate a loss of home? I’m lost and sure would have appreciated a footnote.

Despite the translator snafus, The Makioka Sisters is a pleasant read. If you’re looking for an entry point in pre-1945 Shōwa period Japanese classics, I highly recommend such a thoughtful, gentle choice.

My review of Naomi: https://app.thestorygraph.com/reviews/fa3f7fb1-4f46-476d-8829-4952dd5a76e8