Junichiro Tanizaki

The Makioka Sisters

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In Osaka in the years immediately before World War II, four aristocratic women try to preserve a way of life that is vanishing. As told by Junichiro Tanizaki, the story of the Makioka sisters forms what is arguably the greatest Japanese novel of the twentieth century, a poignant yet unsparing portrait of a family–and an entire society–sliding into the abyss of modernity.

Tsuruko, the eldest sister, clings obstinately to the prestige of her family name even as her husband prepares to move their household to Tokyo, where that name means nothing. Sachiko compromises valiantly to secure the future of her younger sisters. The unmarried Yukiko is a hostage to her family’s exacting standards, while the spirited Taeko rebels by flinging herself into scandalous romantic alliances. Filled with vignettes of upper-class Japanese life and capturing both the decorum and the heartache of its protagonist, The Makioka Sisters is a classic of international literature.



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723 printed pages
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Quotes

  • frehas quoted5 years ago
    To lose the Osaka house would be to lose her very roots.
  • frehas quoted5 years ago
    Sachiko, who knew little of Tokyo and to whom names like Shibuya meant nothing, could only imagine something like the distant views she had had of the Tokyo suburbs from the Loop Line, of well-wooded hills and valleys and intermittent clusters of houses, and overhead a sky whose very color made one shiver—of a wholly different world, in short, from Osaka. As she read of Tsuruko’s “frozen” fingers, she remembered how the main house in Osaka, true to the old fashion, had been almost without heating.
  • frehas quoted5 years ago
    I have always heard that the cold in Tokyo is particularly hard to bear, and in fact I have never seen anything like it. Not a day passes without that cold, dry north wind. This morning the towels were frozen like boards and crackled when you picked them up. I do not remember that this ever happened, in Osaka. They say it is warmer in toward the city, but here we are high up and far out.

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