The Makioka Sisters by Jun'ichirō Tanizaki, translated by Edward G. Seidensticker, can be a bit of a slog. At 562 pages, this book tells the story of four sisters of an old, noble Osaka family. The main plot is Austen-esque: trying to get the 3rd sister, quiet Yukiko, married despite the high, almost snobbish standards of the old Makioka family, so that poor, modern, outgoing Taeko (affectionately called "Koi-san") can marry her long-time lover. As marriage negotiations continue to fall through for Yukiko, Taeko gets increasingly impatient, and older sister Sachiko worries that her behavior will bring ruin to the family name. I first, fittingly, began reading this book on the train from Osaka to Tokyo. It was covered by a flowery book cover I bought from a children's library on Nakanoshima island. Despite my best efforts, it took me more than a weekend to get through the hefty paperback.
Making Sachiko our central protagonist gives us an unreliable narrator in an intriguing way: her sensitive, traditional mindset leaves the reader both nostalgic and frustrated in turns. The book's biggest weakness was long, hefty paragraphs that could be repetitive from other sections. I suspect this comes from it being serialized and published in parts. I think the book would have benefited from multiple point-of-views. Sachiko is the perfect representative of the old family, but her actions were often snobbish and cold, and it would have been interesting to have her unreliability interrogated by having Taeko's point of view as well, here and there. Its biggest strength is to be read between the lines. Over the events of this book, which seem so couched in dated tradition and formality, loom hints of austerity measures and rumors that mark the impending shoe drop of Japan entering World War II. There's a sense (reinforced by the book's Japanese title, "lightly falling snow," which can refer to the falling cherry blossoms, a season of beauty short-lived and always destined to end each year) of impermanence around the entire book. This is a way of life about to be obliterated by world events. It's worth noting that the government actually stopped the publication of this book in 1943 because “The novel goes on and on detailing the very thing we are most supposed to be on our guard against during this period of wartime emergency: the soft, effeminate, and grossly individualistic lives of women.” All of this gives the novel a very specific wash as a frozen moment in time destined to be swept away. Its ending carries a sort of sadness to it: without spoilers, Sachiko feels confident that the future is set, but World War II is about to change everything for her family and country.
Even in the book itself, many holidays, festivals, and traditional arts and celebrations are being reeled back in light of the Second Sino-Japanese War. All of the book's readers during and after World War II would have recognized this acutely, and I suspect that feeling of loss and nostalgia for a traditional Japan (in all its good and bad) was a huge contributor to making this book a classic. As for the ending, the book's pacing was steady throughout, less like a flight (with a take-off, stabilization, and descent) and more like a train ride, straight across with a few interesting stops. The ending felt like getting off one stop before the train's final destination. Unceremonious, and it feels like the story keeps going straight ahead, but you're hurried off the train anyway. The events of the last three pages were large compared to a lot of others in the book that got entire chapters, and yet Tanizaki breezes over them and leaves us, it almost feels, mid-paragraph. I did like the bittersweetness he tries to leave us with, but the final sentence felt very low-energy for being the final words of a 500+ page book. Content warnings for misogyny, ableism, classism, mental illness.
