Reviews
bruh i CANNOT with the last line of this book. 530 pages of intense family drama and politics and tanizaki chooses to end with “Yukiko’s diarrhea persisted through the twenty-sixth, and was a problem on the train to Tokyo.” thank you. that’s great. anyway, this book was extremely long-winded and filled with unemotional prose, but i also somehow enjoyed it? i feel like a lot of contemporary japanese literature focuses on the proletariat, so this afforded an interesting window into the upper-class life, especially at the edge of WW2. it was fascinating to detect glimpses of modernity breaking through (through dress, speech, european relations, etc.), even as the sisters clung to the decorum and traditions that had helped establish their family in the first place. in some ways, i sensed an internal pressure towards change as well, through taeko’s escapades and refusal to yield to marriage customs. not to mention the sisters’ reluctant understanding that tradition had perhaps precipitated yukiko’s own wilting marriage prospects. truly a different time and one full of cultural growing pains. an interesting fact i unearthed: the original title in japanese (細雪) actually means “lightly falling snow”, alluding to both the impermanence of life/status/wealth, as well as yukiko’s principal position in the book (samiyuki : yukiko).
An immaculate presentation of life, bewitching and intriguing as each vicissitude delicately explored, each thread of investigation woven for a gorgeous tapestry displaying a magnificent legacy. The ineffably graceful, the wilfully reckless, the inept and the recalcitrant.
We follow four sisters over four years in 1940s Japan. Tanizaki's writing is serene and harmonious, as is the story itself. You feel the authors nostalgia and wistful yearning for a society that has always been fated to change, it permeates every page. Maybe it would smell of cherry blossoms. The Makioka Sisters isn't just a novel complied of moments of great beauty, it is beauty itself.
