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The Makioka Sisters (Sasameyuki) · Companion GuideStories · Issue 00

10 minutes to The Makioka Sisters — a wartime novel that refuses to mention the war

Four sisters, the dignity of an old merchant house, and the seasons keeping count of the days.

Text and illustrations produced by the pipeline

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Opening

Cherry blossoms fall along the path in front of the Heian Shrine. Three women in kimono stand under the trees, faces turned up to watch the petals come down. The fourth isn't there. Her dream of studying dressmaking in Paris got nailed to the ground in Osaka by an old, unmentionable scandal about an elopement. This is the opening of Jun'ichiro Tanizaki's The Makioka Sisters. The whole book is the domestic round the four of them repeat year after year, moving between Osaka, Ashiya, and Kyoto: matchmaking meetings, cherry blossom viewing, watching fireflies, quarrels, reconciliations, more matchmaking.

You could take it for a family drama with no villain. It really doesn't have much in the way of dramatic incident, no battle scenes, no murders, nothing that could be called a cliffhanger. What it has is: what the family eats tonight, which fabric the older sister picked out for the younger one, whether the man coughing at the matchmaking table counted as rude. But it's exactly this near-microscopic attention that has made it one of the most rereadable family novels in twentieth-century Japanese literature.

What kind of book this is

The author, Jun'ichiro Tanizaki, was born in the late nineteenth century and already in his fifties when he wrote The Makioka Sisters. It began as a magazine serial in 1943, and note the year: the Pacific War was at its bloodiest, and Tanizaki refused to write about it. What he wrote instead was the fussy, granular business of an old Osaka merchant family finding a husband for its third daughter. Within a couple of years the military censors shut the serialization down, on the grounds that it lacked wartime spirit. The complete novel wasn't published until 1948, after the war.

This stance, writing as though the era simply weren't happening, turned out to be exactly what the book got remembered for. It isn't an antiwar novel, and it isn't an allegory of war. It simply routes an entire family's four seasons of ordinary life around the war outside. The characters wear the kimono-over-Western-dress combinations that Osaka women of the time actually wore, not costume-drama robes; they ride streetcars, rent houses, drink weak tea at matchmaking meetings. This is modern urban life, just one being squeezed a little breathless by old rules.

The four sisters and their world

The four Makioka sisters. Tsuruko, the eldest, holds down the old family house in Osaka and enforces the rules hardest. Sachiko, the second sister, has moved with her husband Teinosuke to a household of their own in Ashiya, and worries the most while staying the most practical of the four. Yukiko, the third, is the center of the book's main marriage plot: quiet, compliant, and almost unsettlingly beautiful. Taeko, the youngest, has the most opinions of her own, and gives her sisters the most trouble.

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一间铺着榻榻米的和式房间，傍晚的暖黄灯光；雪子跪坐在矮几前，对面坐着一位穿西装打领带的中年男人和一位穿素雅和服的中年妇人（媒人），雪子低着头看自己膝盖上的手指，姐姐幸子坐在侧后方、神情有点紧。桌上摆着两杯几乎没动过的粗茶。

一九三八年阪神大水灾的夜晚，浊黄的洪水没到成年男人的胸口；一个穿衬衫的瘦削男人（板仓）双手托着一块门板，门板上坐着一个浑身湿透、裹着毯子的年轻女人（妙子），背景是被淹到一半的店铺和摇晃的路灯。色调偏冷，远处有一点火把的光。

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大阪船场旧商家蒔冈家已经没落：长女鹤子守着『本家』门面在大阪，二女幸子带着丈夫贞之助、女儿悦子另立『分家』定居芦屋——真正打理两个未嫁妹妹婚事的其实是幸子这一房

一九三几年的某个春日上午，京都平安神宫前面的樱花大道；三个穿和服的女人和一个穿西装的小女孩（悦子）走在落樱里，最高的那个（三姐雪子）仰头看花，矮一点的（四妹妙子）伸手去接落下来的花瓣，姐姐幸子走在最后面，手里提着包袱皮包着的便当盒。色调偏暖

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一节慢速行驶的老式火车车厢内，窗外是战时关西的冬日田野；雪子穿着一身端庄的出行和服，脸色苍白，一只手捂着肚子，膝盖上放着一个包袱；对面坐着大姐鹤子，眉头微皱，手里捏着手帕。车厢里没有别人，光线偏灰。

That deliberate refusal to mention it is the sharpest thing in the whole book. Outside, people are dying and a war is being fought; inside, the family is still fretting over a husband for the third daughter, worrying over the fourth daughter's scandal, going to Shinsaibashi in Osaka for a bolt of kimono fabric. Tanizaki isn't using this gap to protest anything in the novel. He seems to think some things deserve to be written down precisely because the world is falling apart, stubbornly, on purpose.

Yukiko's marriage: an anticlimactic ending

Near the very end of the book, Yukiko finally settles on someone: Mimaki, the illegitimate son of a viscount. The illegitimacy is, in its way, exactly right, a match that neither reaches too high nor stoops too low for a declined old merchant family like the Makiokas. The wedding is set, and the family sets off for Tokyo for the ceremony. By the logic of an ordinary novel, this should be the happy ending.

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Why it's worth reading even once you know the plot

A companion guide gives you the map. The text itself is the land. You already have the skeleton now: Yukiko ends up marrying Mimaki, Taeko moves in with Miyoshi, the baby doesn't survive, Itakura dies from a routine operation. But you haven't read the sheen of the kimono silk, haven't read the exact angle of Yukiko's bowed head at the matchmaking table, haven't read the half-second of distraction that crosses Sachiko's face when a firefly drifts past her fingers on a summer night in Ashiya. Those things live in the book itself, and the book asks you to sit down for them: unhurried, unrushed, not counting on the next page to deliver big news. Old Osaka between 1943 and 1948 survives, on the page, only for readers willing to slow down that far.

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Art Direction4 plates

Before the guide was written, this book got a visual foundation — every illustration you just read grew out of it.

Character · 10 minutes to The Makioka Sisters — a wartime novel that refuses to mention the war — 01Charactercharacter

World · 10 minutes to The Makioka Sisters — a wartime novel that refuses to mention the war

The family's ancestors ran an old merchant house in Osaka's Semba district; by this generation, the family has fallen a long way from that. Head house is now just a title. The household still pawns things every year to cover expenses. But the forms can't be allowed to slip: elders before youngers, a proper go-between for every match, no younger sister marrying ahead of an older one, no skimping when guests are entertained. All of this holds up a shell that can no longer support itself financially. The money and the effort that actually keep it running come, ironically, from Sachiko's branch, the one that moved out.

Yukiko's matchmaking: cup after cup of tea nobody drinks

The book's main thread is finding a husband for the third sister, Yukiko. It drags from the opening page to the very end, through more matchmaking meetings than anyone could count. Some fall through because the other family hears the Makiokas have declined; some because the man doesn't meet the sisters' standards; some that look settled collapse anyway. Yukiko herself barely speaks at any of these meetings. She keeps her eyes down and lets her sisters decide for her.

Taeko's old scandal is the thorn stuck in this whole business: years earlier she and Okubata, the wealthy family's son she'd known since childhood and called Kei-boy, plotted to elope, and a tabloid got hold of it. The paper printed the four sisters' names out of birth order and pinned the story on Yukiko instead of Taeko. Yukiko's reputation has carried the stain ever since. Any family that looks into a match eventually digs up the old story.

What Tanizaki does well with these scenes is turn the matchmaking table into something close to a ritual standoff. Both families sit there drinking flavorless tea and trading empty pleasantries, neither side willing to be the first to name terms, and Yukiko never lifts her eyes. The reader wants to shake her, but she isn't in a hurry, or rather, she's been trained not to be. Across the whole novel, Yukiko probably says less than the go-between says at any single one of these meetings.

Taeko: saved in a flood, lost to an ear operation

On the younger sister's side, a different thread is quietly moving. Taeko never did run off with Okubata; instead she took up doll-making and Japanese dance, and kept a private plan to save enough money to study dress design in Paris. She fell for a photographer of modest background named Itakura. The family objected, of course, Sachiko most of all, class instinct running deep in her. In 1938, the great Hanshin flood put half of Osaka and Kobe underwater, and Itakura poled his way through chest-deep water on a door panel to pull Taeko out of the house where she was trapped. Tanizaki writes the scene with restraint, but it's what settles the relationship between the two of them.

It didn't last. Itakura later went in for a minor operation on an ear infection; the wound turned gangrenous, and he died, not in the flood but in a hospital bed. Taeko wept herself sick, and Sachiko, secretly, let out a breath of relief: an unrespectable romance had come to a clean end. Tanizaki's rendering of that private relief is harder to sit with than Itakura's death itself — she isn't a bad person, she just weighs propriety heavier than her sister's heart.

Miyoshi and the baby who didn't survive

After Itakura died, Taeko didn't go back to the path her sisters had laid out for her. Instead she moved in with a bartender named Miyoshi. Miyoshi's background was low, and by the standards of an old merchant family, so was his trade. The two of them had a child before marrying; the baby didn't survive. After the baby died, Tsuruko cut Taeko out of the family register for good. This is around 1941: the last piece of the Makiokas' respectability comes off and shatters.

Tanizaki doesn't write this as a family melodrama. He has Sachiko getting the news while ironing the clothes Yukiko will wear to her next matchmaking meeting; the iron pauses for a moment, then keeps moving. There's nothing to be done now is the only line of interior thought she's given. The baby is gone, Taeko is struck from the family register, and Yukiko's marriage is still up in the air, all of it landing at once, and Sachiko simply deals with it one piece at a time. That dealing-with-it is itself what the book is trying to capture about this kind of old-fashioned woman's daily life.

Cherry blossoms, fireflies, a city slowly coming apart

Running through all this human business, reappearing again and again, is the season. Tanizaki hands the whole book's structure over to the four seasons: every spring the family goes to view the cherry blossoms at Kyoto's Heian Shrine, the high point of whatever family togetherness and standing still remains; on a summer night they go out to the countryside to chase fireflies, and for once Yukiko and Taeko set their worries down; then the 1938 Hanshin flood, the Bon dance at the end of summer, the coal stove and rice cakes of winter. The seasons aren't backdrop. They're the metronome.

In other words, The Makioka Sisters has no climax in the usual sense. The plot doesn't climb, climb again, and blow open at the end. It's more like an unhurried river, knocked sideways now and then by a rock, then flowing on around it. What Tanizaki is betting on is something else: that these recurring seasonal rituals, repeated year after year, wear the people down, and the reader will see for themselves, in the ripples on the water, how the family's fortunes are quietly going under.

Where the war is

Right there. In December 1941, Japan attacked Pearl Harbor and the Pacific War formally began. The Makioka Sisters' story is at that exact point in its own timeline. And Tanizaki almost never writes the war directly: no air raids, no conscription, no tension over rationed rice. The reader senses the outside world coming apart only from small things, the phrase the China Incident drifting occasionally out of a radio, soldiers starting to appear on the trains.