Jun’ichirō Tanizaki’s The Makioka Sisters (SASAMEYUKI)
The Makioka Sisters depicts the everyday lives of four sisters from a declining Osaka merchant family.
- The eldest sister, Tsuruko, is married to a conservative, old-fashioned man (a banker) who was adopted into the family as a son-in-law. They have several children and live on Dogenzaka in Shibuya, Tokyo. (About halfway through the novel, they move there from Osaka because of her husband’s transfer within the bank.) This branch constitutes the family’s main house.
- The second sister, Sachiko (modeled on Tanizaki’s wife Matsuko), lives in Ashiya. She is married to an accountant and has one daughter. Her household is a branch family. She is affectionately called goryon-han or naka-anchan.
- The third sister, Yukiko, is in her thirties during the years covered by the novel. Quiet, sensitive, devoted, stubborn, and modestly proud, she repeatedly attends arranged marriage meetings yet remains unmarried. She is known as ki-anchan.
- The youngest sister, Taeko, is in her mid-twenties during the period of the story. Lively and spirited, somewhat free-spirited, intelligent and capable in practical matters, she nevertheless has a reckless streak. She is called Koisan or Koichan.
The story is largely told from Sachiko’s perspective. Its central focus is the family’s anxious concern over Yukiko’s repeated marriage negotiations and Taeko’s unconventional romantic entanglements.
The two younger unmarried sisters, Yukiko and Taeko, ought by convention to live with the main family headed by Tsuruko. However, because they do not get along with their adopted brother-in-law, dislike life in Tokyo, and find the Dogenzaka house too cramped, they reside with Sachiko in Ashiya instead. Even so, the gentle Yukiko nominally belongs to the Dogenzaka household and periodically returns there, though she invariably finds reasons to come back to Ashiya—and once there, she never seems in a hurry to leave.
Most readers naturally root for the delicate and seemingly fragile Yukiko. Taeko, by contrast, appears far more self-reliant, giving the impression that she can take care of herself without anyone’s support.
Some of Yukiko’s marriage proposals fall through because the suitors fail to meet her own standards, especially when she was younger. But the novel more often depicts the main family hiring investigators to examine prospective matches. They reject proposals because the family backgrounds are deemed unequal or because there are concerns such as mental illness in the suitor’s family, effectively ending negotiations before Yukiko’s own preferences can even become relevant. These episodes occur when she is already past thirty.
Taeko, meanwhile, once eloped with the third son of a wealthy Osaka jewelry merchant in a scandal that made the newspapers. From a modern perspective, this young man is utterly foolish and possesses virtually no redeeming qualities. Yet those around Taeko continue to tolerate their relationship. Because the elder sister Yukiko has not yet married, convention dictates that the younger sister cannot marry first, and so Taeko and her suitor are made to wait.
During this period the young man occupies himself with a succession of foolish exploits—frequenting hostesses and stealing merchandise from his family’s store to sell off. Taeko, who had attracted some attention as an artist making dolls, abandons that pursuit to study dressmaking and acquire a practical skill. The implicit rationale is that she anticipates a future in which she may have to support this irresponsible man herself.
Then a major flood strikes the Kobe area, and Taeko’s life is saved by a photographer known to the family. Strong, energetic, highly skilled in artistic photography, and ambitious enough to have trained in America, he gradually wins her affection. The photographer had once been an apprentice at the jewelry store where Taeko’s suitor belonged to the owner’s family. His own family background is humble—tenant farmers in Okayama.
Yet Sachiko and Yukiko favor the foolish jewelry merchant’s son over the photographer. To modern readers, this feels utterly incomprehensible. The photographer seems the obvious choice. The sisters’ only real argument is that “their family backgrounds are different.” In terms of intelligence, strength of character, sense of justice, personal appeal, and capacity for love, the photographer wins by a landslide. Taeko, unconstrained by such old-fashioned values, counters Sachiko’s arguments with logic. Readers inevitably find themselves passionately hoping that Taeko and the photographer’s romance will succeed.
The novel alternates between Yukiko’s marriage negotiations and Taeko’s romantic adventures as both situations gradually become more serious. For Yukiko, the problem is age; for Taeko, it is the increasingly tangled effort to free herself from her previous suitor.
Reading it feels rather like watching an old-fashioned family television drama—the kind once produced by TBS and starring actors such as Masako Kyōzuka or Kōji Ishizaka—but transplanted into the world of the Kansai upper class. Another comparison might be a domestic-drama version of Toyoko Yamazaki’s The Family (Karei naru Ichizoku).
The novel strives for complete fidelity to the social realities of its era. Marriage negotiations depend heavily on family lineage, social standing, personal refinement, and family wealth. So long as one comes from a sufficiently prosperous family, practical life skills matter relatively little. Love and passion appear only fleetingly, at the very end of the process.
Today, concepts such as pedigree and family rank carry connotations that are close to taboo because of their discriminatory implications. Even conducting background investigations into prospective marriage partners is often viewed critically. Under Japan’s current Constitution, marriage is based solely on the mutual consent of the parties involved. The freedom of two individuals to marry according to their own wishes is guaranteed. The spectacle of parents and siblings conducting investigations and deciding whether a marriage proposal should proceed belongs to the social world of prewar Japan under the Meiji Constitution.
That world is historically valuable to observe. Yet we must avoid the mistake of reading the novel through contemporary moral assumptions. While interfering in a son’s, niece’s, or sister’s marriage through background investigations would be unacceptable today, we cannot erase the fact that such behavior conformed to the ethical norms of that period. We should not therefore regard the characters—or Tanizaki himself—as morally depraved simply for acting according to the values of their time.
When approaching literature, readers should not impose present-day common sense upon a work. The proper attitude is to place oneself imaginatively within the historical circumstances of the text. If one insists on applying modern ethical standards, then even The Tale of Genji would be condemned outright for its depictions of incestuous implications, adultery, and the domination of young girls.
The following section contains spoilers. Readers who have not yet read the novel should turn back now. Even so, I will not reveal the ending.
What surprised me most upon reading The Makioka Sisters was the direction Tanizaki’s aestheticism and reverence for women ultimately take.
Through exquisitely detailed descriptions of the changing seasons, the famous temples and scenic sites of Kyoto, Osaka, and Kobe, as well as women’s kimono, hairstyles, and accessories, Tanizaki carefully develops the lives of the younger three sisters, particularly the two youngest. Yet near the end of the novel he devotes extraordinary attention to the youngest sister’s agonizing struggle with severe dysentery. In these passages I sensed the twisted aesthetic vision and burning sensuality that characterize Tanizaki’s artistic imagination.
If I were forced to summarize the novel’s literary essence in an extremely short phrase, it might be:
“A beautiful young lady from a distinguished family suffers terrible diarrhea, and the narrative describes it at great length.”
Tanizaki, who throughout his career expressed a deeply submissive fascination with women, seems here to challenge conventional ideals of femininity. By dwelling on a woman’s bodily functions in painstaking detail, he appears almost to invite ordinary readers to recoil. Yet at the same time he seems to declare that femininity remains overwhelmingly noble, beautiful, and erotic even when exposed in such vulnerable and unglamorous circumstances.
That, to me, is quintessential Tanizaki.
He never writes the kind of novel one would call ordinary.