The Makioka Sisters (Vintage Classics Japanese Series)

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Four sisters live under the fading name of an old Osaka family. As modern Japan gathers pace, the Makioka sisters hold fast to custom, family and one another.

In the years leading up to the Second World War, four sisters live in dilapidated houses in Osaka and Ashiya, each navigating her own complex relationship to the fading lustre of the Makioka family name.

Rich with breathtaking descriptions of ancient customs and an ever-changing natural world, Junichiro Tanizaki evokes in loving detail a long-lost way of life even as it withers under the harsh glare of modernity.

At the centre are the sisters themselves, bound by family duty, private longing and the expectations of a social world already passing away. Marriage negotiations, domestic rituals, seasonal beauty and quiet disappointments become part of a larger portrait of change.

Tanizaki finds drama in the quiet pressures of domestic life. The sisters’ hopes, compromises and obligations reveal the fading power of an old Osaka family, and the beauty of customs that can no longer fully protect those who live by them.

TRANSLATED BY EDWARD SEIDENSTICKER

VINTAGE JAPANESE CLASSICS: five masterpieces of Japanese fiction in gorgeous new gift editions.

'An exquisite novel about four sisters living though a turbulent decade...I'd put it in the 10 greatest books of the 20th century' David Mitchell

'A near-perfect novel' Hanya Yanagihara

Exquisite craftsmanship
Guardian

About Junichiro Tanizaki

Junichiro Tanizaki was one of Japan's greatest twentienth century novelists. Born in 1886 in Tokyo, his first published work - a one-act play - appeared in 1910 in a literary magazine he helped to found. Tanizaki lived in the cosmopolitan Tokyo area until the earthquake of 1923, when he moved to the Kyoto-Osaka region and became absorbed in Japan's past.

All his most important works were written after 1923, among them Some Prefer Nettles (1929), The Secret History of the Lord of Musashi (1935), several modern versions of The Tale of Genji (1941, 1954 and 1965), The Makioka Sisters, The Key (1956) and Diary of a Mad Old Man (1961). He was awarded an Imperial Award for Cultural Merit in 1949 and in 1965 he was elected an honorary member of the American Academy and the National Institute of Arts and Letters, the first Japanese writer to receive this honour. Tanizaki died later that same year.

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