When the Cherry Trees Bloom: Tanizaki's Sakura
In The Makioka Sisters, Junichiro Tanizaki links the life experiences of the Makioka sisters directly with the annual blooms of the Japanese cherry blossoms, or Sakura. The cherry blossoms are the oldest-known flowers in Japan. The importance of cherry blossom viewing, or Hanami, dates back to the sixth century of the Heian period. Japanese nobility adopted the practice not only to admire the flowers’ beauty but also in reverence of the short lives these blossoms represent. For the Japanese, who appreciate beauty, purity, and simplicity, the cherry blossom remains a symbol for the transient nature of life, for a life that is beautiful but also impermanent. Annual cherry blossom viewing celebrates life, death, traditional culture, and it acts as a means of maintaining continuity with the past. With each reference to cherry blossoms and to the family’s annual pilgrimage to view them in The Makioka Sisters, the Makioka women are reminded of their fragile hold on traditional life, their fleeting beauty, and the reality of their mortality. Each sister, however, has a unique connection to the cherry blossom.
Sachiko, the second eldest, is the sister that Tanizaki most explicitly links to the cherry blossoms. She looks forward to the annual trip to view the blossoms with great anticipation, and she plants a tree in her own home garden. Yet, with its “few sickly blossoms,” Sachiko’s personal cherry tree becomes a metaphor for her own weak health: she begins her daily vitamin B injections shortly after the cherry blossom season, has a miscarriage during one season, and experiences a bad bout of jaundice another year shortly after her return from viewing the blossoms (83). Linked to Sachiko, the cherry blossom symbolizes the fragility of life and wellbeing. At the same time, her annual visit to Kyoto to see the blooms is also her ritual occasion for reviving her connection with the past. As she reflects,
The ancients waited for cherry blossoms, grieved when they were gone, and lamented their passing in countless poems. How very ordinary the poems had seemed to Sachiko when she read them as a girl, but now she knew, as well as one could know, that grieving over the fallen cherry blossoms was more than a fad or a convention. (85)
Tanizaki also illuminates the lives of Sachiko’s two younger sisters by subtly linking their struggles to the blossoms. For Yukiko, the still-unmarried third sister, cherry blossom season represents yet another round of marriage negotiations. Hence, the blossoms emerge as a figure both her own fading bloom and the traditional values she holds so dear. By contrast, for Taeko, the youngest and most modern of the sisters, the cherry blossom season is a time of illness and loss. As she suffers, she acknowledges that “and some hundred yards east of the Narihira Bridge, a cherry tree over an earth wall was in full bloom.” Are we to take this as a sign of Taeko’s resilience? As a metaphor for the beauty her life loses as she separates herself from her family and its traditions? As a painful reminder of the evanescence of life? Tanizaki’s novel opens the door to all of these interpretations at once, for in The Makioka Sisters, metaphors are as multilayered and subtle as the characters and feelings they represent.
--Michelle Von Almen, UWF Student
