Tradition and Change in Junichiro Tanizaki's The Makioka Sisters
Partially published in the beginning years of World War II and secretly finished and distributed amongst friends during the war, Junichiro Tanizaki’s novel The Makioka Sisters chronicles the lives of Tsuruko, Sachiko, Yukiko, and Taeko, the daughters of a fading aristocratic family in Japan. They struggle to maintain the traditional aristocratic values of their culture, but they are also attracted by encroaching Western influences. The material cultural changes they incorporate into their lives are subtle, but it is the undercurrent of modern thought that threatens their bond and their happiness. Their relationships are ultimately as delicate as the cherry blossoms they so admire.
The central conflict in the novel revolves around finding very traditional third sister Yukiko a husband. Efforts to find an acceptable suitor, one that Yukiko and the family approve, inevitably end in failure and embarrassment for the Makiokas. She is too traditional for some suitors, too shy for others, and just right for those that are too old for her tastes. Early on in the novel, sister Sachiko’s thoughts at a cherry blossom festival reflect the tensions surrounding Yukiko’s prospects and the delicacy of their bonds:
[E]ven if she herself stood here next year, Yukiko might be married and far away. The flowers would come again, but Yukiko would not…. Sachiko had stood under these same trees with these same emotions the year before and the year before that, and each time she had found it hard to understand why they should still be together.
Yukiko’s sisters do not fully comprehend her disdain for Western culture or modern life. She refuses Western clothes on all but the hottest days, and only then in private. She appears intimidated by the telephone and is incomprehensible to anyone who tries to communicate with her on one. Yukiko embodies the traditional Japanese aristocratic lady. The telephone is just too modern, too Western for her comfort.
The pressures of a culture which prizes formal subordination of individual emotion to familial and social obligation eventually begins to take its toll on the sisters.
While Yukiko shuns Western culture and clings to the traditional role of women, her younger sister Taeko embraces all things Western and rebels specifically against the constraining bonds of femininity. The competing claims of love and family that drive the novel find expression in the plight of Taeko, who cannot marry, according to tradition, until each of her old sisters are betrothed. Taeko cannot marry until Yukiko’s marriage is arranged, and her future hence hangs on her reluctant older sister finding a satisfactory match. In a world at the brink of cataclysmic change, Sachiko tries to bring happiness to both sisters while maintaining the honor of her family name. Hers is a path rutted with pitfalls, a plot that Jane Austen would have relished.
This is a novel, then, about how one family navigates cultural change. Culture is a thing always in flux, inescapably changing, thus continually challenging us to adapt, and Tanizaki’s novel lets us in on the lives of a family facing challenges that are only precursors to the sweeping global change soon to be wrought by world war. Though strikingly Japanese in many ways, the relationships of the sisters and the ways they navigate family life may feel familiar in any culture.
--Regina Sakalarios-Rogers, Instructor, Department of English
