The Makioka Sisters

The slow decline of a genteel Osaka merchant family in the years before the Second World War, told through four sisters and the long, failing effort to find a husband for the shy third sister, Yukiko. The Kansai world is exact: the comfortable house at Ashiya between Osaka and Kobe, the fading main family house in old Osaka, the modern port city of Kobe, and the annual pilgrimage to see the cherry blossoms in Kyoto, the still point of the family's year.

Sachiko

The Ashiya house

Book 1

Sachiko's comfortable house at Ashiya is where the two younger, unmarried sisters actually live, and where the endless deliberations over Yukiko's marriage prospects unfold. Tanizaki makes its rooms, its garden and its rituals of dress and season the measure of a whole vanishing way of life.

Book 1

explicit The novel centres on the branch household at Ashiya, the real residential town between Osaka and Kobe where the second sister Sachiko keeps the home that has become the family's true centre.

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Tsuruko

The main house, old Osaka

Book 1

The main house in Osaka, guardian of the family name and its dwindling prestige, is where propriety is enforced and marriage offers are judged. Its authority over the Ashiya branch, and its own quiet financial decline, trace the slow erosion of the old Osaka merchant class the sisters embody.

Book 1

explicit The eldest sister Tsuruko keeps the Makioka main house in Osaka, seat of a once-prominent merchant family; sited in the old central districts of the real city where such houses stood.

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