The Makioka Sisters

Tanizaki’s masterpiece is the story of the extinction of a great family through pride and over-refinement. It is a loving and nostalgic recreation of the sumptuous, intricate upper-class life of Osaka immediately before World War II. With surgical realism and precision, Tanizaki lays bare the sinews of pride, and in the finest qualities of the Japanese tradition brings a vanished era to vibrant life.

Junichiro Tanizaki wrote this during World War II as a way of reliving and preserving the happier past. It is the story of the attempts made by a declining merchant family to marry off Yukiko, a daughter who is the quintessentially Japanese heroine: inwardly stubborn though outwardly passive, spiritually self-sufficient though materially dependent, maddeningly unwilling to enter the light of day but determined to manipulate everyone from her shadowy retreat.