mouth before strangers, had a hard core that was difficult to reconcile with her apparent docility" (10). The novel follows the affairs of the Makiokas through the spring of 1941 when they at last secure a husband for the third sister despite numerous family difficulties--floods, financial setbacks, and private scandal.
Tanizaki, born in 1886 in Tokyo, moved after the 1923 earthquake to the Kyoto-Osaka region, where he sets much of the action of The Makioka Sisters and where he came to revere the traditions of Japan's past. In his narrative, Tokyo represents the impersonal metropolis where customs and the family name are lost in the crowds. For Sachiko in particular, who serves as the spiritual center of the family, "Tokyo boded ill . . . Tokyo was the devil's corner" (497). Though the ongoing efforts to secure a husband for Yuchiko provide the storyline's consistent thread, Tanizaki shows most events through Sachiko's eyes, which makes the narrative quite accessible. Something of a meddler, Sachiko nevertheless has a good heart and lively supply of common sense.
James Fujii, in Complicit Fictions, seeks a literary perspective from which works such as this should be analyzed "by rereading selected Japanese texts, not as efforts to emulate European realism but as narrative acts inscribed with historical particulars very much their own" (xi; the emphasis is Fujii's). His primary contention is that "texts constitute history" (40), and The Makioka Sisters provides interesting examples of this.
The novel is set against recent history
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