The Makoika Sisters - Everyman's Library Author:Junichiro Tanizaki This is the story of the extinction of a great family through pride and over-refinement. It is a loving re-creation of the sumptuous, pleasue-filled upper-class life of Osaka - the Hamburg of Japan - just before the war. As Tanizaki intimately and sensitively dissects the complex affairs of the once rich and haughty sisters, his surgical realism... more » lays bare the tissue of true pride and false. Yet this realism is without harshness, for it is fused with nostalgia for a vanished era.
'Junichiro Tanizaki may well prove to be the outstanding Japanese novelist of this century...His greatest book, "The Makioka Sisters" (1948), was written 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 quintessential 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'