If you are an avid follower of all my online doings, you may have seen that I have a relatively new Instagram account, Reading by Night. I also read by day, but it is so named because I am a devotee of The Hour of the Wolf–the wee hours, as they’re sometimes called, the interstice between Two Sleeps. Also reading by night is better! Romantic and mysterious, interruptionless.
I have just read The Makioka Sisters, by Junichiro Tanizaki, written in 1957. Kindle and many newspapers and blogs will tell you how long it takes to read something. I don’t think that’s a great way to decide what to read, I wish such estimates didn’t exist. But you can tell when you hold this book in your hand: it’s going to take a while. You flip to the end: 600 pages. I had heard it would be worth it. It is. It was.
The Makioka Sisters is a masterpiece of post war Japanese literature. A perfect portrayal of the pretension, snobbery and sufferings of a declining aristocratic family from Osaka, four sisters, trying to get one of them married, and trying to keep the youngest, most modern one from destroying what little remains of the respectability the family once enjoyed.
As WWII encroaches inexorably and illness and scandal descend, you feel their losses: the grace and beauty of the firefly hunting parties, the repose and solitude of the lost country estates, occasions for elaborate kimonos, traditional songs and dances, the cherry blossoms of Kyoto, the temples and rituals. The sacred trampled by the profane, like sakura.
But much was gained: women freed from subordination to make their own way in life, release from the straitjackets of class and hierarchy; and much that was exciting and new: train travel, television, a sense of freedom, Europeans coming to Japan, new food, expansion—and Western dress.
This is the Japanese women’s version of the Radezsky March by Joseph Roth, another masterpiece, in which gaudily uniformed men in fanciful dress and plumed helmets rattled their sabres and sat stiffly erect on prancing horses—while the Austro-Hungarian empire collapsed around them.
I had forgotten how much I’d liked Japanese literature! I went to the shelf to look: Kobo Abe, Kenzaburo Oe, Murakami, Yoko Ogawa, and the first Japanese novel I’d loved: Snow Country by Yasunari Kawabata. More recently, Yoko Tawada. I think I’ll go back and read them again.
P.S. Why were four Chinese women put on the cover of this book? Maybe the art department didn’t have the equivalent of fact checking. The women’s faces are quite Chinese; one of them is even wearing a Cheong Sam! So I put a Japanese doll, one of the themes of the book, next to it (reposing against a Chinese pillow)
Caterina.net 