The Makioka Sisters

Four sisters live in dilapidated houses, the daughters of a once-great merchant family of Osaka.

Each of the women navigates her own complex relationship to the fading lustre of the Makioka family name, in the years leading up to the Second World War. Rich with breathtaking descriptions of ancient customs and an ever-changing natural world, Tanizaki evokes in poignant detail a long-lost way of life even as it withers under the harsh glare of modernity.

‘An exquisite novel about four sisters living though a turbulent decade...I'd put it in the 10 greatest books of the 20th century’ David Mitchell

‘A classic novel of a whole country about to turn on the terrible hinge of the war into modernity; its tone is elegiac and bleak’ Observer

About the Author

Junichiro Tanizaki was one of Japan's greatest twentienth century novelists. Born in 1886 in Tokyo, his first published work - a one-act play - appeared in 1910 in a literary magazine he helped to found. Tanizaki lived in the cosmopolitan Tokyo area until the earthquake of 1923, when he moved to the Kyoto-Osaka region and became absorbed in Japan's past.

All his most important works were written after 1923, among them Some Prefer Nettles (1929), The Secret History of the Lord of Musashi (1935), several modern versions of The Tale of Genji (1941, 1954 and 1965), The Makioka Sisters, The Key (1956) and Diary of a Mad Old Man (1961). He was awarded an Imperial Award for Cultural Merit in 1949 and in 1965 he was elected an honorary member of the American Academy and the National Institute of Arts and Letters, the first Japanese writer to receive this honour. Tanizaki died later that same year.