The Makioka Sisters — Summary and Characters
Four sisters of the Makioka house
- Author
- Tanizaki Jun'ichirō
- Published
- January 1943
- First appeared in
- Chūō Kōron
- Form
- Novel
- Genres
- Family
- Setting
- Osaka
- Hyogo
- Length
- 572,013 characters
- Reading time
- About 19 hr 4 min
- Orthography
- Modern script and kana
About this work
The long novel Tanizaki wrote across the war and into the years after it. Set in the region between Osaka and Kobe in the 1930s, it follows the four daughters of the Makioka family, an old Osaka merchant house, turning on the search for a husband for the third sister Yukiko and the love affairs of the fourth, Taeko, and unrolling the vanishing upper-class culture of the Kansai and its calendar of seasonal observances like a picture scroll. Serialization began in Chūō Kōron in 1943 but was stopped under military pressure as unsuited to the times; it was completed in 1948. Widely regarded as the summation of Tanizaki's work. This app carries it in three volumes.
Summary
Chapter-by-chapter synopsis
The app covers this work chapter by chapter (full text in the app).
- 1. About This Work
- 2. Main Characters
- 3. Major Supporting Characters
- 4. Book One — The Newspaper Affair, and the First Proposal
- 5. Book One — The Main House Moves to Tokyo, and Nomura
- 6. Book Two — The Great Flood
- 7. Book Two — Love for Itakura, and His Death
- 8. Book Three — Sawazaki, Hashidera, and Match After Broken Match
- 9. Book Three — Taeko's Dysentery, and What Okubata Really Is
- 10. Book Three — The Mimaki Proposal
- 11. Book Three — Two Endings
- 12. Key Motifs and Foreshadowing
More by this author
- Naomi March 1924
- A Portrait of Shunkin June 1933
Related works
- The Setting Sun July 1947
- Sanshō the Steward January 1915
- Mold August 1911
- The Soil June 1910
- Nami-ko November 1898