The Makioka Sisters

Exquisite craftsmanship * Guardian *An exquisite novel about four sisters living though a turbulent decade, during the Forties and Fifties, I’d put it in the 10 greatest books of the 20th century – David Mitchell * Daily Express *A complex, detailed and agreeably gossipy book…The author’s obvious nostalgia for this vanished world does not prevent him from looking objectively at its darker side and this, together with his artful blend of the exotic and the mundane, creates an absorbing and richly textured story * Sunday Times *A subtle, moving novel * The Times *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 *

Junichiro Tanizaki was one of Japan’s greatest twentieth-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.

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