Books: Four Ladies of Japan

THE MAKIOKA SISTERS (530 pp.)−Junichiro Tanlzaki−Knopf ($4.95).

In any land, an unmarried girl approaching 30 is apt to get an attack of the will-I’s; Will I, oh will I ever find a husband? In Japan, this question throws the girl’s entire family into a near panic. The Makioka Sisters is the story of a great mate hunt conducted with all the fussy protocol, near misses and ever-lurking dangers of a de luxe African safari.

The Makiokas are an Osaka-based clan of proper Japanese who, unlike proper Bostonians, have dipped into capital. The four sisters who dominate Author Tanizaki’s story are snobbish, overbred, illness and accident-prone, genteelly displaced persons in a Japan that is flexing its muscles for World War II. By strictly observed seniority rights, Yukiko−who at 30 is the oldest unmarried sister−must find a husband first. But Yukiko is a clinging vine who almost prefers clinging to her family. She is adept at flower-arranging, but she gets completely flustered if she has to answer the telephone. Through go-betweens, Sachiko, the No. 2 sister, sets up miai after miai−get-acquainted sessions with prospective suitors and their families. But Yukiko seems to be jinxed. In the meantime, Taeko, the youngest sister, who represents modern Japan’s off-beat generation, scandalizes the family by running off with one man, then taking another lover, and finally getting pregnant by a bartender.

Large stretches of The Makioka Sisters are dull enough to make U.S. readers wonder if they are not in the hands of the Japanese sandman. Yet Junichiro Tanizaki, 71, is one of Japan’s leading novelists, and this book, written a decade ago, is a neat compendium of what is best and worst in contemporary Japanese writing. Esoteric discussions of Tokyo v. Osaka folkways lead imperceptibly to the dramatic outer and inner conflict of a Japan in transition. The core of meaning, which the Westerner will perhaps find hard to penetrate, is the concept of a heroism that never indulges in triumphs of the will and Promethean wrestlings with destiny, but bends to the winds of fate like a reed and, never breaking, wins the subtler triumph of endurance.