"The Makioka Sisters"

Paper Summary:

This paper examines how the four sisters in Junichiro Tanizaki's "The Makioka Sisters" are parts of an allegorical account of the decline of Japan's old upper-class merchant families in the face of rising modernism and nationalism. Each of the sisters, largely depending on her age and placement in the family, symbolizes a different aspect of the change in the social order. It looks at how Tanizaki manages to develop these allegorical roles for his principal characters without sacrificing any of their validity or interest as individual beings whose thoughts and actions retain the reader's full attention. It also shows how despite the fact that each sister functions in the allegory in a different way, none of them is a simple character with traditional or modern traits that make it easy to sum up her symbolic meaning in a few words.

From the Paper:

"The principal allegorical function of the sisters begins long before the novel opens, of course, in the simple fact that their father had only daughters to inherit from him. He had also been somewhat careless with money and had greatly reduced what there was to inherit. But even this attitude, which was responsible for the kind of upbringing his daughters had, has an allegorical function in that he had never believed that things could change. Thus, even though the early signs of change must have been everywhere in the first part of the century, his daughters were brought up believing that the pattern of life they knew so well would last forever."

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