It's the ordinariness of the characters in The Makioka Sisters that made the novel engaging on a simple level for this reader. For example, the four sisters themselves, Tsuruko, Sachiko, Yukiko and Taeko. None of them especially impressive or special in any way. All decent enough individuals, and loving to each other, though prone to bouts of irritation given the usual points of difference likely within any family. Yukiko's passive-aggressive behaviour in the various elaborate attempts to secure a decent marriage for her as she moves into her thirties is mildly puzzling, I suppose, and it's not at all clear the extent to which the most obviously 'modern' of them, Taeko, has exploited her various boyfriends, especially the weak-minded, over-privileged Okubata. But the ladies seem likable enough such that the reader wants things to turn out well for them.
And the family's sense of the importance of following their socially-sanctioned but semi-private customs results in sequences that are easy to relate to, despite their particularity to Japanese culture: the viewing of the cherry blossoms; the capturing of the fireflies. The reader is happily drawn into the significance of it all.
But why does the writer so subtly undercut their sense of family importance? And why hint at terrible things happening at the borders of the family's reasonably comfortable lives - in China, in Germany? And why so feature so much physical illness, sometimes genuinely deeply painful, as in the case of Itakura losing his leg and, eventually, life to the gangrene that sets in as a result of a simple operation?
I just can't figure it out. But what I can say is that the blending of ordinary, everyday aches & pains & sadness & happiness is balanced against the gathering dark in a way I don't think I've come across in any other novel. Perhaps the uncertainty is the whole point?
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