ABSTRACT
The 1930S were Tanizaki's years of immersion in Japanese history. He wrote masterful novellas and also translated into modern Japanese the lIth-century classic, the Genji monogatari (The Tale of Genji). In 1943 he began to serialize Sasameyuki (The Makioka Sisters), a long, elegiac chronicle of a prewar merchant family in decline. Completed in 1948, the work stands as Tanizaki's paean to a cultural ideal-a graceful way of life that balanced an appreciation of tradition with a striking cosmopolitanism. The Makioka Sisters is distinguished by its focus on a refined yet bourgeois female protagonist, and by its lyrical control of time, which echoes The Tale of Genji in balancing the cyclicity of seasonal observances against the inexorable march of history.
