The Makioka household enters a more troubled season as private hopes collide with illness, gossip, flood, and the pressure of public reputation. In the second volume of The Makioka Sisters, Tanizaki deepens the drama around Yukiko's uncertain future and Taeko's increasingly difficult independence.
The Makioka Sisters: Volume II carries the family through matchmaking visits, strained negotiations, the great Hanshin flood, artistic ambitions, illness, and the growing shadow of a changing Japan. The sisters' loyalties remain tender, but each decision now carries a sharper cost.
Tanizaki is one of Japan's most influential literary voices, renowned for psychological precision, sensuous detail, and an exact understanding of how social forms shape private feeling. His art finds drama not only in catastrophe, but in hesitation, etiquette, rumor, and the things left unsaid.
This volume offers a rich middle movement in the novel: intimate, observant, and increasingly tense, as beauty and family affection are tested by accident, desire, and the erosion of old certainties.