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Thursday 27 February 2014

The Write Advice 044: GEORGES SIMENON


Unconsciously I probably always have two or three, not novels, not ideas about novels, but themes in my mind.  I never even think that they might serve for a novel; more exactly, they are the things about which I worry.  Two days before I start writing a novel I consciously take up one of those ideas.  But even before I consciously take it up I first find some atmosphere.  Today there is a little sunshine here.  I might remember such-and-such a spring, maybe in some small Italian town, or some place in the French provinces or in Arizona, I don’t know, and then, little by little, a small world will come into my mind, with a few characters.  Those characters will be taken partly from people I have known and partly from pure imagination — you know, it’s a complex of both.  And then the idea I had before will come and stick around them.  They will have the same problem I have in my mind myself.  And the problem — with those people — will give me the novel...as soon as I have the beginning I can’t bear it very long; so the next day I take my envelope, take my telephone book for names, and take my town map — you know, to see exactly where things happen.  And two days later I begin writing.  And the beginning will be always the same; it is almost a geometrical problem: I have such a man, such a woman, in such surroundings.  What can happen to them to oblige them to go to their limit?  That’s the question.  It will be sometimes a very simple incident, anything which will change their lives.  Then I write my novel chapter by chapter.

The Art of Fiction #9 [The Paris Review #9, Summer 1955)



Use the link below to read more about the life and work of Belgian novelist GEORGES SIMENON:

 

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2008/jun/11/georgessimenon

 

 

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Thursday 20 February 2014

Poet of the Month 014: JOSHUA JENNIFER ESPINOZA


JOSHUA JENNIFER ESPINOZA
2012







 
 
 
 
[2 untitled poems]





i will always be the person who went to the grocery store in cigarette-burned pajamas every day for five months

 

i will always be the person who wanted to die and didn’t

 

i will always be the person who lost twenty pounds
in one month and i will always be the person who gained it back

 

i will always be the person who decided, while crying
in the passenger seat of your car, to be better

 

i will always be the person who paused when you first said “i love you” just to take the moment in

 

i will always be the person who survived the unsurvivable 

 

i will always be the person who fought like hell for it





*





i read a bunch of words in front of people
and then i drive on the freeway and feel okay.
i realize that everything is a freeway
me speaking aloud is a freeway
you touching my hand is a freeway
my nervous smile is a freeway
you pulling away from me is a freeway
and tomorrow is coming whether i want it to or not
with or without me there.
it doesn’t matter
most things don’t, i guess,
so it evens out and everything does matter
in comparison to everything else.
red lights create space for their paths
i create space for my path
i am a red light flying seamlessly over asphalt
i am fucked in a great many ways
it is perfect to be this
it is perfect to be anything.
 



 
 
 
Published online December 2013






 
 
The following biographical statement appears on the poet's Tumblr blog.  [It is re-posted here for recommendation purposes only and, like the poems, remains its author's exclusive copyright-protected intellectual property.] 

hello friends, my name is joshua. i’m 25 years old and i write mostly about having panic attacks on freeways and wanting to die and not wanting to die and my girlfriend and being trans and being mentally ill and trying to survive and live life to the fullest. i’ve been published in word riot and in/words. please feel free to be my facebook friend!

 


Joshua Jennifer Espinoza is also the author of two poetry collections titled Synthesia and I Had A Dream About The End of the World and You Weren't In It and a powerful short story titled Adam.

 

Everything she writes is incredibly honest and deeply moving.  I urge everyone to read her. 

 

 

 

Use the links below to visit the blog of North American poet, writer, musician and spoken word performance artist JOSHUA JENNIFER ESPINOZA and find the collection Synthesia on the pay-to-download site Scribd:

 

 

http://blankslate.tumblr.com/

 

 

 

 

http://www.scribd.com/doc/157777715/synesthesia 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Poet of the Month 013: KARYS PK

 

 
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Last updated 18 March 2021

  

Thursday 13 February 2014

Some Books About… TONY HANCOCK


TONY HANCOCK 
and friend, 1962



Anthony Aloysius St John Hancock was a comic fiction who lived in an imaginary place called East Cheam and had total reality for millions of people.  Anthony John Hancock (12 May 1924 – 24 June 1968), clown, was not content with this and searched for more reality, and more truth until he finally lost himself in a fantasy world.
DAVID NATHAN



 
Those unfamiliar with the work of Tony Hancock, the great English radio, television and variety comedian, may like to watch this 2 minute clip from season seven of his hit BBC TV series Hancock's Half Hour, which originally aired on 23 June 1961.  It's a comedic masterpiece titled The Blood Donor which captures everything that made him such a beloved figure in every part of the British Commonwealth prior to his death, while shooting a new television series in Australia, in June 1968. 
 
 


The Blood Donor
1961
2 minute clip





Arrow Books/Random House, 2000

 

When The Wind Changed: The Life and Death of Tony Hancock (2000) by CLIFF GOODWIN

Books about dead celebrities tend to fall into two categories –– warts and all exposés which focus exclusively on the more salacious aspects of their subjects' lives or highly respectful 'authorized biographies' written with the full cooperation (and sometimes under the strict supervision) of their subjects' relatives and legal executors.  The truth, as it does with most things, probably falls somewhere between these two extremes and, in the case of Cliff Goodwin's When The Wind Changed: The Life and Death of Tony Hancock, can make for illuminating if occasionally confronting reading.  

The author is obviously an admirer of Hancock's work but never allows that admiration to cloud his judgement when it comes to revealing what drove and tormented the comedian prior to his 1968 suicide in Australia, where he had gone in a last-ditch effort to salvage what was left of his alcohol and drug ravaged career.  It's a balanced biography, neither condemning nor condoning Hancock's erratic and often irrational behaviour, which traces his life year by year to reveal how his performing persona developed and the influence, largely negative, that success had on him both in and out of the spotlight.  The comedian's life was a charmed one in many ways but one which began to unravel and then spiral out of control as his alcoholism worsened and his habit of disassociating himself from those who had been instrumental to his success –– his writers Ray Galton and Alan Simpson, his comedic foil Sid James, his agent Phyllis Rounce – took its understandable toll on these friendships and, in time, on his ability to make effective use of his gifts as a performer.  

Goodwin's plain journalistic style of writing – which occasionally assumes a needlessly melodramatic tone in an effort to heighten the drama of events which were dramatic enough without requiring further embellishment –– enables the reader to get a real feel for the showbusiness world of 1950s and 1960s England, its variety theatres, radio and TV studios and locally staffed film sets (an unthinkable proposition in the very different, predominantly outsourced film industry of the twenty-first century).  Hancock knew and was friendly with most of the great names of the golden era of British radio, film and television comedy –– Peter Sellers, Harry Secombe, Spike Milligan, Eric Sykes, John Le Mesurier and Jimmy Edwards to name just a few –– and Goodwin's many references to them, and to his co-stars Sid James, Bill Kerr, Kenneth Williams and Hattie Jacques, helps to place Hancock's story firmly in the context of his times, shedding valuable light on how his idiosyncratic and largely inimitable style of comedy was born and laboriously perfected.  

If you only want to read one book about Hancock's short but troubled life, then this is probably the book to choose.  It's thoroughly researched, contains a full chronology, extensive notes and complete cast lists, and also includes a transcription of the comedian's 1960 Face to Face interview with BBC journalist John Freeman –– a probing analysis of his personality which exposes the banal, pre-rehearsed 'celebrity interviews' of today as the crass, self-indulgent time fillers they so often are.  It was Freeman's interview, many of Hancock's friends believed, that provoked the endless questioning of his talent which, as the years went by, warped, eroded and eventually destroyed it.   

The photograph chosen for the cover of this book, taken by French photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson, is also one of the best I've seen of Hancock, capturing in one unguarded moment much of the inner anguish and confusion he hid so well from the public during his time as Britain's best loved comedian.

When The Wind Changed: The Life and Death of Tony Hancock is no longer in print. 





Ariel Books/BBC, 1986

 

Hancock (1986) by FREDDIE HANCOCK and DAVID NATHAN

Freda 'Freddie' Hancock (née Ross) met a rising star named Tony Hancock while he was performing  in the English resort town of Bournemouth in 1954 and became first his press agent, then his mistress and finally, in December 1965, his second wife.  (His first wife, a former Lanvin model named Cicely Romanis whom he'd married in 1950, also became an alcoholic and followed him to an early grave in 1969 at the age of thirty-eight.)  The marriage officially lasted one year, his alcohol-fuelled self-destructiveness effectively crushing a relationship which had been, in some respects, the most stable and rewarding of his life.  But Freddie realised, as so many others associated with Hancock came to realise prior to his death, that hers was a choice between trying to keep him alive and sober or attempting to save her own threatened sanity.  'I loved Tony,' she told her co-author David Nathan while they were originally preparing this short but lovingly written biography, 'and I never ceased to love him.  But loving him and living with him were vastly different propositions.'

Hancock is as much the story of a relationship as it is the story of a doomed comic genius whose weekly half hour radio and television broadcasts literally brought the entire British nation to a standstill every Friday night for seven successful years.  Freddie's attempts to make her client and lover see what he was doing to himself –– which included leaving him on numerous occasions and once tipping an entire bottle of brandy over his head when he was supposed to be abstaining from alcohol and had thoughtlessly asked her to pour him a drink – fell on deaf ears, resulting in five failed suicide attempts on her part before she finally found the courage (and the sense) to walk out on him for good in July 1966.  Despite this, and the frequent beatings Hancock subjected her to after she attempted to wrench vodka bottles from his hand, she never ceased to hope that he would one day conquer his demons and begin to appreciate, as she and so many of his contemporaries in the British entertainment industry did, what a rare and exceptional talent he possessed.  Nor was she alone in finding this portly, round-shouldered man (the result of contracting rickets as a child) with 'funny feet' ('look like two kippers strapped to my ankles, they do' was how Hancock himself described them) and a remarkably expressive face irresistibly attractive.  Freddie was only one of many people, female and male, who fell in love with Hancock and drove themselves to the brink of madness in the quest to relieve his largely self-inflicted suffering.

It's a tribute to Freddie's generosity of spirit that she chose not to make her biography the muckraking tell-all exposé it could have so easily become in unkinder, less affectionate hands.  While it can by no means be described as an exhaustive biography, it remains a useful and enlightening one for any admirer of the comedian, revealing him as a deeply flawed man with chronic emotional problems and not, as some would have it, a humorless monster obsessed with becoming an international superstar in the style of his more successful friend and rival Peter Sellers (another inspired comedian who was no stranger to addiction, psychiatry and prolonged episodes of masochistic self-destruction).  Freddie admits that she was naïve, that she ignored the advice of her family and that of Hancock's friends who tried to make her see she had to leave him, but nowhere does she state that she ever regretted having him in her life.  'He was an exciting personality,' she recalls.  'He did not smile all that often, but when he did it was worthwhile.  His eyes smiled a lot.  He had a lasting effect on me from that moment.'  This book is a testament to the love she felt for him, tragically misguided and spurned though it ultimately was.

Hancock was last reprinted in 1996.  Lady Don't Fall Backwards, a similar 1988 memoir by JOAN LE MESURIER, his mistress and the wife of the comedian's friend and occasional Hancock's Half Hour guest star JOHN LE MESURIER, may also be available. 





Methuen Publishing Limited, 1999

 

Hancock's Last Stand: The Series That Never Was (1999) by EDWARD JOFFE

Edward Joffe was a South African-born, Scottish-based television director who was given the unenviable task of directing Hancock's last ever television series, provisionally titled Hancock Down Under, which had been commissioned by Australia's ATN7 network and featured brand new, tailormade scripts authored by Melbourne-based writer Hugh Stuckey.  The program, which was filmed entirely in the Seven network's Sydney studios and featured Hancock as a newly arrived immigrant trying to come to grips with his new home and the Australian way of life, was considered by the comedian's agent and virtually everyone who knew him to be his last chance to recapture and perhaps replicate the success of his BBC years, when Hancock's Half Hour, in both its radio and television formats, had regularly been enjoyed by audiences numbering in the millions.  Hancock himself apparently knew this was his last chance to salvage what was left of a career all but ruined by his addictions to alcohol and prescription medications and approached the project with a newfound sense of purpose and, at least initially, with the intention of remaining sober and drug-free throughout the long and, for him, tedious months of filming.  

He flew to Australia in March and, after spending some time in hotels, eventually moved into a house on Birriga Road in the upscale eastern Sydney suburb of Bellevue Hill with Joffe, his wife Myrtle and their three children.  The Joffes occupied the upper two floors of the house, while Hancock lived alone in a small, self-contained flat on the ground floor overlooking the garden.  It was an arrangement the producers of the show had encouraged, believing that having his director so close would in turn encourage Hancock to curb his drug and alcohol intake, both of which once again became prodigious within a few weeks of his arrival in Australia.  It was in this Birriga Road flat that Hancock was found, dead in his underwear with a cigarette clamped between his badly scorched fingers, by Joffe on the morning of 24 June 1968.

This was, of course, a dismal end to what had been a sad and wasted life and it's a tale that might have been more poignantly told by a writer other than Joffe, whose style has a tendency to become annoyingly glib at times.  The book's one saving grace is that it reveals Hancock trying to understand and confront his own self-destructiveness and its consequences, fighting to regain control of a career which had hit rock bottom following his separation from Freddie Ross and the failure of his one man show – which saw him turned down flat by his former writers Galton and Simpson after begging them to provide him with new material –– to wow audiences at London's Festival Hall and other 'safer' venues in Aden, the Isle of Man and Australia.  

These were dark days for Hancock and this is, at times, a very disturbing book.  Nor is what was actually filmed of Hancock Down Under – a program plagued by disaster from day one that was only screened in edited form following the comedian's death –– a fitting memorial to a performer who had previously been able to make audiences laugh simply by raising his eyebrow or impatiently muttering the phrase 'Stone me!' to himself.  While the program does offer a few brief glimpses of the old, mobile-faced, incredibly subtle clown of the Hancock's Half Hour days, there are too many moments when the old magic simply isn't there, when it becomes tragically obvious that you're watching a sick and scared man trying to regain public favour by sheer force of will.  The show, like Joffe's book, is not a must-own item for any but the most obsessive of Hancock fans, who will most likely be disconcerted or at the very least disappointed to read of the pitiable conclusion to what had been, before the comedian was destroyed by his own insecurities, a sparkling career.

Hancock's Last Stand has not been reprinted since it was originally published in 1999. 

   



Arrow Books/Random House UK, 2004

 

50 Years of Hancock's Half Hour (2004) by RICHARD WEBBER

'One thing,' author Richard Webber writes in his introduction to this fine and indispensable book, 'needs clarifying from the beginning: this is not another Tony Hancock biography.  The tragic life story of one of the nation's finest comedy actors has already been meticulously detailed by other authorsthis book is a biography of a radio and television series, a celebration of a show which, even now, fifty years later, provides pleasure to the millions who continue to listen to or watch Hancock's Half Hour. 

Mr Webber is clearly a man of his word.  His book is an affectionate, lovingly detailed celebration of a program which, amazingly, has remained popular with audiences for over half a century – an audience which includes people, like myself, who were not yet born when it originally aired and have only discovered Hancock thanks to the canniness of the BBC marketing department which wisely chose to repackage, re-release and re-promote what most of the world's other major entertainment conglomerates would have thrown away or left to ignominiously rot in their rarely opened vaults.  

The continuing popularity of Hancock's Half Hour is a testimony to its star's ability to simultaneously personify and lampoon what may be termed a quintessentially English personality and a quintessentially English view of life.  Hancock was appealing because he behaved no better and no worse than anybody in his audience behaved, was unafraid to portray himself as a deluded buffoon whose pretensions were as numerous as they were ludicrous, a clown whose antics nevertheless revealed, in the beautifully chosen words of novelist and playwright JB Priestley whose two part 1968 novel The Image Men features a character based on Hancock, '…a suggestion of depth somebody close to "mass man" of today, coming out of the faceless crowd, hopeful, near to glory for some minutes, before the lid comes on again, before he shrugs his way back into the dark.'  That shrug, it could be argued, was the key to what made 'the lad himself' so popular –– a willingness to get on with it and not linger over his latest defeat that became, in time, the endearing hallmark of the flawed, all too human 'Everyman' he so effectively portrayed.

This book doesn't dwell on the alcoholism, the drug abuse, the affairs or the two failed marriages, the long slow fall from grace that led to what had probably been the comedian's always inevitable decision to take his own life.  Instead, it turns the spotlight on what should always be the first and last consideration when we speak of Tony Hancock –– his ongoing ability to make people laugh.  That somebody so beloved, who had, in the words of his friend Spike Milligan '…no enemy but himself' should die such a lonely premature death only makes a book like this that much more valuable as a celebration of what, in anybody's terms, must rank as a unique and precious legacy.  Containing full episode guides to all his BBC radio and television programs, a complete unaired script penned by Galton and Simpson (who also provide a short and rather silly introduction), full rundowns of cast and crew details plus a complete bibliography and (nowadays all but irrelevant) list of LP, cassette and video releases, it's a book that deserves a place in the collection of any Tony Hancock fan.

50 Years of Hancock's Half Hour is still in print and may be obtainable from your local bookstore or preferred online retailer. 





Macdonald Queen Anne Press UK, 1987

 

The Illustrated Hancock (1987) by ROGER WILMUT

Like Richard Webber's book, Roger Wilmut's The Illustrated Hancock is a celebration of a body of work rather than a lament for a sadly squandered talent.  What makes the book worth owning, as should be obvious from its title, is the assortment of stunning black and white photographs it contains, covering all aspects of the phenomenon that was Tony Hancock from his early days as a variety performer through his radio and television years and his work as both a star in the films The Rebel (1960) and the unfairly scorned The Punch and Judy Man (1962) and as a supporting actor in big budget extravaganzas including Those Magnificent Men In Their Flying Machines (1965) and The Wrong Box (1966)Each section is preceded by a short introduction which provides a context for the images and includes quotes from many of those who knew, loved and worked with him.  The book is a brief but fitting tribute to a comedian who almost singlehandedly raised the bar of British comedy, paving the way for later and equally gifted generations of 'comedy of embarrassment' performers including John Cleese, Harry Enfield, Kathy Burke, Jennifer Saunders, Catherine Tate, Steve Coogan and Ricky Gervais.

The Illustrated Hancock has not been reprinted since it was originally published in 1987.  ROGER WILMUT was also the author of Tony Hancock: Artiste, a 1978 biography that was fully revised and expanded in 1983.

 

 

Special thanks to the person who posted this clip from The Blood Donor on YouTube.  Your efforts are appreciated by comedy fans everywhere.

 

 

 

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Last updated 14 July 2023 § 

 

Thursday 6 February 2014

The Makioka Sisters (1948) by JUNICHIRO TANIZAKI



Vintage Books US edition, 1995


 

 

It was nonetheless out of the question to have the younger sister marry first, and since a match for Taeko was as good as arranged, it became more urgent than ever to find a husband for Yukiko.  In addition to the complications we have already described, however, yet another fact operated to Yukiko's disadvantage: she had been born in a bad year.  In Tokyo the Year of the Horse is sometimes unlucky for women.  In Osaka, on the other hand, it is the Year of the Ram that keeps a girl from finding a husbandThe superstition is a deep-rooted one in Osaka, so strongly colored by the merchant and his beliefs, and Tsuruko liked to say that the Year of the Ram was really responsible for poor Yukiko's failure to find a husband.  Everything considered, then, the people in the main house, too, had finally concluded that it would be senseless to cling to their high standards.




Translated by  
EDWARD G SEIDENSTICKER




 

 

 

The Novel:  Say the word 'Japan' to most Westerners and two very different images will often spring to mind –– the devastated post-nuclear cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki or the glittering technopolis that is modern day Tokyo.  It can be easy to forget that Japan was, until the Meiji Restoration of 1868 which saw the country modernize virtually overnight, an ancient, tradition-bound society which had hardly changed for a thousand years.  When change finally did occur Japanese society became a strange hybrid of Occidental modernity and the timeless Oriental traditions of its proud feudal past, a place where young women were allowed, even encouraged, to bob their hair and dress in Western-style clothes but were still expected, if they came from honorable families, to abide by the same strict rules of etiquette and conduct which had governed the lives of their forbears for centuries before them.

 

It is this clash of cultures, and the conflicts it inspires, that Junichiro Tanizaki examines and so faithfully re-creates in his 1948 masterpiece The Makioka Sisters.

 

The time is the late 1930s and the Makioka family –– four daughters, only the eldest two of whom are married –– is no longer the prestigious clan it was considered to be prior to the death of its art-collecting, pleasure-loving patriarch.  The new head of the household is Tatsuo, ultra-conservative husband of the eldest daughter Tsuruko, who runs the 'main' house in Osaka while the second daughter Sachiko, along with her more liberal-minded husband Teinosuke, maintains a separate residence in the nearby town of Ashiya.  Unusually, Sachiko and Teinosuke share the Ashiya house with the unmarried third and fourth daughters, Yukiko and Taeko, and their own daughter, a precocious schoolgirl named Etsuko.  Although the free-spirited, forward-thinking Taeko – known by the affectionate nickname 'Koi-san' [youngest daughter] – attempted to elope with Okubata, the pampered son of a local merchant, when she was nineteen, she has been prevented from marrying him, despite the scandal their behavior caused, because Japanese custom dictates that is unthinkable for her to marry while Yukiko remains officially 'unspoken for.'   Taeko continues to see her playboy lover in secret, hoping that a husband will soon be found for Yukiko so their thwarted liaison can be sanctioned by her family and formally legitimized.

 

Yukiko is the shyest, most outwardly docile and most accomplished of the four sisters, a talented musician who is studying French and has been trained to perform the tea ceremony and other 'feminine arts' believed to be essential accomplishments for a Japanese lady of her rank to possess.  Her refinement is offset, however, by her age –– she has now reached thirty –– her delicate health and her family's rejection, for one reason or another, of every suitor who has approached them seeking her hand in marriage.  Tsuruko and particularly Sachiko are worried.  Will they ever find their slender, softly spoken sister – who has a visible blemish above her left eyelid that is becoming more noticeable over time –– a suitable husband?  Will the shame that Taeko's scandalous 'modern' behavior has brought upon the family ever be eradicated by her long expected, long delayed betrothal to the untrustworthy but nevertheless socially acceptable Okubata?  

 

Their friends share their misgivings and one of them, a gossiping hairdresser named Itani, takes it upon herself to arrange a match for Yukiko with an unmarried engineer named Segoshi.  The couple meet for dinner at a hotel –– under the strict supervision of Sachiko, Teinosuke and Itani herself –– and Segoshi is immediately captivated by the elegance, grace and beauty of his potential bride-to-be.  A second, more formal meeting known as a 'miai', during which the couple are briefly permitted to speak to each other unchaperoned, is enough to quell Segoshi's misgivings about Yukiko's health and the troublesome blemish above her eye which seems to appear and disappear at random.  Everything is on track for a happy and successful union until a routine investigation of Segoshi's background reveals that his mother suffers from 'palsy' –– a tactful pseudonym, it's soon discovered by informants employed by Tatsuo, for mental illness.  Tatsuo and Tsuruko cannot permit a Makioka to marry into a family prone to mental illness.  Segoshi, like every prospective bridegroom before him, is rejected and Yukiko, stoic as ever in the face of what has now become a familiar disappointment, is once again denied her chance to marry by her family's insistence on arranging the quintessentially 'perfect' match for her.

 

 

Vintage/Random House UK, 2000

 

 

Happily, Segoshi's is far from being the last proposal that Yukiko receives.  Another family friend, aware that the negotiations with him ended badly, arranges another miai with a conservative bank manager in his fifties named Nomura who, in addition to being a widower, is also the father of five children.  Unfortunately, this match also proves unsuitable, this time on the grounds that Yukiko finds Nomura too old, garrulous and insensitive to accept the idea that she might ever learn to love him.  Sachiko, more worried than ever about Yukiko's future and what off-putting signals their apparently unjustified fussiness and haughtiness might be sending to other prospective suitors, is sent to break off the negotiations while Yukiko herself is summoned back to the 'new' main house in Tokyo where it is hoped a better match can be arranged for her by Tatsuo and Tsuruko.

 

In the meantime Taeko, eager to establish a life of her own independent of her family, begins to question the wisdom of remaining perpetually engaged to a self-confessed hedonist like Okubata.  A talented dancer and dollmaker, Taeko wants to branch out and open her own dress shop where she hopes, in time, to design and create haute couture fashions for well-heeled ladies like her sisters.  

 

This plan troubles Tsuruko, who is already concerned about Taeko's burgeoning friendship with Itakura, a low-born photographer who learned his trade during an extended visit to the United States.  They have enough to worry about, she explains to her husband, without adding the possibility that Taeko might forsake Okubata and run off with this liberty-taking peasant adding to their list of woes.  But Taeko, whose outlook is so 'modern' that even her sisters have begun to view her behavior as vulgar, defies them and begins seeing Itakura in secret –– a fact it becomes increasingly difficult to hide when he selflessly risks his life, in a way that the dandified Okubata would never dream of doing, to rescue her when severe flooding unexpectedly strikes the Osaka/Kobe region.  Eventually, it is the spurned Okubata himself who reveals the affair to the Makiokas, writing a note to Sachiko that makes the truth of the matter painfully if undeniably plain to them.

 

The situation worsens when Itakura develops a serious infection after undergoing what should have been a routine ear operation.  When the infection spreads, Taeko cuts short her visit to Tokyo to be at his side, only to watch him die as a result of his doctor's incompetence and his timid family's inability to decide whether or not he should have undergone a second operation which might have saved his life.  

 

In time, Itakura's death pushes Taeko back into the arms of Okubata, who is experiencing family-related troubles of his own in the form of being disinherited due to his inability to choose an acceptable career.  When they're observed behaving 'indecently' together in public, their brazenness proves to be the last straw for Tatsuo and Tsuruko.  Taeko cannot live under the Makioka roof, they tell her, if she insists on behaving like a common tramp.  She leaves the Ashiya house and rents a cheap room in the center of town where she intends to support herself – and, by implication, her disinherited and unemployed lover –– by working as a seamstress.

 

None of this, of course, improves the family's chances of finding a suitable husband for Yukiko.  Tsuruko's sister-in-law attempts to arrange another match with a wealthy, aristocratic landowner named Sawazaki –– another widower with children older than Yukiko – but the family's visit to his impressive Nagoya estate, ostensibly undertaken on the pretext of hunting fireflies, seems doomed to failure right from the beginning.  Sawazaki finds Yukiko too reserved for his tastes and quickly makes it known that he has no intention of making her family an offer for her hand in marriage.  

 

Outwardly disappointed if privately relieved, the Makiokas return to Osaka only to discover that Itani has a new prospective husband in mind for Yukiko, a recently widowed pharmaceutical executive named Hashidera who, at first, seems as reluctant as she is to attend another miai.  Like Sawazaki, Hashidera expresses concern about what he calls Yukiko's 'moodiness.'  He wants a wife, he explains, who will be a kind and attentive mother to his twelve year old daughter and an asset to him in his professional life.  Acknowledging that Hashidera is the most suitable candidate they have met since Yukiko was in the first flush of her now-faded youth, the Makiokas set about the task of wooing him with an enthusiasm and forwardness they have never displayed toward a prospective suitor.  Nevertheless, their efforts once again prove futile.  A second, private meeting with Yukiko is enough to persuade Hashidera that he does not want such a 'spineless, quivering, old-fashioned woman' as a bride.

 

The issue of Yukiko's disappointment –– an emotion which, as has always been the case with her, is assumed rather than confirmed –– is soon swept aside by the news that Taeko, who has been secretly living with her penniless fiancee for some time, has fallen ill with dysentery.  Taeko's life-threatening illness reunites her with her sisters, with Yukiko soon volunteering to replace the traumatized Okubata and personally nurse her back to health.  

 

Seizing on this opportunity to permanently separate Taeko from her disgraced lover –– and thereby avoid another scandal which may further restrict Yukiko's chances of finding a respectable husband –– the Makiokas repay Okubata the money he spent on caring for her during the first stage of her illness and send him on his way, grateful to hear, a few months later, that he's applied for an administrative position in far-off Manchuria.  

 

In time Teinosuke, admitting that he may have treated his invalid sister-in-law too harshly, finds it in his heart to forgive her and re-admits her to the family.  This symbolic gesture is followed by another visit from Itani, who has stumbled across yet another prospective suitor who might, she says, be the perfect match for Yukiko –– the charming, highly cultured, well-traveled son of the aristocrat Viscount Mimaki.  Another miai is swiftly arranged and a favorable impression is made by the worldly and sophisticated Mimaki, who declares his intention to buy a house in Toyko following his marriage and pursue a career as an architect in the city.  Unlike her previous suitors, Mimaki finds Yukiko's natural reserve enchanting.  A proposal, it seems, is imminent.  At last, thinks Sachiko, she will be free of the burden which has plagued her all these years, never suspecting that a new, more serious problem awaits her in the form of Taeko's unspoken of pregnancy.

 

To make matters worse, Taeko informs her astonished sisters that the child she is carrying is not that of the still disliked but socially acceptable Okubata.  Her pregnancy is the result, she confesses, of her liaison with another peasant –– this time a bartender named Miyoshi.  Although Miyoshi behaves like a true gentleman when Teinosuke visits him to discuss what must be done, arrangements are soon made for Taeko never to see the man again and for her to have her baby in the country so as not to jeopardize the promising marriage negotiations the family is now engaged in on Yukiko's behalf with Mimaki and his aristocrat father.  

 

Sachiko's fears, however, prove groundless.  The proposal is offered and accepted and even Yukiko, shy and reserved as ever, seems pleased by the thought of becoming Mimaki's bride.  Fate then does the family another favor, bitter though it is, by taking the life of Taeko's little girl – an event which, while tragic for the new mother, does not  prevent her from going off, once the shock of losing her child has passed, to share an apartment with the kind if thoroughly unsuitable Miyoshi.  She takes her leave of the Ashiya house as Yukiko, feeling glum now that her wedding day has at long last arrived, prepares for the train journey to Tokyo that will see her finally become the wife she's never quite succeeded in convincing herself that she wants to be.

 

 

Vintage/Random House UK, c 2008

 

 

While The Makioka Sisters is often referred to as the 'most Japanese' of Japanese novels, it also reveals Tanizaki to be a writer thoroughly familiar with Western idioms who clearly had no problem with the notion of adapting and replicating them in his work.  

 

The four Makioka sisters share much in common with the five unmarried Bennett sisters in Jane Austen's best-loved novel Pride and Prejudice (1813).  Like Elizabeth Bennett and her unmarried elder sibling Jane, Sachiko and Yukiko are prey to social forces they neither control nor possess the power to change, tradition obliging them to do what their families demand of them even though, in Yukiko's case, these demands clash with their own wishes and continually fail to take their own unvoiced desires into account.  Only Taeko, who is fortunate enough to have youth on her side, is permitted to break with tradition and only then at the cost of her respectability and the life of her newborn child.  

 

But Tanizaki is careful not to overlook or diminish the beauty, grace and elegance of this world –– a world that was to vanish forever when the Imperial Japanese Navy attacked the US Naval Base at Pearl Harbor on 7 December 1941, just eight months after Yukiko's long-awaited wedding –– or, by way of contrast, its sometimes stifling banality.  

 

The novel's lyrical passages –– describing, among other things, cherry blossom time and the loveliness of a nighttime firefly hunt –– are skilfully juxtaposed with images of the sisters' often mundane daily lives.  They see doctors (an activity which seems to consume a disproportionate amount of their time), care for their children, shop, visit the theater and cinema together, deal with servants (Sachiko's sturdy young maid O-haru features throughout the novel as a minor but crucially important character) and complain about each other's character flaws as privileged members of a privileged class which, while still respectful of Japanese tradition, is also willing to include and even embrace 'foreigners' like Sachiko's German neighbors the Stolzes and the Kyrilenkos, a White Russian family who sought refuge in Japan after fleeing the 1917 Bolshevik revolution. 

 

It's also worth noting that the censors of Japan's wartime government suspended the novel's serial publication in 1943 on the grounds that it highlighted 'the very thing we are most supposed to be on our guard against during this period of wartime emergency: the soft, effeminate, grossly individualistic lives of women.'  It is a priceless social document and a valuable reminder of a more genteel time in Japanese history, before the militarists took over and led the country into a war of conquest that would see it conquered in turn and then occupied by the US Army until 1952.  War is a constant if undefined presence in The Makioka Sisters, be it the Second Sino-Japanese War which began in 1937 or the impending world war that would, with the dropping of the first atomic bomb on Hiroshima on 6 August 1945, make the rarefied, tradition-bound lives of Yukiko and her sisters seem as remote as those led by their equally demure and perhaps over-refined ancestors.

 

 

 


JUNICHIRO TANIZAKI, 1913

 

 

 

The Writer:  Junichiro Tanizaki, the grandson of a printer, was born in the Tokyo suburb of Nihonbashi on 24 July 1886.  Although he grew up in modestly privileged circumstances and attended Tokyo First Middle School, his family's fortunes had sunk so low by 1911 that he was forced to leave Tokyo Imperial University because his father could no longer afford to pay for his tuition.  This setback did not prevent him from becoming infatuated with all things Western or from co-founding a literary magazine which published his first one act play in 1909 and first widely read story, Shisei [The Tattoo Artist], the following year.  This story was followed by many others which combined the same elements of eroticism and sadomasochism in what, despite its Western influences, was still considered to be a uniquely 'Japanese' style.

 

Tanizaki married in 1915 but the marriage, perhaps because of his own interest in erotica and Western-style Bohemianism, began to falter after producing one child, a daughter, in 1916.  Its demise was hastened by Tanizaki himself, who encouraged his wife to have an affair with one of his friends, the writer Haruo Sato –– a situation he was to explore time and time again in much of his early work, including his provocative 1928 novel Manji [Quicksand] which depicts an unhappy ménage-à-trois that ends with two of the three participants committing suicide.  

 

In 1918, the successful young author moved from Tokyo to Yokohama to be closer to the Westerners –– the city was home to a large expatriate population at this time – and the Western ideas, literature and fashions which continued to obsess him and inspire his work.  

 

This remained the case until 1922, when the Great Kanto earthquake, in addition to destroying his house and justifying his lifelong fear of earthquakes, sparked an interest in traditional Japanese culture that eventually saw him lose interest in Western art and literature and relocate to Kyoto, Japan's ancient capital.  It was in Kyoto, between 1923 and 1924, that he wrote his first truly successful novel Chijin no ai [Naomi], the serio-comic tale of a Japanese man who strives to transform a Eurasian girl into his idealized version of a modern Western woman.  

 

The clash between Japanese traditionalism and Western Modernism, combined with his insightful examinations of sexuality and its sometimes devastating impact on individuals torn between lust and their strong sense of social duty, were to recur frequently in his writing and, in time, would help secure his reputation as Japan's most widely read novelist after his Meiji-era forerunner, the justifiably revered Natsume Soseki.  

 

Tanizaki's most successful novels of the pre-war period –– Manji [Quicksand, 1928], Tade kuu mushi [Some Prefer Nettles, 1929] and Ashikari [The Reed Cutter, 1932] –– managed to combine traditional Japanese aestheticism with his interest in exploring the social, erotic and personal impact of what some Japanese felt had been the country's over-eagerness to modernize.  This did not prevent Tanizaki from translating the classic The Tale of Genji and other ancient works into modern Japanese in the hope they would be read and appreciated by new generations of his countrymen who, he feared, were in danger of permanently losing touch with their cultural and spiritual heritage.

 

 

JUNICHIRO TANIZAKI, c 1960

 

 

Tanizaki spent the war years working on The Makioka Sisters (Sasameyuki in Japanese, a word that literally translates as 'Lightly Falling Snow' in English) moving to the eastern resort town of Atami to escape Allied bombing and find the peace and quiet required to re-submerge himself in a past that was literally being destroyed stone by stone right before his eyes.  He remained in Atami after the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and did not return to Kyoto until 1946, where he finally completed what is generally regarded to be his masterpiece, and one of Japan's truly outstanding works of modern literature, in 1948.  

 

It was followed a year later by Sosho Shigemoto no haha [General Shigemoto's Mother, 1958], a moving statement on a favorite Tanizaki theme of a son's secret longing for his mother.  The success of this novel, plus his winning of the Asahi Prize and the Japanese Order of Merit award he received in 1949, set the seal on his reputation as Japan's greatest living author.

 

Although he suffered from paralysis in his right hand from 1958 and was diagnosed with angina pectoris two years later, neither condition prevented Tanizaki from writing and publishing his last major novels Kagi [The Key, 1956] and Futen Rojin Nikki [Diary of a Mad Old Man, 1961] and the memoir Yosho Jidai [Childhood Memories, 1957] prior to his death, from heart disease, on 30 July 1965. 

 

 
 
 
 
Many works by JUNICHIRO TANIZAKI have been translated into English (and many other foreign languages), while several of his novels, including Manji [Quicksand] and Sasameyuki [The Makioka Sisters], have also been adapted for the cinema.  
 
 
 
 
Use the link below to read about the latter film, made by Japanese writer/director KON ICHIKAWA in 1983, that was released as a Region 1 US DVD in June 2011:
 
 
 

 

 

 

 

 

You might also enjoy:

 

 

 
The Buddha Tree (1956) by FUMIO NIWA

 

 

 
The Guide (1958) by RK NARAYAN

 

 

 
Excellent Women (1952) by BARBARA PYM

 

 

 

Last updated 8 March 2021