Jun'ichirō Tanizaki 谷崎潤一郎 was actually born in the Kanto region
He settled in Kansai Kyoto while he was nearly at the age of 40. In the process of his description of the Mikioka sisters, was also full of delicate Kansai colors. He wrote about the beauty of Kyoto that even the native Kansai people cannot see. The story was described the prosperity of Japan's economy in the 1930s, the upper-class business family in Osaka upholds the tradition, but also embraces the new culture through the character of the sister.
Michelle Wang mentioned that the continuous style and pauses of the Kansai accent can be heard about other meanings, full of delicate and complex details, reflecting some erotic concepts that were not accepted at that time, but still exist.
Jun'ichirō Tanizaki 谷崎潤一郎 used musical instruments to describe the voices of women in Tokyo and Osaka in his essay "Osaka and Osaka People I Met":
"Tokyo women's voice, for better or worse, is a shamisen tone in a sanxian, clean and beautiful, but lacks width, lacks thickness, lacks arc, and most importantly, lacks cohesion. So the dialogue is very Precise, clear, and grammatically correct, but without rambling or overtones.”
"Women in Osaka are like the sanxian opera "Joruri" or the sanxian in local songs, no matter how high-pitched the tune is, there is bound to be a sense of fun behind the sound. The warmth is there. Women in Kansai also know how to express it in a subtle manner.”
The Kansai dialect's "Hum" sound is a softly pronounced word that seems to pass through the nose, and even the soft voice is given meanings such as "extra-language interest" and makes people imagine.
In The Makioka Sisters text:
"In the streets of Kyoto, even if she accidentally walks into a strange place, she will have a familiar sense of familiarity, and she can't help but want to chat with passers-by, but Tokyo..."
(You can feel the unfamiliar sense of Tokyo without words)
Jun'ichirō Tanizaki 谷崎潤一郎's translation project immersed in the classical world inspired him to establish his own literary style, and gradually practice the Japanese "shadow aesthetics" in the creation of novels through the "Japanese style" that emphasizes sound performance and is full of feminine atmosphere. In "The Makioka Sisters", there is a brilliant presentation of his good use of Kansai dialect, after Jun'ichirō Tanizaki 谷崎潤一郎 translated "The Tale of Genji". Therefore, the translation of "The Tale of Genji" influenced his creation of "The Makioka Sisters".
Whether it is the ambiguity in the text, the musical sound of the text, the emotional relationship that violates morality, the power of women... all can be talked about from the origin of Jun'ichirō Tanizaki 谷崎潤一郎 and "The Tale of Genji". He spent thirty years before and after, translating "The Tale of Genji" three times, and the best works of his life were written during the translation period. In "The Tale of Genji", the light source in his later years lived in Rojo-in, and divided the courtyard into four parts: spring, summer, autumn and winter, and let the wives and concubines live in different courtyards according to their personalities. So when he described the four sisters of Makioka, he also used seasons to describe their personalities. For example, Yukiko Makioka was the most beautiful of the four sisters, and her character was just like her name.
Yang Zhao thought that Jun'ichirō Tanizaki 谷崎潤一郎 used fiction to excavate some kind of anti-social personality, which usually hided and cannot even be noticed by oneself, but is teased out by unexpected events. Jun'ichirō Tanizaki settled this as "strange affair".
Jun'ichirō Tanizaki was obsessed with women's feet, and had shown this eccentric obsession many times in his novels. He described Yukiko wearing a kimono showing her calf and cutting her toe nails, a typical "weird", usually in terms of appearance, dress or figure. What attracted his attention the most was the woman's feet, and at that moment, used that scene to express her sisterhood.
The Makioka Sisters in 1943 was once a forbidden book recognized by the Japanese military.They believed that The Makioka Sisters presented the weakness of Japan's romance was biased towards the idle life of private affairs. Meanwhile his delicate writing style such as cherry tree blossoms, the scorching red leaves, and the gorgeous kimonos, completely ignored the Second World War .
Personally, I think The Makioka Sisters is the Japanese version of the upper-class little woman, the same as Little Women. American little women had the courage to imagine an independent life, and strived to live with ideas and souls and to be proud of themselves. In the novel, the fourth sister Taeko has the courage to break through the system of the Shioka family in pursuit of ideals, which should be the presentation of Western cultural values.
Jun'ichirō Tanizaki tried to stand on the opposite side of the war, looking directly at the "individual" desires of society such as fetishes and misogyny, and excavating human sexuality. From the writing experiment of "Wonderful Love" to "Shadow View", the deep face of Japanese classical implicit beauty of shadow, from a microscopic perspective, Tanizaki is describing the warmth and elegance of beauty in describing life. The so-called beauty often develops from actual life. The ancient peculiar to Japanese aesthetics is the best interpretation, alluding to the helplessness of blindly following militarism at that time. Rather than saying that Jun'ichirō Tanizaki ignored the war situation, it would be better to say that he represented Yukiko as Japan.
The whole novel describes the marriage of Yukiko, which always revolves around the traditional family consciousness of the Makioka family, including: money, status, family issue, etc. Yukiko cannot be independent in the pursuit of love, but only acts according to the will of the family and follows social identify to complete. French Nobel literature writer Jean-Paul Sartre considered The Makioka Sisters as "the highest masterpiece of modern Japanese literature". Jean-Paul Sartre believes that "existence precedes essence"which means that morality and soul are created by man in his existence, and man is not obliged to obey but has the freedom to choose. Therefore, when evaluating a person, what should be evaluated is his behavior. The whole Japanese country used to achieve the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere. The traditional national consciousness actually suppresses the life that most Japanese really want to pursue.
Finally, I would like to share that Jun'ichirō Tanizaki had two bluestones inscribed with the words "empty"(空) and "silent"(寂) in his handwriting at the Horanin cemetery in Sakyo Ward, Kyoto City, Kyoto Prefecture.
The beauty of the shadows is the luster of time ─ penetrating the shimmering white light, the doors and windows of the Japanese room that depend on the shades of shadows, the black-lacquered rice pot, the snow-white rice that shines like pearls. Also, the freshly snowed surface of Tang paper gently inhaled light...
Digging deep into the light and shadow of Tanizaki's aesthetic life, perhaps the last word of emptiness can make the highest aspect.