Japan, 1938. War is looming on the horizon, but the Makioka sisters are far more concerned with their domestic troubles. The sisters live in Osaka, and are well off, traveling together to view the changing of the seasons--cherry blossoms in Kyoto, brilliant leaves in the fall. Tsuruko and Sachiko, the older two, have been married for quite some time. Tradition demands that they marry in order of their birth, but marrying off the shy, conservative...

In Osaka in the years immediately before World War II, four aristocratic women try to preserve a way of life that is vanishing. The story of these women, the Makioka sisters, forms what is arguably the greatest Japanese novel of the twentieth century, a poignant yet unsparing portrait of a family--and an entire society--sliding into the abyss of modernity. Tsuruko, the eldest sister, clings obstinately to the prestige of her family name even as her...