Vibe
Ichikawa adapts Tanizaki’s novel around four Osaka sisters and a declining merchant-family order before the Pacific War. Marriage negotiations for the shy third sister structure a world where seasonal beauty, kimono and domestic ritual preserve customs already being overtaken by history. The sisters are united by family identity but divided by how much that identity should determine their futures. Tsuruko and Sachiko already occupy married households; Yukiko’s delayed marriage becomes a collective problem because Taeko, the youngest, is not supposed to marry first. Ichikawa turns those negotiations into a portrait of custom operating through affection rather than through a simple villain. The family genuinely wants stability for Yukiko, yet every meeting also reveals how inherited rules constrain the women’s time. Seasonal beauty deepens that tension. Cherry blossoms, kimono and carefully arranged interiors preserve a world that is already fading. The film never asks viewers to choose between admiration and criticism. The customs are beautiful because people have invested generations of meaning in them; they are restrictive because that beauty can become a reason not to change. Taeko’s modernity and Yukiko’s reserve therefore represent different responses to a family order that history will soon overtake regardless of what any sister decides.
Watch for
- Watch the changing seasons as structural markers; time passes through blossom, clothing, weather and ritual before it is stated directly.
- Notice how kimono and interiors make family status visible while also revealing the labor required to maintain that appearance.
- Track marriage negotiations as negotiations about the survival of a family order, not just one woman’s romantic preference.
- Pay attention to Taeko’s modern behavior against Yukiko’s reserve; the sisters embody different ways of living inside a tradition already losing authority.
Production notes
Criterion lists a 1983, 140-minute color film directed and produced by Ichikawa, co-written with Shinya Hidaka and starring Keiko Kishi, Yoshiko Sakuma, Sayuri Yoshinaga and Yūko Kotegawa. Kiyoshi Hasegawa photographed it. Criterion lists The Makioka Sisters as a 140-minute 1983 color film in 1.85:1, directed and produced by Kon Ichikawa and co-written with Shinya Hidaka from Jun’ichirō Tanizaki’s novel. Keiko Kishi, Yoshiko Sakuma, Sayuri Yoshinaga and Yūko Kotegawa play the four sisters. Kiyoshi Hasegawa handled cinematography. The project was a late-career large-scale literary adaptation, and Criterion describes it as a triumph. Color and costume are central production tools rather than surface decoration. The family’s material culture—kimono, domestic rooms, seasonal rituals—creates the historical order the narrative is watching disappear. Ichikawa’s career had already encompassed antiwar films, documentaries and broad formal experimentation; this production demonstrates his capacity for classical-looking elegance without surrendering irony or historical distance.
Trivia
- Criterion lists The Makioka Sisters at 140 minutes.
- Kon Ichikawa directed and produced the film and co-wrote it with Shinya Hidaka.
- The film adapts Jun’ichirō Tanizaki’s novel.
- Criterion describes the film as a late-career triumph for Ichikawa.
Legacy
The film represents late-career classical craft and gives Ichikawa a family-literary mode distinct from his war films and documentary work. The Makioka Sisters remains one of the major screen versions of Tanizaki’s canonical novel and one of Ichikawa’s strongest late works. Its historical importance lies in the way a film made in the 1980s reconstructs prewar bourgeois Kansai life without simply embalming it. The beauty is retrospective, but the social tensions remain active. Director concentration is justified here because the entries document radically different uses of cinema: battlefield decomposition, spiritual antiwar parable, documentary spectacle and now seasonal family classicism. The Makioka Sisters also preserves a non-Tokyo urban-cultural history centered on Osaka/Kansai merchant identity and the slow erosion of inherited status. The Pacific War remains mostly outside the immediate family plot, which is precisely the point. The sisters behave as if marriage, business and seasonal ritual can continue indefinitely, while the audience knows the historical world supporting those routines is approaching catastrophe. Ichikawa lets dramatic irony accumulate quietly: the family’s effort to preserve continuity is already becoming a document of a vanished order.