What's missing in Junichiro Tanizaki's Makioka Sisters

Junichiro Tanizaki's most famous novel - or so I've been told - The Makioka Sisters - was published as a newspaper serial in Japan over the span of five years (and three book volumes) 1943-48. The serial novel is a now near-defunct genre (Tom Wolff revived it briefly w/ Bonfire of the Vanities), and JT's Makioki novel shows why: For contemporary readers, it feels awkward and flat, never really delving deeply into character, psyche, setting, or mood. Each short chapter reads like a plot summary, w/ a lot of overlap, necessary repetition of key points and character traits, as if his readers would forget from week to week or day to day or whatever the publication schedule entailed. The set-up is pretty good: 4 adult sisters, the older two married and now faced w/ the task of finding husbands for the younger 2. Daughter No3 has been proposed to a # of times but seems reluctant to get married; youngest daughter, the artistic and rebellious one, is in the midst of a serious relationship, but she can't get married until her older sister does so, according to strictly adhered-to tradition. I've read about 50 pp., which is to say about 1/3 of the way through the first of the three "books," and so far it's not holding me rapt. The extreme devotion of the family members to tradition, protocol, and ritual - there's a whole process for introducing a woman to her potential suitor, for example - seems so antiquated today (I think the setting of the novel is the 1920s?), although maybe deeper into the book the characters will unfold, so to speak - become more complex, scrap w/ one another, mature in some surprising ways. One thing that is surprising, no matter when JT set this novel, is that there is absolutely no reference, direct or oblique, to the times in which he wrote this piece, with Japan in the midst of a losing, humiliating, and devastating war that would upend the government and every aspect of Japanese society. Beneath the social examination in this novel there lies a deep nostalgia, even a fantasy about the beauty of Japanese life back in the days when everyone followed protocol - kind of like the Japanese Gone with the Wind, nostalgia for an era that perhaps never really existed.