World War II and Tanizaki's fiction

As readers can surmise from previous posts, Junichiro Tanizaki's novel The Makioka Sisters (1943-48, serial publication) is a terrific novel about the complex relationships among 4 sisters, a smart study of individual psychology and family dynamics, set against the background of life in Japan ca 1935-41. The Makioka family is one of fallen wealth and stature, and the sisters, particularly the elder ones, cling to tradition in every way - their taste in music and the arts, in fashion, most of all the social proprieties regarding arranged marriages - in a world in which tradition is crumbling and falling away: they are, as the increasingly become aware, relics from a lost age. On finishing reading the novel, which has a surprisingly abrupt conclusion, I have to think about all the JT excluded from this novel, and what that signifies. As you look at the dates of serialization, you can see that the novel began publication in the midst of World War II and was completed five years into the American occupation of Japan; the events of the novel, however, conclude just before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. JT has many shadings of the effect of the war on life in Japan - references particularly in book 3 to shortages and to concerns about travel abroad - and JT includes several letters from a
German family to the M sisters, especially at the end of the novel, so the shadings are present: how can we not feel a chill when reading the letter from Hamburg saying that everything looks great from Hamburg and they expect soom to celebrate a victory? Still - how can a Japanese novel completed in 1948 fail to mention or allude to Hiroshima and Nagasaki? To the Holocaust? To the fall of the Emperor? Just as the M sisters are relics of a lost age, so, in a way, is Tanizaki: living in a world in ruins, writing about a world that no longer exists. I have to wonder as well whether there was official censorship or self-censorship during the war years, which may have prevented JT from telling the story of Japan in the war in any way but through allusion and indirection. And then in the post-war years: Was it just too painful and humiliating to write directly about the postwar Japan? To reconcile with history and try to make sense of Japan's alliance w/ Nazi Germany? Or was his subtle treatment of the war an accurate picture of how most Japanese felt about the war before 1941 - that it was something off in the distance that wouldn't affect them much aside from raising the price of groceries? The war is the dark cloud of truth that casts its shadow across this work of fiction.