The Makioka Sisters

by Junichiro Tanizaki

  There are many strange ways of pronouncing “been,” but Mrs. Sagara had an affectation all her own. Sachiko could not possibly have imitated it. She wanted to laugh when she thought what Taeko might have done.

  “You have been traveling since you came back?”

  “I was in the hospital for some time.”

  “Oh?”

  “A nervous breakdown.”

  “Mrs. Sagara’s trouble is luxury,” said Mrs. Shimozuma. “But it must almost be fun to be in St. Luke’s.”

  “It’s near the harbor, and very cool—it’ll be pleasant from now on into the summer. But the fish market is so near, and you sometimes get a very smelly breeze. And then there are those noisy temple bells.”

  “They still ring bells in the Honganji, do they, even now that they have put up that odd building?”

  “Oh, they do indeed.” Mrs. Sagara managed to give even that phrase her own elegant accent.

  “It would be more appropriate if they were to blow a siren.”

  “And you can hear the church bells too.”

  Mrs. Shimozuma heaved a sigh. “Maybe I should become a nurse. Do you think that’d be a good idea?”

  “It might be just what you’re looking for,” said Mrs. Niu lightly.

  Sachiko had heard rumors that Mrs. Shimozuma’s marriage was not happy, and she sensed a deep meaning in the words.

  “I’ve just remembered,” Mrs. Niu continued. “It’s supposed to be good for jaundice to keep a rice ball under each arm.”

  “Really!” Mrs. Sagara, flicking open a cigarette lighter, looked at Mrs. Niu in astonishment. “You do have interesting bits of information.”

  “They say if you keep the rice balls under your arms they turn yellow.”

  “What a filthy idea,” said Mrs. Shimozuma. “You’ve been keeping rice balls under your arms, Mrs. Makioka?”

  “This is the first time that treatment has been suggested. I have been told to take clam broth.”

  “Whichever treatment,” said Mrs. Sagara, “it’s a very inexpensive ailment.”

  Sachiko knew, from the presents they had brought, that they hoped to be invited for dinner, but the two hours to dinner promised to be very long indeed. She always felt uncomfortable with bright, stylish Tokyo matrons like Mrs. Sagara. One of the more expert of Osaka ladies at standard Tokyo speech, Sachiko still found that Mrs. Sagara put her on her guard—or rather, made Tokyo speech seem repulsive. Sachiko avoided it purposely. And then Mrs. Niu, who always used the Osaka dialect with Sachiko, was today keeping Mrs. Sagara company. Tokyo speech had made her an entirely different person, Sachiko thought, a person with whom she could not possibly feel at home. Although there was nothing strange in the fact that Mrs. Niu, who, though born in Osaka, had gone to school in Tokyo and had long associated with Tokyo people, should have a good Tokyo accent, Sachiko had never before realized how far into the Tokyo recesses her friend had penetrated. There was nothing here of the usual sedate Mrs. Niu. The way she rolled her eyes, the way she curled her lips, the way she held her forefinger as she lifted a cigarette to her lips— perhaps Tokyo speech was not authentic unless it brought its own gestures and facial expressions. The woman was suddenly cheapened in Sachiko’s eyes.

  Normally Sachiko would have stood a little discomfort rather than turn guests away, Today, however, she only became more irritable as she listened to the three of them. Presently her unhappiness showed on her face.

  “Mrs. Niu—I really think we should go.” Mrs. Shimozuma at length saw the point and stood up. Sachiko made no effort to detain them.

  1 Poet and scholar, 1768–1843.

  21

  IT WAS NOT a particularly serious attack of jaundice, and yet Sachiko was a very long time recovering. The June rains had begun before she was quite well again.

  One day Tsuruko telephoned to ask how she was, and incidentally to pass on a bit of news: Tatsuo was to manage a branch bank in Tokyo, and very shortly the family would leave Osaka.

  “And when will that be?”

  “Tatsuo says next month. He means to go on ahead, though, and the rest of us will follow when he has a house. But then we have school to think about, and we will have to leave before the end of August.”

  Sachiko could tell even over the telephone that her sister was almost in tears.

  “How long have you known about it?”

  “It was very sudden. Not even Tatsuo knew.”

  “But next month—that is really too soon. What will you do about the house?”

  “We have hardly given it a thought. No one dreamed we would ever have to move.”

  Tsuruko was fond of long telephone conversations. On the point of hanging up, she would begin all over again. For a half hour she told Sachiko how distressing it was to reach the age of thirty-six and suddenly be asked to leave a city from which one had not ventured in one’s whole life.

  Relatives and acquaintances came around with congratulations, said Tsuruko, and no one took the trouble to imagine how she felt. When, occasionally, she let fall a hint, they only laughed and told her not to be so old-fashioned. It was indeed as they said, Tsuruko tried to tell herself: she was not going off to a foreign country, or even out to some inaccessible spot in the provinces. She was going to the capital, she would be at the very feet of His Imperial Majesty. What was there then to be sad about? But Osaka was her home, and she wept sometimes at even the thought of having to leave. The children were all laughing at her.

  Sachiko herself could not help being a little amused. Still she thought she knew how her sister felt. Tsuruko had lost her mother early, and had had to take care of her father and sisters, and when the father was dead and the sisters were grown, there were her own husband and children and she had to work to revive the family fortunes. She had known more hardship than any of them; and yet she had also had a more conservative education, and there remained in her something of the sheltered maiden of old. It was very strange for a lady of the Osaka middle classes to reach the age of thirty-six without once having seen Tokyo. Osaka women, it was true, did not travel as much as Tokyo women, and Sachiko and the younger sisters had rarely been east of Kyoto. Still they had each had occasion—a school outing, perhaps—to visit Tokyo once or twice. Tsuruko, early burdened with housework, had never had time for travel, but beyond that she was convinced that no city compared with Osaka. As for the Kabuki, she was quite satisfied with the Osaka actor Ganjirō; and as for restaurants she wanted nothing better than the Harihan or the Tsuruya. Since she had no desire to go off looking at strange places, then, she always sent her sisters instead, and happily stayed behind to watch the Osaka house.

  The house was built in the old Osaka fashion. Inside the high garden walls, one came upon the latticed front of the house. An earthen passage led from the entrance through to the rear. In the rooms, lighted even at noon by but a dim light from the courtyard, hemlock pillars, rubbed to a fine polish, gave off a soft glow. Sachiko did not know how old the house was—possibly a generation or two. At first it must have been used as a villa to which elderly Makiokas might retire, or in which junior branches of the family might live. Not long before his death, Sachiko’s father had moved his family there from Semba; it had become the fashion for merchant families to have residences away from their shops. The younger sisters had therefore not lived in the house long. They had often visited relatives there even when they were young, however, and it was there that their father had died. They were deeply attached to the old place. Sachiko sensed that much of her sister’s love for Osaka was in fact love for the house, and, for all her amusement at these old-fashioned ways, she felt a twinge of pain herself—she would no longer be able to go back to the old family house. She had often enough joined Yukiko and Taeko in complaining about it—surely there was no darker and more unhygienic house in the world, and they could not understand what made their sister live there, and they felt thoroughly depressed after no more than three days there, and so on—and yet a deep, indefinable sorrow came
over Sachiko at the news. To lose the Osaka house would be to lose her very roots.

  It had been inevitable that Tsuruko would leave Osaka. Tatsuo, having given up the family business and gone back to his bank, could be transferred at any time. But Tsuruko, and Sachiko herself, had chosen to overlook the inevitable. Some eight or nine years before, it was true, Tatsuo had almost been sent off to Fukuoka. He had pleaded family reasons for staying in Osaka, even at his old salary, and, although there had been no clear understanding on the point, it had seemed afterwards that the bank would respect his status as the head of an old family. Tsuruko had somehow taken it for granted that they would be allowed to live forever in Osaka, but the bank had had a change in management and policy, and then Tatsuo himself wanted to get ahead in the world, even if it meant leaving Osaka. He was most dissatisfied to see his colleagues move ahead while only he stayed behind. He had many children, and while his expenses were growing, economic developments were making it more difficult for him to rely on the property he had inherited from his foster father.

  Tsuruko might well feel that she was being evicted. Deeply attached herself to the old house, Sachiko thought of going immediately both to console her sister and to see the house again. There were delays and delays, however, and two or three days later she had another telephone call. Tsuruko did not know when they would be able to return to Osaka, but they had decided in any case to let “Otoyan” and his family have the house for the time being at a low rent—in fact he would be half renter and half caretaker. Since August was so very near, Tsuruko had to begin getting ready; but, spend her days though she would in the storehouse, she could only stare absent-mindedly at the disordered heaps. The utensils and furnishings and art objects had been left untouched since her father’s death. She was sure that among the things she herself did not need there would be something Sachiko might want. Would Sachiko come for a look?

  “Otoyan” was their affectionate name for Kanei Otokichi, an old man who had long before worked in their father’s Hamadera villa, and who now had a grown son. With the son working in a large department store, Otoyan no longer had any particular responsibilities. He frequently visited the Osaka house.

  Sachiko went to Osaka the next afternoon. The doors of the storehouse, beyond the court, were open, and Tsuruko was on the second floor. Even out of doors the air was heavy and sticky, as it so often is in the rainy season. In the storehouse the smell of mildew was strong. Tsuruko, a scarf tied around her head, was quite lost in the task of sorting out household goods. Before her was an open chest full of small boxes, and beside it were five or six ancient-looking boxes with such labels as “Twenty Trays, Shunkei Lacquer.” Tsuruko was busily untying cords and opening boxes. After making sure that the contents were indeed “One Shino Candy Dish” or “One Kutani Decanter,” she would decide whether the boxes were to be taken along or left behind or otherwise disposed of.

  “Do you need this?” asked Sachiko. Her sister gave a vaguely negative snort, and went on with her work. Sachiko had come upon a Chinese inkstone. She remembered the day her father had bought it. He really was a very bad judge of art, and, since he tended to think that the expensive must be good, he had occasionally made a foolish buy. Sachiko was with him when, quite without protest, he paid the several hundred yen a favored antique dealer asked for this stone. Astonished that inkstones could come so high, the child Sachiko wondered what her father, who was neither a calligrapher nor an artist, meant to do with the thing, but even more puzzling were the two pieces of red-flecked alabaster which, Sachiko remembered, had come with the inkstone. Later, choosing suitable congratulatory mottoes, her father took them to be carved into seals for a physician friend who composed Chinese verses and who had reached his sixtieth birthday. The engraver returned them with apologies: they contained impurities, and he could do nothing with them. Sachiko had come upon them a number of times afterwards, pushed out of sight somewhere.

  “Do you remember those two pieces of—alabaster, I think it was?”

  “Yes.”

  “What ever happened to them?”

  Tsuruko did not answer.

  “What ever happened to them?”

  Tsuruko was meditating upon a “Book Box, Decorated Kōdaiji Lacquer.” She was having trouble with the cleated lid.

  So it always was with Tsuruko, People who did not know her well would be overcome with admiration—what a thorough, industrious housewife—when they saw her so hard at work that she did not hear what was said to her; but she was as a matter of fact by no means as self-contained as she appeared. When a crisis came, she would stand looking vacantly into space for a time. Then she would go to work as though possessed. Utterly selfless, one would have thought, and intent only on serving others. The truth was that she was too excited to know what she was doing.

  “She was very funny,” Sachiko said to her sisters that evening. “She sobbed into the telephone yesterday, and she wanted me to come talk to her because no one else would. And then when I went today she hardly spoke to me.”

  “But wait and see,” said Yukiko. “Before long we will have her weeping for us again.”

  Two days later, Tsuruko telephoned to ask if Yukiko would not help her. We will see which mood she is in now, said Yukiko. About a week later she was back.

  “The packing is nearly finished, but she is still bewitched.”

  She had been asked to go to Osaka, Yukiko reported, to watch the house while Tsuruko went with Tatsuo to take formal leave of his family in Nagoya. The two of them left on Saturday afternoon, the day after Yukiko arrived, and returned late Sunday night. And what, then, had Tsuruko been doing in the five or six days since? She had been at her desk practicing calligraphy. And why was she practicing calligraphy? She now had to write notes of thanks to all the relatives on whom they had called, and this for Tsuruko was a heavy task. She was determined in particular not to be outdone by her sister-in-law, the wife of Tatsuo’s elder brother—a lady who was an expert calligrapher. Always when she wrote to this sister-in-law she sat down with a dictionary on her left and a copybook on her right. Looking up each character to make sure that she had it in the proper cursive style, and deliberating over the choice of each word, she would write draft after draft, until in the end the letter had taken the better part of a day. And this time she had not one but five or six letters to write. Even to prepare the drafts was no easy matter. All day she sat at her desk, and she showed the drafts to Yukiko. Was this all right? Had she left anything out? Only one letter had been finished by the time Yukiko returned to Ashiya.

  “How like her. When she has to go calling on a bank executive, she starts three days ahead of time memorizing what she will say, and she goes around mumbling it to herself.”

  “It was too sudden, she said, and all she could do was sit around in tears, but now she has made up her mind, and everyone will be surprised at how fast she is off for Tokyo. She says she will surprise us all.”

  “She lives for that sort of thing. We must all act surprised— that will delight her.”

  So the three of them dissected Tsuruko.

  22

  TATSUO, who was to begin work in Tokyo on July 1, left Osaka late in June. He planned to stay with relatives while he looked and had other people look for a house to be rented cheaply. Presently a letter came saying that he had chosen the house. It was decided that he would return to Osaka on the twenty-eighth, a Saturday, that they would all leave for Tokyo on the twenty-ninth, and that relatives and friends would gather at the station for one last farewell.

  From the beginning of August, Tsuruko went about making a call or two a day on relatives and bank officials. When she had finished the last of the calls, she came to spend two or three days with Sachiko. This was no formal leave-taking like the other calls. Tsuruko had been left reeling by all the preparations, she had worked as though “bewitched”; and now, partly to rest, partly to be with her three sisters for the first time in a very great while, she meant to forget everything, she
said. Leaving Otoyan’s wife to look after the house, she brought along only her youngest child, who was two, and a maid to take care of her. When had the four of them last gathered under one roof, able to talk quite at their leisure? Tsuruko could count the number of times she had visited Ashiya, and the visits had been no more than an hour or two Stolen from household chores, and when Sachiko visited Osaka the children were always so noisy that it was quite impossible to talk. For two of the sisters, then, it was the first time since before they were married that they could really have a good, long conversation. There were any number of things they wanted to say, and any number of things they wanted to hear. Subjects had piled up through more than ten years. But when at length the time came, the exhaustion of her recent labors, or perhaps the exhaustion of more than ten years’ work, caught up with Tsuruko. What she wanted was simply to call in a masseuse and lounge about the house. Since Tsuruko knew little of Kobe, Sachiko thought of taking her to the Oriental Hotel and to a Chinese restaurant on Nanking Street, but Tsuruko said that she wanted only to lie down with no one to bother her, that all she needed was the simplest of food, that they need not worry about entertaining her. And so the three days passed without their really having talked about anything.

  Some days before Tsuruko was to leave Osaka, Aunt Tominaga suddenly came to call on Sachiko. Aunt Tominaga, an elderly sister of Sachiko’s father, had never before visited the Ashiya house. Only important business could have brought her out from Osaka on a hot summer day. Sachiko thought she knew what it was. She was right: it concerned Yukiko and Taeko. Aunt Tominaga was of the view that, although the younger sisters might well stay with Sachiko while the main house was in Osaka, it would be better for them now to go to Tokyo. After all, they belonged in the main house. Yukiko, with nothing to detain her, should go to Osaka the next day and on to Tokyo with Tsuruko. Taeko on the other hand had work to finish. They would have to let her stay behind for a time; but she too, Aunt Tominaga hoped, would leave for Tokyo in no more than a month or two. No one, of course, had in mind making her give up her work. She could continue it perfectly well in Tokyo, and indeed Tokyo might have advantages over Osaka. Tatsuo had said that, with Taeko beginning to win recognition, she might have a studio in Tokyo, provided of course that she showed herself to be truly sincere. Tsuruko, Aunt Tominaga explained, knew that she should have discussed the matter herself when she was in Ashiya, but she had wanted only to rest. Lazy and irresponsible though it was of her, she hoped the aunt would forgive her and go speak to Sachiko in her place. Aunt Tominaga was therefore in a sense Tsuruko’s messenger.