The Makioka Sisters

by Junichiro Tanizaki

  “It is free?” said Teinosuke. “Maybe we should all have our pictures taken.”

  “Let me take a picture of the whole family. Suppose you line up with Koi-san in the middle.”

  “What order do you suggest?”

  “Mr. and Mrs. Makioka behind the chair. And now Miss Etsuko on Koi-san’s right.”

  “We must put O-haru in too.”

  “Q-haru will fit in to the left.”

  “If only Yukiko were here,” said Etsuko.

  “That would be nice,” Sachiko agreed. “She will be very sorry when she hears what she missed.”

  “You should have invited her down, Mother. You had a whole month.”

  “I did think about it. But after all, she only went back in April.”

  Itakura looked up startled. He was sure that as he turned his range-finder toward them he had seen tears in Sachiko’s eyes. Teinosuke noticed at almost the same time. What could be the reason? He was often caught off guard by her tears when something would remind her of the child she had lost, but today there must be another reason. Seeing Taeko in that white kimono, had Sachiko thought of the day long before when her other sister had worn the same kimono? Did she wonder when Taeko would put on a wedding kimono in earnest? And had it made her sad to think that they must first find a solution to the problem of Yukiko? He felt an answering wave of emotion as it occurred to him that someone besides Yukiko would be sorry to have missed the recital. But possibly Okubata had arranged for Itakura to be here in his place—very probably he had.

  “Satoyū.” The pictures finished, Taeko called to a girl perhaps twenty-two or three, evidently a geisha, who was kneeling before a mirror in a corner of the room. Her dance was to follow Taeko’s. “May I ask you a favor?”

  “And what might it be?”

  “Would you step across the hall with me for a minute?”

  There were a number of professionals among the dancers today, two geishas and several teachers. This Satoyū, a geisha from the Sōemon quarter, was a favorite pupil of Saku’s.

  “I have never danced in long skirts before. I am not at all sure I can manage. Would you give me a little coaching on how not to trip?”

  “But I am not sure myself that I can keep from tripping.”

  “Oh, come now.” Taeko led the young geisha across the hall.

  They could hear samisen and kokyū 1 being tuned below.

  “Koi-san, Mr. Makioka says to hurry.” Itakura went to call her when she had been shut up with Satoyū twenty or thirty minutes.

  The door opened and Taeko came out, satisfied with what she had learned.

  “Would you mind holding up the train please?” She had Itakura help her downstairs.

  Teinosuke, Sachiko, and Etsuko followed. Teinosuke quietly took his place in the audience.

  “You know who that is, Fritz?” He tapped the German boy on the shoulder.

  Fritz nodded curtly and turned to watch the dancing.

  4

  IT WAS the morning of July 5, just a month after the dance recital.

  Even for the rainy season, there had been more rain than usual. It rained all through June and on into July, when the rainy season should have been over. From the third through the fourth it rained, and on the morning of the fifth the slow rain turned into a downpour. Even so, no one foresaw that but two hours would bring the most disastrous flood in the history of the Kobe-Osaka district. At about seven, Etsuko, bundled against the rain, but not especially worried, started out as usual with O-haru. Her school was some three or four hundred yards south of the National Highway, not far from the west bank of the Ashiya River. O-haru, who usually came back after seeing the child across the highway, felt that in such a storm she must go as far as the school. She was not back at the house until eight-thirty. Her interest aroused by the flood warnings the youths of the Home Defense Corps were spreading, she made a detour along the embankment, and she reported that the water was frightening around Narihira Bridge, almost as high as the bridge already. Still no one suspected the danger. “Do you think you should go out in this rain?” said Sachiko when some ten or twenty minutes after O-haru’s return Taeko put on a green oiled-silk raincoat and overshoes and started to go out, but Taeko, off this morning not to her studio but to the sewing school, only laughed and said that a small flood might be interesting. Sachiko did not try to stop her. Only Teinosuke decided to wait until the rain had let up a little. He was killing time over some papers in his study when he heard the siren.

  The rain was at its very worst. He looked out and saw that, although the lowest part of the garden, under the plums by the study—water was likely to collect there after even a trifling shower—had become a pond two yards square, there was nothing to suggest a crisis. Since the house was a half mile or so from the west bank of the Ashiya River, he felt no particular alarm. But then he thought of Etsuko’s school, much nearer the river. If the embankment had given way, might it not have been by the school? Would the school be safe? Not wanting to frighten Sachiko, he tried to calm himself. After some minutes he ran into the main house. (He was soaking wet even after the five or six steps that separated his study from the house.) The siren was probably nothing serious, he said to Sachiko. As he put on a raincoat over his kimono and started out for a look around the neighborhood, O-haru came from the kitchen, her face pale and her clothes sodden from the hips down. A terrible thing, she said; she had been worried about the school after seeing the flood waters in the river, and she had run out in alarm when she heard that siren. The water, she said, had come as far as the next street east, and was running in a torrent from the mountains to the sea, north to south. She had made a try at crossing, but after two or three steps the water was up to her knees. Just when she was beginning to fear that she would be swept away, someone shouted at her from a roof nearby. She was sternly reprimanded— what the devil did a woman mean trying to cross a torrent like that? The fellow was in what seemed to be a Home-Defense uniform—but she saw that it was the young green grocer. “Yao-tsune, what are you doing here?” At that, he recognized her too. “Where do you think you are going, O-haru? Have you lost your mind?” Not even a man could go farther, he said, and near the river the destruction was fearful—houses were falling people were dying. There had apparently been landslides in the upper reaches of both the Ashiya River and the Kōza River, O-haru learned; houses and mud and boulders and trees had dammed up against the north side of the railroad bridge, and the embankments had given way on both sides. The streets below the breaks were seething maelstroms, in some places as much as ten feet deep. People were calling for help from second-storey windows. How was the school? she asked. He did not really know, but since the destruction was worst to the north of the National Highway, possibly the lower areas had escaped. He had heard too that the danger was far greater on the east bank than on the west. She could not rest until she had seen for herself, said O-haru. Might there not be a roundabout way she could take? But the man replied that you could go nowhere without running into water, and that it only got deeper the farther east you went. The deep water was bad enough, but the current was so strong that you were in danger of being swept away to sea; and it was the end if a boulder or a tree came down on you. The men of the Home Defense Corps were crossing on ropes at the risk of their lives, but that was nothing for a woman to try. O-haru gave up and came home.

  Teinosuke tried to telephone the school, but the line was already out. “Very well, I shall go see for myself,” he said. He did not remember what Sachiko answered. He remembered only that she gazed at him with tear-filled eyes and clung to him for a moment. He changed his kimono for his oldest foreign-style clothes and put on a macintosh, a rain hat, and rubber boots. Before he had gone fifty yards he saw that O-haru was following him. Instead of the loose summer dress she had worn on her earlier venture, she had on a cotton kimono with the sleeves tied up and the skirt hitched up into the obi to show the red under-kimono. There was no need for her to come along, he shouted; she
was to go home immediately. But she answered that she would go with him only a little of the way. It might be better to go south, she said, and led him south, parallel to the river, until they came to the national highway. Following a circuitous route as much to the south as possible, he came to within a hundred yards of the Kobe-Osaka electric line without getting especially wet, but to reach the school he had to cross a torrent. The water was fortunately only about as high as the tops of his boots. As he approached the old National Highway, he was surprised to note that it was even shallower. From there he could see the school, and the faces of the children in the second-storey windows. “Fine, fine, the school is safe,” he heard a happy voice behind him, speaking to no one in particular. O-haru was still with him. He had been following her, and he could not remember when he had passed her. The current was fairly swift. With his boots full of water, he had to brace himself at each step to keep from being swept away. O-haru, much shorter than he, was already wet to the waist. Having given up protecting herself from the rain, she was using her umbrella as a staff and clutching at fences and telephone poles as she followed some distance behind him. O-haru was famous for talking to herself. “How nice,” or, “Whatever will he do now?” she would say in the movies, the delight or the suspense too much for her. The other maids all complained that it embarrassed them beyond measure to go to the movies with her, and Teinosuke could not help feeling a little amused as he saw how the old quirk had come out in this crisis too.

  Sachiko moved restlessly about the house after Teinosuke left. When the rain seemed to let up a little, she went outside. Stopping a cab from the garage in front of the Ashiya River Station, she asked about the school. He had not been in that section of town himself, the driver said, but it appeared to be as safe as any. Though cut off by flood waters, the school itself, on high ground, had no doubt escaped. Sachiko was much relieved. If the Ashiya River was bad, added the driver, the Sumiyoshi River was far worse. The Government line, the electric line, and the National Highway all being cut, he had no exact information; but people walking from the west reported that, although there was little water as far as Motoyama and by following the tracks one could reach that station without getting wet, everything farther west was under a sea of muddy water; that waves were thundering from the mountains, piling one on another and breaking over in a violent backwash; that all manner of debris was coming down with them; that nothing could be done to help the people clinging to bits of matting and wood in the torrent.

  Sachiko had to worry about Taeko, then, instead of Etsuko. Taeko’s sewing school was no more than two or three hundred yards from the Sumiyoshi River, and, from the driver’s story, must certainly be in the middle of the flood. Taeko generally walked to the National Highway and took a bus from there. The driver remembered having passed her on the way down—she had had on a green raincoat, he said; and if she was starting out then, she must have reached the school very shortly before the flood came down. Sachiko should be much more worried about the sewing school than about Etsuko’s school. For no reason at all, Sachiko ran back into the house and called out in the loudest voice she could muster:

  “O-haru!”

  O-haru had gone out with Mr. Makioka and had not yet come back, she was told. With that she screwed up her face and wailed like a little child.

  O-aki and O-hana stared at her in mute surprise. Embarrassed, Sachiko fled from the parlor to the terrace, and, still sniffling, down to the lawn. She saw Mrs. Stolz’s pale face over the net-wire fence between the two gardens.

  “Mrs. Makioka. Your husband? Etsuko’s school?”

  “My husband has gone after Etsuko. But the school seems to be all right. And your husband?”

  “To Kobe. Peter and Rumi. I am very worried.”

  Of the three Stolz children, Fritz was still too young for school, but Rosemarie and Peter went to the school run by the German Club, high in the Kobe hills. It had once been the usual thing for the father and the two children to start out together in the morning, Mr. Stolz’s office being in Kobe; but with the China incident, business had fallen off, and, as his trips to Kobe had become less frequent, the two children would often start out by themselves. This morning too the father had stayed home. Later, worried about the children, he had determined to go to Kobe. At the time, of course, they had not known how serious a flood it was, and it had not occurred to them that the railway lines would be out, and Mrs. Stolz only hoped he had gotten through safely. It was not easy to talk to Mrs. Stolz, who was less adept at Japanese than her children, but somehow, mixing in her own almost nonexistent English, Sachiko managed to convey her meaning.

  “I am very sure he will be back safe, And the flood is only in Ashiya and Sumiyoshi, and the children in Kobe will be quite all right. I really think so—you have nothing to worry about.”

  After repeating her assurances several times, Sachiko went back into the house. Very shortly Teinosuke and O-haru brought Etsuko in through the front gate, which Sachiko had left open.

  Etsuko’s school had not been damaged. Because much of the surrounding land was flooded, however, and there was a possibility that the water would rise higher, classes had been dismissed and the children had been gathered on the second floor, where they waited for fathers and brothers to call for them. Etsuko had therefore not felt in danger herself, and had only been wondering about the house. Teinosuke was among the earliest parents to arrive. After thanking the principal arid Etsuko’s teacher, he started back with Etsuko and O-haru over more or less the same route. It was then that Teinosuke was glad O-haru was with him. She had astonished everyone when, mud and all, she fell upon Etsuko in her delight at seeing that the child was safe; and on the way back she walked upcurrent to shield Teinosuke. The water was two or three inches higher and the current much swifter than when they had crossed but a short time before. Teinosuke had to carry Etsuko on his back. He found that it was extremely difficult to walk, and if O-hani had not been there to divide the current for him he would have been in danger venturing even one step into it. The task was not an easy one for O-haru, who was sometimes in water to her waist. They followed a street to the west, cross current, and at the intersections they were sometimes in real danger. At one intersection there was a rope for them to cling to, at another they were pulled out by a Home Defense patrol; but at a third there was no such help, and they barely managed to get across by clinging to each other and leaning on O-haru’s umbrella.

  Sachiko had no time to be happy or to thank them. She could hardly wait for the end of the story.

  “Yes, but what about Koi-san?” She was in tears again.

  1A sort of bowed samisen.

  5

  IT USUALLY took no more than a half hour for Teinosuke to go to and from the school. Today it had taken upwards of an hour. By the time he returned, information about the Sumiyoshi flood was fairly detailed, if somewhat confusing: the district west of Tanaka had become one great, swirling river; the sewing school was in the worst of the flood; south of the National Highway, the Kōnan Market and the golf course had literally become an arm of the sea; people and animals were dead and injured by the score, houses were collapsing. The news Sachiko had gathered, in short, was all bad.

  But Teinosuke, who had been through the Tokyo-Yokohama earthquake, knew how reports could be exaggerated. Citing the earthquake, he sought to comfort the already despairing Sachiko. Since it was said that one could go as far as Motoyama, he would go see for himself. If the flood was really as bad as reports had it, he said, he could not hope to go farther, but he doubted very much that it was. He had seen at the time of the earthquake that even in the worse calamities surprisingly few people died. Long after the outsider had concluded that there was absolutely no hope, people somehow managed to get through. In any case, it was much too soon to begin weeping. Sachiko was to compose herself and wait for him. She was not to worry if he was a little late. He would do nothing rash. He would turn back as soon as it appeared that he could go no farther. Taking al
ong a light lunch and shoving a little brandy and some first-aid medicines into his pocket, he started out in low shoes and plus-fours—he had had enough of the rubber boots.

  The sewing school was a little more than two miles away by the Government Line. Teinosuke, who was fond of walking, knew the area well and had passed the school itself a number of times. He pinned his hopes chiefly on the fact that the Kōnan Girls’ Academy lay across the street south of the tracks, perhaps a mile beyond Motoyama Station, and the sewing school a little to the west of it, a hundred yards or so directly south from the tracks; and that if he could follow the tracks as far as the academy, he might be able to go on to the sewing school, or at least to see whether or not it was damaged. O-haru was after him again, but this time he was firm: she was not to come, he said harshly. She was to stay with Sachiko and Etsuko, whom he did not want to leave alone. About fifty yards north of the house he came to the tracks. For the first few hundred yards there was no water at all, except two or three feet in the open rice paddies. As he left the wooded section, the water to the south disappeared, but near Motoyama the south side of the tracks was again under water. The tracks themselves still being dry, he did not feel endangered. Each time he met a group of students from one of the Kōnan academies, however, and asked what lay beyond, he received the same answer: this was nothing to what he would find the other side of Motoyama—he had only to go a little farther and everything would be one solid sea. He wanted to go on to the west of the Kōnan Girls’ Academy, he said, and they all answered that that was the worst flooded section of all. The water had still been rising when they had left school, and by now probably even the tracks were under water.