The Makioka Sisters

by Junichiro Tanizaki

  “How clever of you to find a place for everything.”

  “When the baggage came, I had no idea what I would do with it all. Somehow I did manage, though. When you pack a house full, you can put an amazing amount into it.”

  Tsuruko sat down for a talk after she showed Sachiko to her room. The children came storming up after her, and pulled and tugged at the two sisters. They were to go downstairs—they were smothering her—see, they were getting their aunt all wrinkled.

  “Masao, suppose you go downstairs and tell O-hisa to hurry with something cool for your aunt. Do as I tell you, Masao.”

  Tsuruko held the youngest child, Umeko, on her lap. “Yoshio, go down and bring us a fan. Hideo, you are the oldest. The oldest is to go downstairs first. I have not seen your aunt in a very long time, and we have a great deal to talk about. Do you expect me to talk with you hanging on me?”

  “How old are you, Hideo?”

  “Eight.”

  “You are very big for your age. At the gate I thought it was Tetsuo.”

  “And he still has to hang on his mother, just as if he were the youngest of all. Tetsuo keeps himself busy with his studies. He is not quite so much of a baby.”

  “O-hisa is the only maid you have?”

  “O-miyo was with us until a little while ago, but she wanted to go back to Osaka. I decided that with Umeko able to walk I hardly needed a nurse.”

  Sachiko, expecting to find Tsuruko faded and worn, looked admiringly at her sister. She still knew how to take care of herself. Her hair was neat, her dress was proper and tasteful. With a husband and six children—fourteen, eleven, eight, six, five, and three —to look after, and only one maid to help her, she had a right to look far more wasted and slovenly. She might well have looked ten years older than she was. But Tsuruko, a proper Makioka, would have been taken for a good five or six years younger than her thirty-seven. Tsuruko and Yukiko resembled their mother, a Kyoto woman, and Sachiko and Taeko their father. One could see something of the Kyoto beauty in the first and third sisters. Unlike Yukiko, however, Tsuruko was amply built. Just as the two younger sisters were shorter by steps than Sachiko, so Sachiko was a step shorter than Tsuruko. Her figure well proportioned to her height, Tsuruko seemed larger than her slight husband when they went out together. She was far from the delicate, fragile Kyoto beauty Yukiko was. Sachiko, who had been twenty at the time of Tsuruko’s wedding, could remember how striking her sister had been that day. Clean featured and rather long of face, Tsuruko had worn her hair—when loose it trailed to the floor and reminded one of the long-haired Heian beauty of a thousand years ago—in a high, sweeping Japanese coiffure. One thought, looking at the figure, feminine and at the same time grand and imposing, how the robes of the ancient court lady would have become her. The most extravagant rumors about the bride Tatsuo was taking were no more than the truth, said Sachiko and the other sisters. Fifteen or sixteen years had passed, Tsuruko had six children, life had become less easy, and yet, though something of the bloom had passed, she still looked young. No doubt she was saved by her height and the fullness of her body. Sachiko looked closely at her sister, rocking Umeko in her arms, and saw that the smooth, white skin at the throat was as firm as ever.

  Teinosuke had suggested that it would be a great imposition for Sachiko and Etsuko to stay at the Shibuya house. He would telephone or write to make reservations at an inn, he said, and Sachiko could move after only a night or two with her sister. But Sachiko did not like the idea of going to an inn—she might have been less reluctant if Teinosuke had been with her—and besides, not having seen her sister for so long, she had all sorts of things to talk about, and the Shibuya house would be far more convenient than an inn. And with O-haru to help in the kitchen, they would not be such a nuisance. Soon, however, she began to see that she might better have taken Teinosuke’s advice. Tsuruko assured her that it was not always this noisy. The children were in the house all day long because of the summer vacation, and in two or three days it would be quieter. But since the three youngest had not yet started to school, it did not seem likely that Tsuruko would have much time to herself. Finding a spare moment now and then, she would come up to Sachiko’s room. The three children would immediately be up after her, and sometimes she would have to spank one of them, and the clamor would only be louder. Once or twice every day the screams were quite deafening. Sachiko knew from the Osaka days that her sister tended to be short with the children—how otherwise could she have managed them? But even granting that no one was to blame, Sachiko thought it sad to have so little time for conversation. After the first two or three days, in the course of which Etsuko was taken by Yukiko to see the Yasukuni Shrine and the Sengakuji Temple and the other famous places, they found that it was too warm for sight-seeing. Very soon Etsuko was bored. Another reason for not staying at an inn had been Sachiko’s hope that Etsuko, who had no brothers and sisters, might find it fun to play with a little girl younger than she, and might become friendly with her cousins, but Umeko was so completely her mother’s child that she even turned Yukiko away, and she proved to be too much for Etsuko. School would begin soon, Etsuko pointed out, and if she did not hurry back Rumi would be off for Manila. Since she had been treated more gently herself, she would steal frightened, intimidated glances at Tsuruko when the latter began to punish one of the children. Fearing that Etsuko might come to dislike Tsuruko, in many ways the kindest of the sisters, and that the spankings might have an unfortunate effect on her nerves, Sachiko concluded that the best thing would be to send Etsuko on home with O-haru. However, Dr. Sugiura of Tokyo University, to whom they had an introduction from Dr. Kushida, was out of town and would not be back until early in September. The whole trip would be wasted unless they saw him.

  If they were to stay on, might it not be better to go to an inn? True, Sachiko herself had never stayed at the Hamaya; but it was managed by a lady who had been a waitress at the Harihan Restaurant in Osaka, whom Sachiko’s father had known, and whom Sachiko herself remembered (“the young lady,” Sachiko had been in those days). It was not as if she would be staying at a completely strange inn. Teinosuke had said moreover that the inn was a small one, a made-over restaurant, that the guests were for the most part congenial people from Osaka, that most of the maids spoke the Osaka dialect, and that it was a place to make one forget that one was in Tokyo. Because of all this, might it not be better to move? But seeing the trouble Tsuruko was taking to entertain her, Sachiko could not bring the subject up. Tatsuo too was most solicitous. He said that it was quite impossible to have a comfortable meal at home, and took them out to a foreign-style restaurant said to be well known in Tokyo, and gave a little party at a Chinese restaurant called the Peking, to which the children were brought lest Etsuko be lonely. For all the tight-fisted ways he was said to have developed, Tatsuo seemed as fond as ever of taking people out. Or was it that he still felt the old impulse to father them all? Sachiko did not know. Perhaps he was unhappy over reports that he did not get along well with his sisters-in-law. He pointed out that Sachiko knew only the Harihan and the Tsu-ruya and other expensive restaurants. Very near the Shibuya house, he said, were any number of little restaurants that catered to the pleasure quarters. The food was better than in large, famous restaurants, and, since proper wives and daughters were quite willing to be seen in such places, Sachiko too might find them interesting. If she liked, he would give her a taste of the real Tokyo. Leaving Tsuruko to watch the house, he would set out happily with Sachiko and Yukiko for one of his little restaurants. Sachiko remembered, a little fondly, how the sisters had had their fits of perverseness in the days when Tatsuo was new in the family, and how he had occasionally sent them off in tears; but now, seeing how good-natured and indeed how weak he was, and how intent he was on entertaining them—more intent than Tsuruko even— Sachiko could not bring herself to cross him. She concluded that there was nothing to do but stay in the Shibuya house. They would leave as soon as possible after seeing Dr. Sugiura.
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  1Takeuchi Seihō (1864–1942), a Kyoto painter.

  2Confucian scholar, 1746–1816. Father of the more famous Rai Sanyō.

  16

  IT WAS the night of the first of September.

  Sachiko and Yukiko had dinner with Tatsuo and Tsuruko, the children having eaten earlier. The talk turned from the Tokyo-Yokohama earthquake—September 1 was the anniversary—to the recent Ashiya flood, and as the matter of Taeko and the young photographer Itakura came up, Sachiko told them in some detail of what had happened. She herself had not been in danger, she said, and she only knew what Taeko had told her. No doubt it was not by way of retribution, but that very night the wont typhoon in over ten years hit Tokyo. For almost the first time in her life Sachiko knew two or three hours of real terror.

  Reared in the Osaka region, where storm damage is lighter, Sachiko did not know how terrifying a wind could be. It was true that some four or five years earlier—had it been the autumn of 1934?—the pagoda of the Tennōji Temple had fallen in a typhoon, the Eastern Hills of Kyoto had been stripped quite bare, and Sachiko herself had been frightened for perhaps a half hour, but since the damage was light in Ashiya, they were astonished to leam from the newspapers that the wind had been enough to knock over a pagoda. That typhoon was hardly one to compare to this Tokyo typhoon. Her fears were multiplied at the thought that if the Tennōji Pagoda had fallen before the wind then, the Shibuya house would never stand before the wind now. Because the house was so cheaply built, the typhoon seemed five and ten times more violent than it really was.

  The wind came up before the children were in bed, at eight or nine o’clock, and by ten o’clock it was fierce. Sachiko as usual went to bed upstairs with Yukiko and Etsuko. Etsuko clung to her as the house began to shake. Calling Yukiko over too, the child was soon lying with an arm tight around each. There was nothing to worry about—the wind would die down, they said; but they were clinging to her as desperately as she was clinging to them. The three lay huddled in a tight cluster, their faces pressed together. Teruo, who slept with Tetsuo in the small room across the hall, looked in and asked if they ought not to go downstairs. Might it be safer downstairs?—ought they to go downstairs?—he could hear people running about down there. Sachiko could not see his face, but his voice was tense and unnatural. Not wanting to frighten Etsuko, she said nothing. She was beginning to fear that the house might fall, however. Each time the beams moaned she thought the time had come, and she was in no mood to argue with Teruo. “Etsuko, Yukiko, suppose we go downstairs,” she said, taking Etsuko by the hand. The house was just then shaken by a gust of wind which they thought must surely blow it over. The stairs, flimsy as shingles, seemed about to crumple under her feet, while the walls on either side ballooned like sails. Dirt and sand came in through the yawning cracks between the plaster and the pillars. Certain that she was about to be crushed to death, Sachiko threw herself down the stairs, almost knocking Teruo over before her. Upstairs they had not noticed because of the wind, and the leaves and branches and tin roofs and sign boards sailing through the air; but now they could hear the frightened voices: “I’m scared, Mother; I’m scared.” The four youngest children, headed by Hideo, were clustered about their parents. As Sachiko came in, Yoshio and Masao ran over to her. Etsuko was left to Yukiko. Tsuruko held Umeko in both arms, and Hideo cowered at her sleeve (his behavior was extraordinary: during lulls in the wind, he would twist at his mother’s sleeve and listen intently, and when he heard the wind coming up again in the distance, he would cover his ears and, with a low and yet hoarse and penetrating moan, press his face against the floor). Four adults and seven children, like a group statue of Tenor. Whatever may have been Tatsuo’s feelings, the three sisters at least were resigned to being crushed to death. Had the wind been a little stronger and had it lasted a little longer, they might well have been. Sachiko thought that in her fright she had been imagining things, but here downstairs she could see that at each fresh gust of wind the pillars and the plastered walls were indeed separated by cracks two and three inches wide—she wanted to say six inches or a foot, watching by the one flashlight. The cracks opened before the wind and closed in the lulls, and each time they were wider than before. Sachiko remembered how the Osaka house had shaken in the Hachiyama earth- quake, but an earthquake is over in a moment. This opening and closing of the walls was quite new to her.

  Even Tatsuo, doing his best to remain calm, began to feel uneasy at the billowing walls. Was this the only house that was rocking so, he wondered aloud—the other houses in the neighborhood were more solidly built. The Koizumis’ would be standing up well enough, said Teruo. It was a solid, one-storey house. Suppose they go to the Koizumis’? They did not want the house to fall on them. The house would not fall, answered Tatsuo—but then, it might be better to leave—but they could hardly get the Koizumis out of bed. This was no time to think about being polite, said Tsuruko; and the Koizumis would surely not be sleeping through the storm. Suddenly everyone was in favor of leaving. The Koizumi house was the neighboring one to the rear, its gate but a step from the Makioka kitchen. Mr. Koizumi, a retired civil servant with a wife and one son, had been of some help to Teruo, who went to the same middle school as the son. Tatsuo and Teruo had called on him once or twice.

  Meanwhile O-haru and O-hisa were talking in the maid’s room; and soon O-haru came in to say that she would go see how things were with the Koizumis. If it seemed appropriate, she would ask them to take in the whole Makioka family. O-haru of course had no idea who the Koizumis might be, but she had complete confidence in herself, and she evidently meant to present her petition once O-hisa had shown her the house,

  “Suppose we get started, O-hisa.”

  “Be careful—the wind might blow you away.”

  Without waiting for permission, O-haru led O-hisa off through the back door. The Koizumis would not mind a bit, she said, back a few minutes later. Mr. Teruo was right—the Koizumi house was not even trembling, the storm seemed like a far-off dream. As she spoke, O-haru turned to take Etsuko on her back.

  “Miss Etsuko could never make it alone. Why I was blown back twice myself, and finally had to crawl over. And there are all sorts of things blowing through the air. Put a quilt over your head, now.”

  Tatsuo still showed no sign of leaving. He would stay to take care of the house, he said, as Teruo, Tetsuo, Sachiko, Yukiko, and

  Etsuko went off with O-haru. Tsuruko could not decide what to do; but when, after O-haru had gone off with Masao (“Come on, young man, we are getting out of here!”) and was preparing to take Yoshio in his turn, she could stand it no longer. Giving Yoshio to O-hisa, she left the house with Umeko in her arms. O-haru had been most heroic—coming back the second time, she had barely escaped being crushed by a balcony that sailed down the street. O-hisa having taken Yoshio, she turned to the terrified Hideo, and, brushing aside Tsuruko’s protests that the boy was quite big enough to walk by himself, took him on her back.

  So all of them, even the maid O-hisa, had left. Half an hour later Tatsuo appeared somewhat sheepishly at the Koizumis’ back door. The wind was worse than ever; but the walls and pillars of the Koizumi house were so solid that no one thought of the danger. How strange that a better-built house should make such a difference. The wind subsided at about four in the morning, and the Makiokas returned trembling to their frail, uninviting little house.

  17

  ALTHOUGH THERE WAS a clear autumn sky the next morning, the memory of the typhoon was still with Sachiko like a nightmare. Worried about the effect on Etsuko’s nerves, she decided that the time for deliberation had passed. She put in an emergency call to Osaka and asked Teinosuke to make reservations at the Hamaya Inn. She would like if possible to move that day, she said, and toward evening she had a call from the Hamaya. Reservations had been made from Osaka, and a room was waiting for her. She set out with Etsuko after a brief farewell to her sister. She would have dinner at the inn, she said, and if Tsuruko did not mind she would like to
leave O-haru in Shibuya for three or four more days. She hoped her sister might find time to visit the inn.

  Yukiko and O-haru went into the city with them. The four had dinner at a German restaurant recommended by the inn, and after they had strolled along the Ginza and looked at the night shops— it must have been at about nine—Yukiko and O-haru said good-bye at the subway station. It was the first night Sachiko had ever spent at an inn alone with Etsuko. The terror of the night before came back still more vividly. Even though she had taken sleeping medicine and a sip or two of the brandy she kept for just such an occasion, she was still awake when the first streetcar passed the following morning. Etsuko too had had trouble sleeping. She was going back to Osaka the next day, she said fretfully. She would not wait for the doctor. She was likely to get worse at this rate. She would go back ahead of Sachiko; she wanted to see Rumi. The next morning, however, she was snoring happily. At about seven o’clock, reconciled to the fact that she herself was not to sleep, Sachiko got up quietly so as not to disturb Etsuko. Asking for newspapers, she went out to sit on the veranda overlooking the Tsukiji canal.

  At home, she was intensely interested in the two problems of the day, the Japanese advance on Hankow and the Sudeten dispute, so interested that she could hardly wait for the morning newspapers; but here, perhaps because of the unfamiliar Tokyo papers, she found that the news did not seem real. She turned to watch the people on the banks of the canal. Since the inn she had stayed at with her father was in an alley behind the Kabuki Theater, the roof of which she could see, this was not the alien ground she found Shibuya to be; but new buildings had gone up, and the view along the canal was very different from the view she remembered. Then too she had come to Tokyo during spring vacation, and this was the first time she had seen it in September, and even here in the middle of the city the air was chilly against the skin. Osaka would not be chilly so soon. Did autumn come early to Tokyo, cold city that it was? Or was this only a cold wave after the typhoon, a short break in the hot weather? Or was one more sensitive to the cold when one was away from home?