The Makioka Sisters

by Junichiro Tanizaki

  Also in March, Katharina Kyrilenko sailed for Germany on the luxury ship Scharnhorst. Teinosuke and the rest, while meaning to repay the Kyrilenkos for the party two years before, had only seen them occasionally on the train. Taeko continued to bring reports of “the old one” and the brother and sister and Vronsky. Though less enthusiastic about dolls, Katharina had not entirely given them up. Just when Taeko was beginning to forget about her, she would appear with a new doll to be criticized. She had made considerable progress these two or three years. In the course of time she had acquired a “friend,” a young German named Rudolf, and it was Taeko’s theory that the doll-making suffered because Rudolf was more interesting. Rudolf worked in the Kobe office of a German company. Taeko, who had been introduced to him one day in Kobe, frequently saw him out walking with Katharina. One knew immediately that he was a German, she said: he was tall and strongly built, and not so much handsome as rugged. Katharina had apparently decided to go to Germany because, for one thing, she had grown to like Germany since she met Rudolf, and for another, Rudolf had arranged for her to stay with his sister in Berlin. But her real destination was England, where the daughter by her former husband was living. She would have a springboard once she arrived in Germany.

  “Is Yudōfu sailing with her, then?”

  Taeko called Rudolf “Yudōfu,” “Steamed Curds” (a pun on “Rudōfu,” the nearest a Japanese could come to pronouncing his name), and Sachiko and the others spoke of this gentleman they had never met as if that were really his name.

  “Yudōfu is staying in Japan. Katharina is going alone with an introduction to the sister.”

  “Will she go to England for the little girl, then, and back to Berlin to wait for Yudōfu?”

  “I doubt it.”

  “This is the end of Yudōfu?”

  “I rather imagine so.”

  “That seems very businesslike of her.”

  “But I think that is really best,” Teinosuke put in. They were talking over the dinner table. “I doubt if they were really in love— they were just playing.”

  “Unmarried people have to behave that way when they come to Japan alone.” Taeko apologized for the two.

  “When does she sail?” asked Teinsouke.

  “At noon, day after tomorrow.”

  “If you have any time day after tomorrow,” said Sachiko to her husband, “you might go see her off. It was wrong of us not to have them over for dinner.”

  “We never quite got around to it, did we.”

  “And so you should see her off. Etsuko will be in school, but the rest of us mean to go down to the ship.”

  “Yukiko too?” asked Etsuko.

  Yukiko smiled and shrugged her shoulders. “Just to see the ship.”

  After about an hour in his office, Teinosuke took an express for Kobe. He had almost no time to talk to Katharina. Only “the old one,” Kyrilenko, Vronsky, the Makioka sisters, a gentleman Taeko told them was Rudolf, and two or three other foreigners and Japanese saw Katharina off. Teinosuke and his family left the pier with the Kyrilenkos. By the time they said good-bye on the Bund, Rudolf and the other foreigners had already disappeared.

  “The old one does manage to hide her age,” said Teinosuke. “The old one” looked especially young from the rear. She walked off, as always, with a quick, deerlike step.

  “I wonder if she will ever see Katharina again. She is old, no matter how young she looks.”

  “And neither of them shed a tear,” said Yukiko.

  “She even seemed embarrassed when we cried.”

  “It takes courage to go off to Europe alone, with a war about to begin. It takes courage for the old one too. But then I suppose this seems like nothing after the Revolution.”

  “Born in Russia, grew up in Shanghai, drifted to Japan—and now she is off for Germany and England.”

  “I suppose the old one is in a bad temper. Remember how she dislikes the English?”

  “ ‘I, Katharina, always fight. Now she go. I, not sad. Happy.’“ For the first time in a great while, they had Taeko’s imitation of “the old one.” Having just heard “the old one” herself, they stood roaring with laughter in the middle of the street.

  30

  “BUT KATHARINA has improved—grown up,” said Teinosuke. “I kept wondering if she was so good looking the last time I saw her.” They had walked up from the Bund, and they continued the conversation as they sat in a row—Sachiko, Teinosuke, Yukiko, Taeko—at the Yohei, where they had made reservations that morning.

  “It was just her make-up. And she was dressed very carefully.”

  “She has changed her make-up since she met Yudōfu,” said

  Taeko. “The whole tone of her face has changed. She has the most amazing confidence in herself. Just you watch, Taeko, she said. I’ll find myself a rich husband in Europe.”

  “She is not bothering to take along much money, then?”

  “In a pinch she can always be a nurse. She was a nurse in Shanghai, you know. She probably has only enough money to keep her for a little while.”

  “And she and Yudōfu have said goodbye?”

  “I imagine so.”

  “Yudōfu is no fool,” said Teinosuke. “His only responsibility is to write a letter to his sister. And did you notice the way he waved at her once or twice and then marched off ahead of everyone?”

  “I did indeed. A Japanese could never have done that.”

  If a Japanese tried to behave like Rudolf, Teinosuke said, it would be “Sudōfu,” “Soured Curds,” and not Yudōfu. But Sachiko missed the point.

  “What is ‘Sudōfu’? A French novel?”

  “By Molnar. Remember?”

  There was room for ten customers around the L-shaped counter. The Yobei was therefore quite packed with only the Makiokas, a man who looked to be a broker from the neighborhood, two or three of his employees, and beyond them two young women, no doubt geishas, chaperoned by an older geisha, and there was barely room for one person to pass behind the chairs. The door was constantly opening. A newcomer would ask—even beg—for a place; but as is so often the case with proprietors of sushi1 restaurants, the old man made rudeness a part of his trade. Unless the applicant was a steady customer who had a reservation, he would be turned off with a snort as if to say that he ought to be able to see for himself what his chances were. The passer-by, unless he happened to come at a slack time, had little chance of being admitted. Even the steady customer who had made his reservation, but who appeared fifteen or twenty minutes late, would be told to go walk around the block for an hour or so. The old man had learned his trade at the Yobei, a famous old sushi restaurant in Tokyo, no longer in business. The name of his shop was in fact a modification of “Yobei.” He was a native of Kobe, however, and he made his sushi to fit the Kobe taste. Although he did give his customers the vinegared rice and fish any Tokyo sushi man would, the Kobe influence was evident in his choice of materials. He always used white Kobe vinegar, never yellow Tokyo vinegar, and always a thick soy sauce not seen in Tokyo. He offered only fish taken before his very eyes, so to speak, here along the shores of the Inland Sea. No fish was unsuitable for sushi, he insisted—on that point at least he agreed with the old Yobei. He tried conger eels and blowfish and dace and even oysters and sea urchins, and scraps of halibut or clam, and sometimes red whale meat. Nor did he limit himself to fish: he used mushrooms too, and bamboo sprouts and persimmons. But he was opposed to tuna, that most common of sushi ingredients; and scallops and omelettes and the commonplace sushi that goes with them were never seen in his restaurant. Though he sometimes cooked his fish, the prawns and abalone were alive and moving when they reached the customer.

  Taeko had long known the old man. One might say that she discovered him. Eating out often, she was wonderfully well informed on the little restaurants in downtown Kobe. She had found this one in the days when, in an alley opposite the stock exchange, it was even smaller than now, and she had introduced Teinosuke and the rest. She first gave
them a description with gestures: he looked like the dwarf with the enormous, mallet-shaped head one sees in illustrations to horror stories; he turned customers off most haughtily, and he attacked a fish with his carving knife as though it had insulted him. When Teinosuke went to see for himself he found the man ridiculously like Taeko’s description. His customers lined up before him, he would ask what they wanted, and then proceed to give them what he himself preferred: he would cut enough sea bream, for instance, to go around, and after that he would give everyone prawns and halibut. And it annoyed him when a customer had not finished the first round in time for the second. “You still have some left,” he would say to anyone who carelessly let two or three pieces accumulate. His fish varied from day to day, but he always had prawns and sea bream, of which he was especially proud, and he liked to begin a course with the bream. He did not welcome the uninitiated person who asked for tuna. When a customer displeased him he would pepper the sushi, and grin as his victim started choking.

  Sachiko, with her particular fondness for sea bream, soon became a regular customer, and Yukiko was as fond of this sushi as she. With a little exaggeration, one might say that it was one of the pulls that brought Yukiko back from Tokyo. She thought of the house in Ashiya when she became homesick, but somewhere in a corner of her mind there was also a picture of this restaurant, and the old man, and the glistening bream and prawns under his determined knife. Although Yukiko for the most part preferred Western food, she would find that after two or three months of Tokyo tuna, she could almost taste the bream of Akashi. That white flesh, newly cut, gleaming like mother of pearl, became the image of the bright Osaka-Kobe region, and of her sister and niece and the house in Ashiya. Sensing that Kobe sushi was one of the particular pleasures Yukiko came back for, Teinosuke was always careful to take her once or twice to the Yohei. He would sit between Sachiko and Yukiko, and make sure that his wife and sisters-in-law had sake in their cups.

  “Delicious. Absolutely delicious.” Beyond the shy Yukiko, who sat huddled over her sake, Taeko was expressing her pleasure quite openly. “This is the sort of thing we should have treated the Kyrilenkos to.”

  “We really should have,” said Sachiko. “We could have asked the brother and the old one to come along with us this evening.”

  “I did think of it. But then we only had reservations for four, and I doubted if they would eat raw fish.”

  “Nonsense,” protested Taeko. “Foreigners love sushi.” She looked inquiringly at the old man.

  “They eat it, all right.” The old man reached down with a water-swollen hand to restrain the prawns, which were scampering over the counter. “They come in now and then.”

  “And have you forgotten how Mrs. Stolz ate it?” asked Sachiko.

  “But there was no raw fish in the sushi you gave her.”

  “They eat raw fish too,” said the old man. “It depends on the kind, though. They don’t seem to like tuna much.”

  “Why is that?” asked the broker.

  “I don’t know, but they don’t seem to. Tuna and bonito they don’t much eat.”

  “Remember Mr. Roots?” One of the younger geishas, turning to the older one, spoke in a soft voice. She did not seem in the least self-conscious about her Kobe accent. “He would eat raw fish only if it were white.”

  “I do remember.” The old geisha was busy with a toothpick. “The red seems to bother foreigners.”

  “It must not look very appetizing,” said Teinosuke. “A lump of raw, red fish on top of the dead-white rice.”

  “Koi-san,” Sachiko called down the counter. “What would the old one say about a place like this?”

  “Not here, not here!” Taeko resisted the impulse to do an imitation of “the old one.”

  “You’ve been down to the harbor?” The old man cut open a prawn and spread it over a ball of rice, which he then cut into sections an inch or so wide. One prawn was set before Sachiko and her husband, the other before Yukiko and Taeko. They were such large prawns that a whole one per person would have left room for nothing else.

  Teinosuke took up a piece of the still-wriggling prawn. “We saw someone off on the Scharnhorst, and while we were about it we did a little sight-seeing.”

  “German ships are very different from American ships,” said Sachiko. “Even a luxury ship like the Scharnhorst.”

  “Remember how bright and cheerful the President Coolidge was?” Taeko agreed with her sister. “The Scharnhorst made you think of a battleship.”

  “Eat it up, young lady, eat it up.” The old man was impatient. Yukiko had not touched the sushi before her.

  “But the thing is still moving.” It was always a trial for Yukiko to have to eat as fast as the others. She liked the “dancing sushi’’ of which the old man was so proud, the prawns that were still moving when they were set out to be eaten; she liked it as well as the sea bream. But she wanted at least to wait until it had stopped moving.

  “That is what makes it good.”

  “Go ahead and eat it. Are you afraid it will haunt you?”

  “Would I be afraid of a prawn’s ghost, I wonder,” mused the broker.

  “What about a frog’s ghost, Yukiko?”

  “A frog’s ghost?”

  “It happened when we were in Tokyo. Tatsuo took us out to have barbecued chicken one evening. The chicken was very good, but for the last course they killed a frog, and it let out a horrible croak. Yukiko and I were as white as two sheets. Yukiko said she could hear that croak the rest of the night.”

  “I would rather talk about something else.” Quite sure that it was no longer moving, Yukiko took up a piece of the “dancing sushi.”

  1 Balls of vinegared rice, highly seasoned and usually topped with strips of raw or cooked fish.

  31

  CHOOSING A weekend in mid-April, Teinosuke, the three sisters, and Etsuko made their annual pilgrimage to Kyoto. On the train back, Etsuko suddenly ran high fever. She had complained of feeling tired for about a week and had not been as lively as usual in Kyoto, and when they found, upon reaching home, that she had a temperature of about one hundred and four, they immediately called Dr. Kushida, who suspected scarlet fever and said he would come again. The next morning he said there could be no doubt about it—one symptom of scarlet fever was this bright flush over the whole face, except around the lips—and was in favor of sending her to an isolation ward. Since Etsuko violently disliked hospitals, however, and since the disease, though ‘contagious, was not usually passed on to adults and did not often appear more than once in the same house, he finally agreed to treat her at home, provided it was in a room apart. Fortunately Teinosuke’s study was in a cottage off from the main house. Brushing aside his protests, Sachiko moved Teinosuke into the main house and turned his study, one room with a small anteroom, into Etsuko’s hospital suite. In addition to electric heating and gas, the study had been fitted with a sink for light cooking when, some four or five years before, Sachiko had convalesced there from a severe attack of influenza. Teinosuke moved his desk and some of the book shelves and cabinets to the master bedroom on the second floor. After he had disposed of everything else that was likely to be in the way, Etsuko moved in with her nurse, and communication was broken off between the study and the house. Not completely broken off, of course. Someone had to bring out food, and someone was therefore needed for liaison. Because the other maids prepared food and were to be kept away from the patient, the task was first given to O-haru, who had no fear of contagion and who loved to be of service, but her courage had its disadvantages. After two or three days Yukiko pointed out that O-haru’s disdain for antiseptics and the carefree way in which she touched first Etsuko and then everything else in the house could only result in spreading the disease. O-haru was therefore replaced by Yukiko, who had had enough experience to be extremely cautious, and who was as fearless as O-haru. Yukiko entrusted nothing to the maids. She did the cooking and the serving and the washing herself, and she went almost without sleep f
or the week the fever was at its highest. She and the nurse took turns refilling the ice bag every two hours.

  Etsuko made good progress; the fever began to fall. Even so, said Dr. Kushida, it would be forty or fifty days before the scarlet had dried into scabs and peeled away and recovery was complete. Yukiko, who had meant to go back to Tokyo shortly after the excursion to Kyoto, decided to stay on. Sending an explanation and a request for more clothes, she threw herself into her work, happy to be in Ashiya even if it meant working as a nurse. She strictly forbade anyone else to go in and out of the study. Sachiko, ordered to keep away (she was always the first to catch a disease, Yukiko pointed out), had so little to occupy her that Yukiko suggested a day at the theater. There was no need to worry about Etsuko. The suggestion quite hit the mark: Kikugorō was in Osaka again, dancing one of Sachiko’s favorite roles, and nothing was to keep her from the theater this month, she had thought. Then came the illness. But however much she wanted to see Kikugorō, she could not go jauntily off leaving behind a child with scarlet fever. She had to be satisfied with a phonograph recording of the accompaniment to her favorite role. Koi-san, she remarked, might want to go on alone, and apparently Taeko did slip off to the theater.

  Etsuko, meanwhile, was bored. She lay all day listening to the phonograph, and soon there was a protest from the Swiss gentleman who had moved into the Stolz house. He was a rather difficult person. A month before they had been asked if they would not do something about the barking dog. The protests came through Mr. Sato, who owned the Stok house and who lived two doors from Sachiko. The Sato maid would be sent over to deliver a two- or three-line note in English that had come from the Swiss. This was the note about the dog: