The Makioka Sisters

by Junichiro Tanizaki

  “Yone-yan,” said Taeko again. “Sachiko is here.”

  It was the first time Sachiko had heard her sister call Itakura “Yone-yan.” At the Ashiya house she had always spoken of him as “Itakura,” and Sachiko herself, and Yukiko, and even Etsuko had been in the habit of somewhat discourteously referring to him by his last name. His full name was Itakura Yusaku, and this “Yone-yan” was a diminutive of “Yonekichi,” his trade name as an apprentice in the Okubata shop.

  “How awful to find you like this,” said Sachiko. “You always seemed so healthy.” She sniffled into a handkerchief.

  “See, the lady from Ashiya is here.” This time the sister spoke to him.

  “No, leave him alone,” said Sachiko. “I thought it was the left leg that hurt.”

  “It is. But because of the ear, he has to lie on his left side.”

  “How terrible.”

  “And that makes it hurt all the more.”

  There were beads of sweat on Itakura’s rough-grained face. Now and then a fly would light on the face, and Taeko would brush it away as she talked. Itakura stopped moaning.

  “I have to go,” he said.

  “Mother, he has to use the bedpan.” The mother was leaning against the wall.

  “Excuse me.” She bent to pick up the bedpan, in newspapers under the bed. “Quiet, now.”

  “It hurts!” The moaning, which had been low and steady and trancelike, became the screaming of a lunatic. “It hurts, it hurts, it hurts!”

  “You will just have to stand it. There is nothing else to do.”

  “It hurts, it hurts! You are not to touch me. You are not …”

  “Try to stand it. What else am I to do?”

  Sachiko looked curiously at the sick man, wondering what could have brought this failure of courage. The left leg had to be moved several inches, and Itakura took some minutes turning so that he faced partly up. He was quiet for a time, trying to control his breathing. Then he set about the task of using the bedpan. His mouth was open, and he looked up at them with frightened eyes quite strange to Sachiko.

  “Has he been eating?” Sachiko asked the mother.

  “No, not a thing.”

  “He just drinks lemonade.”

  The left leg protruded from under the blanket. There seemed to be nothing wrong with it, except that the veins were a little swollen and it was a little too white. And possibly Sachiko was imagining even that much. As Itakura rolled over again, the screams were as terrible as before. This time, “it hurts” was puncuated with screams of: “I want to die. Let me die;” and “Kill me. Kill me right now.”

  The father was a quiet man who seemed too timid and good-natured to have opinions of his own. The mother was considerably more forceful. Whether from lack of sleep or from weeping or from some ailment, her eyes were swollen and watery, and she was always pressing them shut. Although there was, for that reason, something a little dull and absent about her expression, it was evident that she had taken charge of the patient. Itakura, who seemed very dependent on his mother, would do whatever she said. Because the mother resisted, said Taeko, they had not called in a surgeon. Even after Sachiko arrived, they divided into two factions, the sister and Taeko in one, the parents in the other, and held whispered conferences in the corners of the room, or in the hall. The sister-in-law tried to mediate; she talked first with one faction and then with the other. The parents spoke in such low tones that Sachiko could make out nothing they said. The mother seemed to be complaining, and the father listened. Taeko and the sister called the sister-in-law aside and told her over and over that the parents would be guilty of murder if they did not agree to an operation, and that she must somehow try to convince the mother. The sister then talked to the mother; but the mother argued stubbornly that since her son would die anyway she wanted him to die with a whole body. When the sister-in-law tried to overcome that argument, the mother counterattacked: was the sister-in-law prepared to guarantee that the cruel operation would be a success? The sister-in-law next tried to pacify the sister: she simply could not prevail; hers was not the sort of argument old people understood. And the sister talked to the mother. The mother, said the sister in a tearful voice, saw only what was immediately before her eyes, and did not know her duty as a parent. So that they would have nothing to reproach themselves with afterwards, they should try surgery whether it would succeed or not. Time after time the round of arguments was repeated.

  “Sachiko.” Taeko called her sister to the far end of the hall. “I cannot stand a minute more of this.”

  “But it is not at all unreasonable for a mother to feel as she does.”

  “Anyway, we are too late. I am sure of that. But the sister has asked me to see if you might not be willing to talk to the mother. The mother is stubborn with the family. With important people, she nods and does as they tell her.”

  “And I am an important person?”

  Sachiko was most reluctant to enter the discussions. She sensed how deep the old woman’s resentment would be if outside interference were to bring unhappy results, and she knew moreover that the chances were eight or nine in ten that the results would be unhappy.

  “You only need to wait a little while. She sees that she will have to do as everyone says. She will go on objecting until she has satisfied herself.”

  More worried about persuading Taeko to come home now that she had done her duty, Sachiko waited nervously for an opening.

  A nurse about to go into Itakura’s room stopped when she saw Taeko.

  “Dr. Isogai would like to speak to one of the relatives.”

  Taeko passed this information on to the people in the room. The sister and sister-in-law were kneeling beside the pillow; the mother and father were at the foot of the bed. The two old people debated for a time which should go, and presently they went together. Fifteen minutes later they came back, the father looking most upset, the mother in tears and muttering something in his ear. Afterwards it appeared that Dr. Isogai had instructed them in the most positive terms to transfer the patient to a surgical hospital. To have him die here would be no small inconvenience. The doctor argued that he had done everything possible to treat the ear; that, since the most complete care had been taken in the disinfecting, there could have been no error in the operation itself; and that the leg ailment must therefore be quite another matter. The ear was healing, as they could of course see, and the patient no longer belonged in this hospital. Out of consideration for other patients, Dr. Isogai had called in Dr. Suzuki the night before and persuaded him to take the case. Since then valuable time had been lost through indecision, and maybe the time for surgery had already passed. In any case the hospital could not take responsibility for further delays. Thus Dr. Isogai made it appear that the whole crisis had been brought on by the parents and their slowness. They only bowed and thanked the good doctor. When they were back in the room, the mother scolded the father as if it had been entirely his fault that the doctor had gotten around them so successfully. Sachiko knew that the complaints resulted from an excess of grief. The mother, resigned at length to the inevitable, had found the proper moment to end her resistance.

  It was growing dark as they prepared to move Itakura. Dr. Isogai behaved with extreme coldness. His manner suggested that the patient was a great nuisance, and he did not once come out to see the family. The work of moving was left to a doctor and nurse from the Suzuki Hospital. Whether or not he knew that in the conferences of these last hours it had been decided to amputate his leg, Itakura only moaned like some strange animal. The family accepted the fact that the strange animal was what their son and brother had become, and no one asked his opinion about the operation. One thought bothered them, however: what of the screams when they moved him to the ambulance? The halls were only a yard wide, there was no landing on the narrow spiral staircase, and it was obvious from the screams when Itakura had to use the bedpan that the pain would be intense when they carried the stretcher out. The family seemed less concerned
for the strange animal than for themselves, who would have to listen. Sachiko asked the nurse if something could not be done. There was no cause for worry, said Dr. Suzuki. They would give him a sedative. And indeed he was quieter when, after an injection, he was taken away by the doctor, the nurse, and his mother.

  35

  SACHIKO called her sister aside while Itakura’s father, sister, and sister-in-law were cleaning the room and paying the bill. She wanted to go home, she said, and Teinosuke had told her to bring Koi-san with her if possible. Taeko replied that she would wait for the results of the operation. Unable to dissuade her, Sachiko finally saw the four of them to Dr. Suzuki’s and went on to Ashiya in the same cab. As Taeko started into the hospital, Sachiko called her back again: though she could understand Koi-san’s desire to help, still it appeared—perhaps they had only been shy before the Makiokas—that the Itakura family really did not need help. How would it be then if Koi-san were to slip out? Of course much would depend on exactly what happened, but Sachiko hoped Koi-san would not forget for one second their great fear of rumors that she and the sick man were formally engaged. She hoped her sister would think always of the Makioka name, and most especially of the effect on Yukiko. Sachiko felt that she may have gone a little too far. What she hoped to convey, with much delicacy and indirection, was that it could do no good to have Koi-san’s affairs known now that Itakura was to die. There was no doubt that Taeko knew what she meant.

  To be honest, Sachiko could not keep back a certain feeling of relief now that the possibility of Taeko’s marriage to a man of no family had been eliminated by natural and wholly unforeseen circumstances. It made her a little uncomfortable, a little unhappy with herself, to think that somewhere deep in her heart she could hope for a man’s death, but there was the truth. And she was sure she would not be alone: Yukiko would be with her, and Teinosuke; and Okubata, if he knew, would be dancing the happiest dance of all.

  “Why are you so late?” Teinosuke, already back from work, had been waiting for her in the parlor. “They said you left at noon, and I just had someone call the hospital to find out what was keeping you.”

  “I had to stay on and on. I wanted to bring Koi-san back with me.”

  “And did you?”

  “No. She decided to wait for the operation. I think she is right.”

  “They will operate?”

  “Yes. They were still arguing whether they should or not when I got there, and when they finally made up their minds I took them all to the Suzuki Hospital.”

  “Will he live?”

  “Probably not.”

  “It seems very strange. What is the matter with the leg?”

  “No one really told me.”

  “Did you find out the name of the disease?”

  “Dr. Isogai ran off whenever we tried to ask, and Dr. Suzuki seemed not to want to talk while Dr. Isogai was there. I imagine it is blood-poisoning.”

  As Sachiko paid “Mito,” all ready to leave, for her forty days’ services, and sat down to dinner with Teinosuke and Yukiko, there was a telephone call from the Suzuki Hospital. The conversation was a long one, the general drift of which Teinosuke and Yukiko could follow from the dining room: the operation was over and Itakura was resting more easily; because there would have to be transfusions, everyone except the two old people had had blood tests; Itakura and his sister were both Type A, whereas Taeko was Type O; although they could thus use the sister’s blood for the time being, they would need one or two more donors; Taeko’s blood, Type O, would do, but the family was determined not to ask for it; unhappily, the sister had suggested telling Itakura’s fellow apprentices in the Okubata shop, and two or three of them had been informed and would very shortly arrive at the hospital; Taeko did not want to see them, or, worse yet, to see Kei-boy, who might have heard; she had therefore decided to go home; the apprentices being old friends of Itakura’s, the sister seemed to think that they might be willing to donate blood; since Taeko was exhausted, she hoped someone would send a cab for her; and, finally, she wanted a bath and something to eat as soon as she reached home.

  “Does the family know about Koi-san and Kei-boy, then?” asked Teinosuke when Sachiko was back in the dining room. He was careful to lower his voice.

  “I doubt it very much. If they did, do you think they would think of letting Itakura marry her?”

  “Never,” Yukiko agreed. “He cannot have told his parents about Kei-boy.”

  “But possibly the sister knows.”

  “Those men from the shop—do they see a great deal of Itakura?”

  “I wonder. I have not heard anything about old friends.”

  “But if there are people like that around his studio, then there is not much doubt that Koi-san’s affair is an open secret.”

  “You remember how Kei-boy told me he had ways of investigating? He probably was thinking of the men in the shop.”

  Although a cab was ordered immediately, it was more than an hour before Taeko appeared. The cab had had a flat tire on the way, and she had waited a fairly long time at the hospital. The wait was no problem, but she had had to see the men from the Okubata shop, and the man she most wanted to avoid, Kei-boy himself. (It was not likely that he was in the shop at such an hour. Taeko assumed that one of the men had called him.) She stayed as far from Kei-boy as she could, and he was tactful enough to keep his distance. When she started to leave, however, he came up and asked why she did not stay longer—he asked with every appearance of politeness, but a note of sarcasm could easily be read into the words. When the men from the shop, on their own initiative, asked to have their blood tested, Kei-boy stepped forward and said that he too would have a blood test. It was difficult to see what he had in mind, though with that bustling officious-ness of his, he was probably but following a sudden impulse. Taeko had had her own blood tested because she had thought she could do no less when the sister and the sister-in-law were tested. The whole family had tried to discourage her, she said.

  “Where did they amputate?” asked Sachiko. The three sat for a time at the dinner table with Taeko, who had taken a bath and changed to a cotton summer kimono.

  “Here.” Taeko stretched out her leg and drew a hand across her thigh. Then, in confusion, she waved as if to brush away the mark.

  “And were you watching?”

  “Just a little.”

  “In the operating room?”

  “I was in the next room, with a glass door between. I could watch if I wanted to.”

  “How brave of you—even if you were not especially watching.”

  “I tried not to see—but I would be frightened and want to take just a look. His heart was beating so, and his chest was rising and falling like this. Does a general anaesthetic always do that to a person, I wonder. You could never have stood seeing that much, Sachiko.”

  “We will talk about something else.”

  “That was nothing. I did see something really terrible.”

  “Stop, stop. Please.”

  “It will be a long time before I can eat beef again.”

  “Stop it, Koi-san.” This time it was Yukiko who protested.

  “I found out the name of the disease, though.” Taeko turned to Teinosuke. “Gangrene. Dr. Suzuki would not talk while we were in the other hospital, but he told us later.”

  “Is gangrene as painful as all that? It was from the ear, then.”

  “I have no idea.”

  They learned afterwards that Dr. Suzuki was not in good repute with other members of his profession. Indeed it was strange that he agreed to take a case two leading surgeons had already refused, and a case so hopeless that even he could make no promises. It must have been just such incidents that had given him a bad name. Though unaware of the doctor’s shortcomings, Taeko had thought, when she saw the large hospital with apparently no other patients, that it was not a prosperous establishment. Perhaps because the building was a converted Western-style house that made one think of those put up some seventy-five y
ears earlier, in the first days after the opening of the ports, and because footsteps echoed hollow against the high ceilings as in a haunted house, she felt a sudden chill when she stepped inside the door. Coming out of the anaesthetic, Itakura looked up at her and said: “So I am a cripple.” But the moaning animal at Isogai Hospital had become a human being again. Clearly he had known all along how serious his condition was, and what those repeated conferences meant. In any case, it was a great relief to Taeko that the moaning at least had stopped. She began to wonder if he might not survive with but the one leg gone. She began to imagine him on crutches. But it was only a two- or three-hour reprieve, in the course of which the men from the Okubata shop and Kei-boy himself arrived. She saw her opportunity to leave. The sister, who alone knew of the triangle, helped her slip out unobtrusively. At the door, Taeko told the sister to call her if there was a change, whatever the hour. She also told the driver that she might have to get him out of bed before the night was over.

  Exhausted though she was, Taeko talked with her sisters and Teinosuke for some time. At four in the morning she was called back to the hospital. Sachiko, half asleep, heard the cab, and said to herself as she dozed off: So Koi-san has left again. She did not know how much time passed before O-haru slid the bedroom door open.

  “Mrs. Makioka. Koi-san called from the hospital to say that Mr. Itakura is dead.”

  “What time is it?”

  “About half past six, I think.”

  Sachiko could not go back to sleep. Teinosuke knew of the telephone call, but Yukiko and Etsuko, asleep in Teinosuke’s study, did not learn of it until they got up at about eight.

  Taeko came home at noon to tell them all that had happened: when Itakura again took a turn for the worse, the sister and the men from the Okubata shop gave repeated blood transfusions, to no avail; the poison attacked the chest and head, and the patient, though for a time liberated from the pain in the leg, died in the most intense agony; Taeko hoped never again to see such a painful death; his mind was clear to the end, however, and he took leave of his family and friends one by one, and thanked Kei-boy and Taeko and wished them happiness; asking to be remembered to the family in Ashiya, he mentioned them all by name, Mr. and Mrs. Makioka, Miss Yukiko, Miss Etsuko, and even O-haru; the men from the Okubata shop, with their work to do, returned to Osaka after spending the night at the hospital, but Taeko herself and Kei-boy went to Tanaka with the body, and it was from there that she had just returned; Kei-boy, who stayed on to help after she left, was addressed as “the young master” by the Itakura family; and the wake would be tonight and the next night, and the funeral in two days, at the Tanaka house. Though Taeko’s face was worn, she was calm and shed no tears.