The Makioka Sisters

by Junichiro Tanizaki

  They turned off the flash lights and approached in silence. Fireflies dislike noise and light. But even at the edge of the river there were no fireflies. “Maybe they are not out tonight,” someone whispered. “No, there are plenty of them. Come over here.” Down into the grasses on the bank, and there, in the delicate moment before the last light goes, were fireflies, gliding out over the water, in low arcs like the sweep of the grasses. On down the river, and on and on, were fireflies, lines of them wavering out from this bank and the other and back again, sketching their uncertain tracks of light down close to the surface of the water, hidden from outside by the grasses. In the last moment of light, with the darkness creeping up from the water and the moving plumes of grass still faintly outlined, there, far as the river stretched —an infinite number of little lines in two long rows on either side, quiet, unearthly. Sachiko could see it all even now, here inside with her eyes closed. Surely that was the impressive moment of the evening, the moment that made the firefly hunt worth-while.

  A firefly hunt has none of the radiance of a cherry-blossom party. Dark, dreamy, rather—might one say? Perhaps something of the child’s world, the world of the fairy story in it. Something not to be painted, but set to music, the mood of it taken up on piano or koto. And while she lay with her eyes closed, the fireflies, out there along the river, all through the night, were flashing on and off, silent, numberless. Sachiko felt a surging inside her, as though she were joining them, soaring and dipping along the surface of the water, cutting her own uncertain track of light.

  It was rather a long little river, as she thought about it, that they had followed after those fireflies. Now and then they crossed a bridge over or back, taking care not to fall in, and watching for snakes with eyes like fireflies. Six-year-old Sōsuke ran ahead in the darkness, thoroughly familiar with the ground. His father, who was guiding them, called uneasily after him, “Sōsuke, Sosuke.” No one worried about frightening the fireflies, there were so many, and unless they called out to one another, they were in danger of being separated, drawn apart in the darkness by fireflies. Sachiko and Yukiko were left alone on one bank. From the other, now brought in clear and now blotted out by the wind, came Etsuko’s call, “Koi-san, Koi-san,” and Taeko’s answer. There was something child-like in the sport, and when it came to child-like things Taeko was the most enthusiastic of the sisters. Etsuko always joined forces with her.

  Even now, here inside, Sachiko could hear the voices, blown across the river. “Mother—where are you, Mother?” “Over here.” “And Yukiko?” “She is here too.” “I have twenty-four already.” “Well, be sure not to fall in the river.”

  Sugano pulled up some grass along the path and tied it into something like a broom. To keep fireflies in, he said. There are places famous for fireflies, like Moriyama in Omi, or the outskirts of Gifu, but the fireflies there are protected, saved for important people. No one cares how many you take here. Sugano himself took more than anyone. The two of them, father and son, went boldly to the edge of the water, and Sugano’s bunch of grass became a jeweled broom. Sachiko and the rest began to wonder when he might be ready to think of going back. “The wind is a little cold— do you think perhaps”… “But we are on the way back. We are going back by a different road.” On they walked. It was farther than they had thought. And then they were at Suganos’ back gate, everyone with a few captured fireflies, Sachiko and Yukiko with fireflies in their sleeves.

  The events of the day passed through Sachiko’s mind in no particular order. She opened her eyes. She could have been dreaming. Above her head, in the light of the tiny night bulb, she saw the framed motto she had noticed earlier in the day: the words “Pavilion of Timelessness,” written in large characters and signed by one Keidō. Sachiko had no idea who Keidō might be. A flicker of light moved across the room. A firefly, repelled by the mosquito incense, was hunting a way out. They had turned their fireflies loose in the garden, and they had been careful to chase the last from the house before closing the shutters for the night. Where might this one have been hiding? In a final burst of energy, it soared five or six feet into the air, and glided across the room to light on Sachiko’s kimono, spread on the clothes rack. Moving over the printed pattern and into the sleeve, it flickered on through the dark blue-gray cloth. The incense in the badger-shaped burner was beginning to hurt Sachiko’s throat. She got up to put it out, and, while she was up, moved on to see to the firefly. Carefully she took it up in a piece of paper—the idea of touching it repelled her—and pushed it through a slot in the shutter. There were almost no fireflies left (had they gone back to the river?) of the scores that had flickered through the shrubbery and along the edge of the lake earlier in the evening. The garden was lacquer-black.

  Still Sachiko tossed, listening to the breathing of the other three. They were apparently asleep. Taeko lay next to her, and Yukiko and Estuko on the other side of the room. Someone was snoring gently. Yukiko, she decided. A slight, delicate little snore.

  “Are you awake?” It was Taeko.

  “I have not slept a wink.”

  “Neither have I.”

  “You were awake all the time?”

  “Because of the strange house. I never can sleep in a strange house.”

  “Yukiko at least is asleep. Listen to the snoring.”

  “Like a cat’s purring.”

  “Exactly. Bell might snore that way.”

  “But how can she be so calm, with the miai tomorrow?”

  When it came to sleeping, thought Sachiko, Yukiko was sounder than Taeko. Taeko was an extraordinarily light sleeper, awake at the slightest disturbance, whereas Yukiko could sleep sitting up on a train. Yukiko was surprisingly sound in many ways.

  “He is coming here?”

  “At eleven. We are to have lunch together.”

  “What shall I do?”

  “You and Etsuko are being taken to Sekigahara. The three of us will meet him.”

  “Have you told Yukiko?”

  “I did mention it a little while ago.”

  Sachiko had not been rid of Etsuko long enough to talk to Yukiko, though the two of them were alone those few moments on the far bank of the river. “Tomorrow is the miai,” Sachiko said. Yukiko gave her usual vague answer and Sachiko could think of no way to begin again. And as Taeko pointed out, Yukiko, with her quiet snoring, did not seem in the least upset.

  “I suppose when you have been through as many miai as Yukiko, you learn not to worry.”

  “I suppose so,” answered Taeko. “But she could be just a little more helpful.”

  5

  “YOUR MOTHER and Yukiko have been to Sekigahara any number of times, but Koi-san was very young and would like to see it again. Suppose you go off with Koi-san, then, and we will be waiting here for you.”

  Etsuko knew that something was afoot. Usually she would have whined and coaxed to have Yukiko go with her, but this time she set out quietly in a cab with Taeko, Sōsuke and his father, and the old man who had charge of the lunch. In the Pavilion of Timelessness, Sachiko helped Yukiko dress. Soon Tsuneko came to tell them that the gentleman had arrived.

  They were led to the fartherest part of the house and into a large, old-fashioned room with low paper-paneled windows. From the wide boards of the veranda, polished to a dark luster, they looked out at the garden on which only the one room fronted, at the tiles of the memorial hall through the fresh green of the old maple tree, at the luxuriant growth of rushes between the pomegranate in bloom by the veranda and the shiny black stones along the pond. Sachiko asked herself whether there had always been this room and this garden, and memories began to come back. She wondered if it was not in this very room that they had slept when they first visited the house twenty years before. The cottage had not yet been built. She had forgotten everything else, but she remembered the rushes, the thin green stems all across the forepart of the garden like lines of rain in the air.

  Sawazaki was introducing himself to Mrs. Sugano. When all
the introductions were finished, he took his place at the head of the table. Sachiko and Yukiko faced the garden and Mrs. Sugano was at the foot of the table opposite Sawazaki. Before sitting down, he turned to examine a scroll hanging in the alcove above the flower arrangement, lilies in a metal vase. The sisters had a chance to study him from the rear: a small, thin gentleman whom they would have taken for the forty-four or forty-five he was said to be, and whose complexion suggested a glandular disorder. His way of speaking, his bow, his gestures were all quite ordinary, and there was no hint of ostentation in his dress. In comparison with Sachiko and Yukiko he was even a little too carelessly dressed: a brown suit not quite bulging, but worn a little thin here and there; a silk shirt yellowed from repeated launderings; silk socks the stripes of which were beginning to fade—all evidence that he was not taking the miai seriously, and at the same time that he lived a most frugal life.

  “A fine Seigan1 piece,” he said, whether or not he had finished reading the poem on the scroll. “I understand you have a great many.”

  Mrs. Sugano giggled modestly, and her face softened. This was the flattery that worked best. “I am told that my husband’s grandfather studied calligraphy under Seigan.”

  For a time the two discussed historical and artistic matters: the Sugano family had several pieces by Seigan’s wife Koran, screens and fans and the like, as well as several pieces by that Ema Saikō who was famous as a lady disciple of the poet and scholar Rai Sanyō. There had apparently been intercourse between the Suganos and the Emas, who were physicians to the head of the Ogaki clan, and Mrs. Sugano still owned a letter from Saikō’s father. When the talk turned to Sanyo’s love for Saikō, his days in this province of Mino, and Saikō’s posthumous Chinese poems, Sawazaki had much to say. Mrs. Sugano, though her answers were short, gave evidence that she was not ill informed herself.

  “My husband was very fond of a bamboo ink wash by Saikō. He used to bring it out for guests, and he talked so much of Saikō that in the end I remembered everything myself.”

  “Mr. Sugano had very good taste. I used to play chess with him, and he asked me several times to come for a look at the new cottage. I’ve often thought I would trouble you to show me his collection.”

  “I would have liked you to see the cottage today, but these ladies are staying there.”

  “It is a beautiful room.” Sachiko saw her opportunity to enter the conversation. “So quiet, off in the garden by itself, really much better then a special suite in the best hotel.”

  Again Mrs. Sugano laughed modestly. “It is hardly that good. But please stay and enjoy it as long as you can. My husband in his last years came to like quiet places more and more. He spent almost all his time out in the cottage.”

  “And how did you choose the name?” asked Sachiko.

  “Suppose we ask Mr. Sawazaki. He will know more about it than I do.” Mrs. Sugano seemed to be examining Sawazaki in the classics.2

  “Well …” Sawazaki was obviously uncomfortable.

  “Might it be something about a Chinese woodcutter?” Mrs. Sugano suggested.

  “It might, I suppose.” There was by now a distinct frown on his face.

  Mrs. Sugano laughed and gave up the interrogation. A strangely perverse laugh, it rather chilled the conversation.

  Tsuneko poured saké from a green porcelain decanter for Sawazaki and then for the others.

  Mrs. Sugano had said that Tsuneko would cook lunch, but most of the lunch seemed to have come from a caterer. In such warm weather, Sachiko would have preferred fresh vegetables cooked at home to an uninteresting meal from a country caterer. She tried a bit of the sea bream and found it soft and pulpy. Extremely sensitive to the good and bad in sea bream, she hastily washed it down with saké, and laid her chopsticks aside for a time. Only the trout seemed really edible, and they were not from a caterer: she gathered that Sawazaki had brought them on ice.

  “Suppose you try the trout, Yukiko.”

  Since it was her unfortunate question that had spoiled the conversation, Sachiko wanted to make amends. She found Sawazaki thoroughly unapproachable, however, and in desperation she turned to her sister. Yukiko had been looking at the floor since they came in. She only nodded.

  “Yukiko is fond of trout?” asked Mrs. Sugano.

  Yukiko nodded again, and Sachiko answered for her. “We are all fond of trout, and Yukiko more than anyone.”

  “How nice. We didn’t know what to offer you, way out here in the country. And then Mr. Sawazaki brought the trout.”

  “We don’t often see such beautiful trout,” said Tsuneko.

  “And packed in all that ice. You must have been loaded down. Where did you say they were taken?”

  “In the Nagara River.” Sawazaki was feeling better. “I telephoned Gifu last night and had them brought to the station.”

  “What a great deal of trouble.”

  “And so thanks to you we have our first trout of the year,” said Sachiko.

  Though the conversation moved a little more smoothly and there was desultory talk of famous spots in Gifu Prefecture—the Japan Rhine, Gero Spa, the Waterfall of Filial Piety—and of the firefly hunt, it required a great effort to string the pieces together. Sachiko, who could always drink, would as soon have had more sake. There was some excuse for Tsuneko’s not having noticed, with the guests rather far apart in the large room and with but one man among them, and the weather was too warm for much sake. Still it seemed a little extreme that Mrs. Sugano and Yukiko should have their first cups cooling before them, and Sachiko should have had an empty cup since she washed down that piece of sea bream. Concentrating on Sawazaki, Tsuneko had decided that the women could take care of themselves. Perhaps Sawazaki was not in a drinking mood, perhaps he was being reticent, perhaps he was not much of a drinker. In any case, he allowed his cup to be filled only once in three times Tsuneko presented the decanter. He could not in the end have drunk more than two or three cups. All through the meal he sat with the stiffest formality, almost like a soldier at attention.

  “Are you ever in Osaka or Kobe, Mr. Sawazaki?”

  “Never in Kobe. I do go to Osaka once or twice a year.”

  Unable to keep from wondering why this millionaire had agreed to the miai, Sachiko was on the watch for defects. Nothing so far had struck her as especially peculiar, though it was a little comical to see how he hated to be asked something he did not know the answer to. He hardly needed to pout—but maybe such was the nature of rich men. The prominent veins along the bridge of his nose, just below the eyebrows, suggested a quick temper. And there was something a little furtive about the man (was it Sachiko’s imagination?), something a little effeminate, brooding, even timid, about the cast of his features. She could see how little interest he had in the miai. She had noticed that he turned a searching eye on Yukiko several times during his conversation with Mrs. Sugano. Afterwards that dark, cold glance scarcely bothered with her at all. Mrs. Sugano and Tsuneko being at great pains to bring the two together, Sawazaki would occasionally say a word or two to Yukiko—and promptly turn to someone else. Yukiko’s monosyllabic answers were partly to blame, but there could be little doubt that he was not pleased with her. Sachiko concluded that the principal reason was that left eye. In spite of Sachiko’s hopes that the spot would have faded, it was only darker today. Yukiko had started to put on her usual thick powder, and Sachiko had had to restrain her—was it not just a little too thick? Sachiko had tried various tricks, adding a touch of rouge and thinning the powder, but there was no hiding the spot. Mrs. Sugano and Tsuneko gave no sign that they noticed. Yukiko was seated on Sawazaki’s right, however, and the brilliant early-summer light set the mark off sharply. Her own indifference helped a little: she behaved as though the spot were the most natural thing in the world, nothing to be apologetic or embarrassed about; but Sachiko, sure that it was darker than the day before, did not see how she could leave her sister exposed much longer.

  “I am awfully sorry, but I have to think
about train time.” Sawazaki stood up abruptly when lunch was over, and Sachiko thanked him from the bottom of her heart.

  1 Yanagawa Seigan (1789–1858) was a poet in the Chinese style.

  2 The name of the garden cottage is literally “Pavilion of the Rotted Axe-handle,” a reference to a Chinese woodcutter the handle of whose axe rotted as he stood watching a supernatural chess game.

  6

  “NOW THAT YOU are here, you must stay another night. Tomorrow is Sunday, and we can have someone show you the Waterfall of Filial Piety. You remember we talked about it at lunch.”

  But the sisters refused politely. As soon as Etsuko and Taeko were back, they began getting ready for the 3:09 train, which would have them in Gamagōri at five-thirty. Though it was a Saturday afternoon, the second-class car was almost empty. They found seats together, and the exhaustion from the day before overtook them. No one felt like talking. The car was oppressive and sticky in weather that announced the coming of the rainy season. Sachiko and Yukiko dozed off, and Taeko and Etsuko turned in a companionable way to the weekly magazines.

  “Etsuko, your fireflies are running away.” Taeko took up the firefly cage that hung by the window, and set it in Etsuko’s lap. The old man at the Sugano house had made Etsuko a cage to take along, a tin can with gauze stretched over the open top and bottom. The gauze had come loose, and one or two fireflies were crawling out.

  “Let me do it for you.” Etsuko was having trouble with the cord around the gauze. By shading the cage, one could see the green light of the fireflies even in the daytime. Taeko peered inside.

  “Look, look.” She passed it back to Etsuko. “You have lots of things besides fireflies.”