The Makioka Sisters

by Junichiro Tanizaki

  8

  EARLY IN JULY Teinosuke had to spend two or three days in Tokyo. Worried about Yukiko, he found time to visit the Shibuya house. He did not see Tatsuo, but Tsuruko and Yukiko both seemed in good spirits. Though he talked alone to Tsuruko while Yukiko was out making ice cream, the question of the miai did not come up. He thought the main house might have had some hint from Mrs. Sugano of the reasons why Yukiko had not pleased the man, but Tsuruko did not seem to want to discuss the miai. Possibly no word had come; possibly she preferred to keep it secret. She talked a great deal of how, since it would soon be the twenty-second anniversary of her mother’s death, they would all have to go to Osaka for memorial services;l and perhaps Yukiko’s unexpectedly good spirits were due to the fact that she could count on returning to Ashiya soon.

  They had decided, said Tsuruko, to move the day up from September 25, the anniversary of her mother’s death, to September 24, a Sunday, and have services at the Zenkeiji Temple. She and Tatsuo would therefore go to Osaka on Saturday, September 23. The problem was which of the children to take. Six would be far too many. Teruo, the oldest, would of course have to go, and though they could leave behind the other three of school age, Masao and Umeko would have to go too. And whom to put in charge of the house? It would be ideal if Yukiko would agree to stay in Tokyo, but one could hardly order her away from memorial services for her own mother. They had no one else to ask, there was nothing to do but leave the maid O-hisa in charge. Did he think it would be all right?—for only two or three days, after all. There would be six of them in Osaka, then, and where should they all stay? Probably at two houses. Six people would be more than they could have descending on one house. Tsuruko would ask to be put up in Ashiya. So she rambled on, worrying about an event more than two months off.

  Sachiko herself had been wondering what the main house meant to do about the memorial services, and had thought of writing to Tokyo before long. In December 1937, on the twelfth anniversary of her father’s death, Tatsuo had had simple services in a Tokyo temple of the same sect as the Zenkeiji. The main house had just that autumn moved to Tokyo and faced all the problems of the new life, and it would not have been easy to return to Osaka. Formal greetings and lacquer incense bowls for memorial offerings were sent around to relatives: though aware of the impropriety, Tatsuo meant to have memorial services for the late Mr. Makioka in Tokyo; he would be delighted to see anyone who happened to be in the city, but he could hardly ask a special trip; and he hoped rather that everyone would visit the Zenkeiji during the day. The reasons given were valid, and Sachiko sensed too that Tatsuo, who knew how lavish services in Osaka would have to be, feared the expense. Their father had been a patron of the arts, and actors and geishas in considerable numbers were present at services as late as the second anniversary. The second-anniversary banquet at the Harihan Restaurant, complete with professional entertainers, made one think of the Makioka family at its most prosperous. His lesson learned, Tatsuo sent out invitations for the sixth-anniversary services in 1931 to a small and select circle, but many remembered and more heard by chance, and the modest plans for refreshments at the temple had to be dropped in favor of another banquet at the Harihan. Although there were those who rejoiced in the display (“Father loved extravagance so, it is good to spend a little money on him— think of it as filial piety”), Tatsuo complained that the question was whether he should or should not spend beyond his means. The Makioka fortune no longer being what it once was, the services should have been more modest, as he was sure Mr. Makioka in his grave would agree. Everything considered, it seemed likely that he had special reasons for staying away from Osaka on the twelfth anniversary. The family elders all criticized him severely: what was this, not coming down from Tokyo for a parent’s memorial services? The people at the main house had become wonderfully economical, it was true, but was not a memorial service rather special? With Tsuruko caught in the cross fire, Tatsuo’s final excuse had been that he would make amends by having the sixteenth anniversary services in Osaka. Sachiko had therefore been wondering what he meant to do on this twenty-second anniversary of her mother’s death. It was less that the other relatives would complain than that she herself would be most dissatisfied if services were again held in Tokyo.

  Tatsuo had no strong personal feelings in the matter, not having known his mother-in-law. Sachiko’s own feelings about her mother were rather different from her feelings about her father. Her father, who died of apoplexy in December, 1925, at the age of fifty-four, had not lived an especially long life. Her mother’s life was short; she died in 1917 at the age of thirty-six. Sachiko herself was just at that age, it occurred to her, and Tsuruko was already two years older, and yet she remembered her mother as far more beautiful than either herself or Tsuruko today. The circumstances of her mother’s illness and death had something to do with the fact that Sachiko, fourteen at the time, saw her mother as fresher and younger than she actually was. Though victims of lung diseases often become repulsively pallid and emaciated, Sachiko’s mother preserved a strange charm to the end. Her face, a cleaner white, took on no shadow, and her hands and feet, thin though they were, still carried a warm glow. She had fallen ill shortly after Taeko’s birth. Sent at first to the seashore, to Hamadera and Suma, she was finally moved to a little rented house in the hills at Minoo when it became evident that the sea air only made her worse. Sachiko was allowed to see her mother in the last years only once or twice a month, and then for a very short time. She would find after she went home that the image of the sick woman lingered on and on in her mind, joined to the lonely sound of the waves or the wind in the pines, and it was thus that she came to idealize her mother, and her mother’s image became the focus of her affections. Because the family knew after the move to Minoo that the mother would not live long, Sachiko’s visits were not restricted as they had once been. There was a telephone call one morning, and she was dead shortly after Sachiko and the rest arrived at her bedside. The autumn rain, which had been falling for several days, beat against the glass doors at the veranda. The little garden sloped gently off to a mountain stream and all down the slope autumn hagi,2 beginning to shed its blossoms, was pounded at by the rain. With the water rising and people talking excitedly of a flood, the sound of the rushing water was far stronger in their ears than the sound of the rain. Sachiko would tremble as a stone in the bed of the stream, grinding against another, shook the foundations of the house, and she would wonder what to do if there should indeed be a flood. But at the sight of the quiet, utterly tranquil face of her mother going away as the morning dew, she quite forgot her fears, and felt as though something cool had swept over her, as though she were being drawn in by a vision and washed clean. It was sadness that she felt, but a sadness divorced from the personal, with a sort of musical pleasure in it, at the thought that something beautiful was leaving the earth. Though they had known that their mother would not live through the autumn, the grief would have been scarcely endurable, the darkness far more intense and persistent, had the dead face been less beautiful.

  Sachiko’s father, early addicted to pleasure, had been married at the age of twenty-eight, rather late for the time, to a woman nine years younger than himself. According to the family elders, it was such a happy match that for a time he stopped going to the teahouses. The two stood in complete contrast to each other, the husband a lover of gaiety and lavishness, the wife, born of a Kyoto merchant family, in every sense the fragile, self-effacing Kyoto beauty. For all the contrast, people looked upon them as a couple to be envied. But Sachiko had no memories from so early a day. She remembered rather that her father was always away chasing after his pleasures, and that her mother, the docile, long-suffering townsman’s wife, managed the house with no hint of dissatisfaction. The addiction to pleasure, verging on debauchery, only became more shameless with the mother’s illness, and yet Sachiko knew that it was the Kyoto beauty her father liked best. He chose Kyoto more often than Osaka for his pleasures, and he sometimes too
k Sachiko with him to a Kyoto teahouse. And he loved Yukiko more than Taeko. No doubt he had all sorts of reasons, but one must have been that of the four sisters Yukiko most resembled her mother. Tsuruko too resembled her mother, while Sachiko and Taeko were like their father. Although Tsuruko’s face reminded one of the Kyoto beauty, she was tall and generously built, and quite without her mother’s fragile grace. Less than five feet tall—a woman of the last century —the mother had had tiny hands and feet. The graceful fingers reminded one of a delicately wrought miniature. Taeko, the shortest of the four daughters, was taller than her mother had been, and Yukiko, an inch taller than Taeko, was rather large by comparison, but she more than the others had inherited her mother’s good points. She had about her a sort of perfume to remind one of her mother.

  Sachiko heard of the memorial services only through her husband. Nothing came directly from either Tsuruko or Yukiko until the formal invitation arrived in mid-September. It struck her as a little odd, on reading the invitation, that the main house meant to move the sixteenth-anniversary services for her father up two years and hold them at the same time. Teinosuke too was surprised—nothing had been said in Tokyo of memorial services for the father. But whatever Tsuruko might have had in mind, there seemed little doubt that Tatsuo had meant from the start to combine the two services. It was not unusual to move up services for one parent or the other. Still Tatsuo, who had been criticized for the inadequacy of the earlier services, had promised to make amends when the sixteenth anniversary came. One could not deny, if confronted with the argument, that times had changed and that lavish display was improper in a national crisis, but if that was what worried Tatsuo, should he not have consulted the more troublesome relatives? To wait until the last minute and abruptly announce his decision—was it not a little tactless? The invitation said simply that the family would be much honored if such and such a person could be at the Zenkeiji Temple, Shimodera-machi, Osaka, at ten o’clock on the morning of September 24, for memorial services, the sixteenth and twenty-second respectively, for the late Mr. and Mrs. Makioka. It was not until some days later that Sachiko heard the details from Tsuruko over the telephone: although they had had no such plans when Teinosuke was in Tokyo, Tatsuo had suggested that it might be well to have the father’s services this year too, reckless spending for memorial services being difficult to reconcile with National Spiritual Mobilization; even so they had made the change in plans only recently, after they had begun the invitations, and after Tatsuo had decided that with a war on in Europe and no one able to say how long Japan could stay out, and with the China Incident, now in its third year, showing signs of becoming part of a world war, they must economize and tighten their belts a bit more; since there were to be so few guests they had not thought engraved invitations necessary, and they had had to call in clerks from the bank to help with the rewriting; there had been no time-for consultations, but Tsuruko did not think they would again be criticized—and she agreed completely with her husband. When she had finished this elaborate chain of apologies and explanations, she went on to tell of her own plans. She and Yukiko, with Masao and Umeko, would take the Swallow Express on the twenty-second. They hoped they might stay with Sachiko. Tatsuo and Teruo would take a night train on Saturday, return on Sunday night, and thus be no trouble to anyone. As for Tsuruko herself, it had been two years since she was last in Osaka. Inasmuch as she could leave the house in O-hisa’s hands this time and did not know when she could leave home again, she would really like to stay four or five days, but unfortunately she had to return on the twenty-sixth at the very latest. What of refreshments, asked Sachiko. Yes, refreshments—they had taken a room at the temple, and they would have a caterer bring in lunch. She had telephoned all the instructions to Shōkichi, whose father was taking care of the Osaka house. There were not likely to be complications, but to make very sure, could Sachiko check again with the temple and the caterer? Expecting some thirty-five guests, she had ordered lunch and sake for forty. They might ask the wife and daughter of the priest to warm the sake. They would have to serve it themselves, however, and she hoped Sachiko would be willing. Tsuruko, who rarely telephoned, talked on and on when she did. She would think of something more and something more that had to be said. Both Yukiko and Taeko would be at the services. How embarrassing to have people see the two of them, still unmarried. And what sort of presents should she bring to the family? It was Sachiko who finally said: “I will see you day after tomorrow, then.”

  1 On certain anniversaries, memorial services have a special significance.

  2 Lespedeza japonica.

  9

  THE MATTER TOUCHED upon at the end of the conversation—that it would be a trial to display the two sisters for whom husbands had not been found—probably troubled both Tatsuo and Tsuruko. One could see here another reason for their lack of enthusiasm. Tatsuo had wanted to have at least Yukiko married before this twenty-second anniversary—Yukiko, who was still “Miss” at thirty-two, while all the younger cousins were married and some of them mothers already. At the sixth-anniversary services in 1931, it had not been easy for Tsuruko and Tatsuo to hear how Yukiko “had not aged at all,” and this time the discomfort would be still more acute. True, Yukiko looked as young as ever, and she did not seem in the least humiliated at having been overtaken and passed by cousins. For that very reason people pitied her, and turned to reproach the main house. What a shame that such a woman should be so long unmarried; her dead mother and father must be lamenting in their graves. A good half of the responsibility was her own, thought Sachiko, who thoroughly sympathized with her brother-in-law.

  But she was upset at the thought of the approaching visit for reasons that had nothing to do with Yukiko. There had been another change in Taeko’s affairs.

  For a short time after Itakura’s death, Taeko had seemed dazed and apathetic. In a week or two, however, she had to all appearances recovered. She had been stunned by the death of a man for love of whom she had been prepared to brave all opposition, but she was not one to brood. Soon back at sewing school, she was as healthy and energetic as ever. Sachiko was filled with admiration: this time even Koi-san had been shaken, and it was fine of her to show it so little. With all these projects of hers, said Sachiko to Teinosuke, Koi-san could do things she herself could never hope to imitate.

  One day toward the middle of July, Sachiko had lunch with Mrs. Kuwayama at her favorite Kobe sushi restaurant. Koi-san had just called to make reservations for two, said the old man. Sachiko had no idea where she might have called from, since she had left the house that morning, and had equally little idea who the other person might be. Several times recently, added one of the boys, Koi-san had been in with a gentleman. Startled, Sachiko would have liked to hear more, but with Mrs. Kuwayama beside her she could only smile and change the subject. And the truth was that she was a little afraid to know who the man was. Leaving Mrs. Kuwayama after lunch, she went to a French movie she had seen once before. When she left the theater at five-thirty, she could hardly keep herself from wandering back toward the restaurant—Taeko would just then be arriving with her gentleman friend. Instead, she went straight home.

  A month later, toward the middle of August, Teinosuke, Sachiko, Etsuko, and O-haru went to see Kikugorō, playing that month in Kobe. (Taeko rarely accepted Sachiko’s invitations to a play or a movie. She meant to go, she would say, but some other time.) As they climbed from the taxi and started to cross the street, Sachiko and O-haru were held back by a red light. A taxi passed, and they had a glimpse of Taeko and Okubata inside —in the bright summer sunlight there could be no mistaking them. Lost in conversation, they did not know they had been seen.

  “O-haru, you are not to tell Mr. Makioka or Etsuko,” said Sachiko in consternation. Noting the change in Sachiko’s expression, O-haru nodded with great seriousness and looked at the ground. Sachiko deliberately held back. She wanted her heart to be pounding a little less violently when she overtook Teinosuke and Etsuko, a block or so ah
ead. Always in a crisis she felt the tips of her fingers go cold. She clutched at O-haru’s hand.