Quicksand

by Junichiro Tanizaki

“No, I don’t. You must be the one who knows.”

  “If we go on doubting each other like this, there’ll be no end to it. Still, I can’t help feeling I’m the only one being put to sleep.”

  “And I feel the same way!”

  “But then, you know very well what happened at Hamadera!”

  “That’s why I feel it’s my turn to be deceived.”

  “Haven’t you ever been awake till Mitsu went home? Please tell me the truth.”

  “Never. And you?”

  “After medicine as strong as that I couldn’t stay awake if I wanted to!”

  “Oh? Then you did swallow it?”

  “Of course I did! See how pale I am!”

  “I’m as pale as you are!”

  We were still going on like that at eight in the morning, when the telephone rang, as usual.

  “Time to get up!” Mitsuko said.

  Rubbing his sleepy eyes, my husband got out of bed. Sometimes he had to go in to his office, but even if he was altogether too drowsy to leave the house, he knew Mitsuko had told him he mustn’t stay in the bedroom after eight o’clock, so he would go downstairs, perhaps to sit in the wicker chair on the veranda, and fall asleep there. That way, I could stay in bed as long as I liked, but my husband was so drained of energy that when he did go to the office he couldn’t put his mind to his work. He simply wanted to rest. Yet if he took too many days off, Mitsuko would tell him he seemed to want to spend all his time with me, so almost every morning, whether he had business or not, he would leave the house. “I’ll be back after I’ve had a nap,” he would say.

  That was when I began telling him: “Mitsu doesn’t bother about me; she just keeps saying what you should or shouldn’t do—it proves that you’re the one she loves.”

  But according to my husband, she wouldn’t have been so abusive to anyone she loved. “Isn’t she trying to wear me out,” he said, “to paralyze me so that I’ll lose all desire and the two of you can do whatever you like?”

  Strangely enough, at dinnertime, even though our stomachs were suffering from the sleeping medicine and we had no appetite, we both ate as much as we could, counting each other’s bowls of rice and doing our best to cram down food. We knew it was the only way to weaken the effect of the medicine.

  “You mustn’t have more than a second bowl,” Mitsuko would say. “If you eat too much, the medicine won’t work!” Finally she sat beside us at dinner and kept a sharp eye on how much we ate.

  When I think back on our physical state in those days, it seems amazing that we managed to survive. Every day our weakened stomachs were subjected to large doses of sleeping powder; perhaps because we couldn’t assimilate it, our minds were always cloudy, even during the day, as if we hardly knew whether we were alive or dead. We grew steadily paler and thinner, and worse yet, our senses dulled. Mitsuko, though, in spite of tormenting us and even putting a limit on our food, indulged herself in whatever delicacies she liked, and her complexion was as radiant as ever. For us, Mitsuko seemed to shine like the sun: no matter how exhausted we felt, the sight of her face brought us back to life; it was our sole remaining pleasure.

  Mitsuko herself remarked: “You seem to feel as if your nerves are numb, but you do brighten up a little when you see me, don’t you? Maybe the trouble is you’re just not passionate enough.” She could tell by the degree of excitement which of us had stronger feelings for her, she said, and that was all the more reason to keep on giving us sleeping medicine. Really, you might say she wasn’t interested in being offered an everyday love; nothing would satisfy her unless she felt it was a passion that flamed up even though desire had been blunted by the power of the medicine. . . .

  In the end, both my husband and I were like empty husks—she wanted us to seek no other happiness, to live only for the light of our sun, Mitsuko, with no further desires or interests in the world. If we objected to the medicine, she would burst into angry tears. Well, of course Mitsuko had long ago shown how much she liked to test the devotion of her admirers, but she must have had some other reason to carry it to such hysterical lengths. I wonder if it might not have been Watanuki’s influence. Had that first experience left her dissatisfied with an ordinary, wholesome relationship, so that she wanted to turn anyone who was in her clutches into another Watanuki? Otherwise why did she need to paralyze our senses so cruelly? In the old tales you often heard of spirit possession, by the dead or the living, but the way Mitsuko behaved, wilder and wilder every day, made you think she herself was under the spell of Watanuki’s deep-seated bitterness. It was enough to make your hair stand on end.

  And not only that. It wasn’t just Mitsuko; even my normal, healthy husband, a man without the slightest trace of irrationality, had changed character. By the time I noticed it, he had already become spiteful and jealous; humoring Mitsuko, with a weird grin on his pallid face, he seemed womanish, crafty, mean-spirited. If you watched closely, everything about him—his tone of voice, the whole way he talked, his facial expression, the look in his eyes—seemed to be the very image of Watanuki. I know a person’s face is supposed to reflect what he feels in his heart—but still, do you suppose there really is such a thing as a vengeful spirit’s curse? Is that just a foolish superstition? Anyway, Watanuki was so dreadfully spiteful that it was easy to imagine him putting a curse on us and casting some kind of spell to take possession of my husband.

  “You’re getting to be more and more like Watanuki,” I told him one day.

  “I think so myself,” he replied. “Mitsu wants to turn me into a second Watanuki.”

  By that time he had meekly bowed to his fate, whatever it might bring. Far from trying to resist becoming another Watanuki, he seemed happy about it; as for the sleeping medicine, eventually he was asking Mitsuko to give him more. And Mitsuko, now that the three of us had arrived at this stage . . . how could there be a satisfactory conclusion for her? She must have felt desperate, ready to do anything, maybe even to weaken us with that medicine until she had killed us off—didn’t she have a scheme like that buried deep in her heart? . . . I wasn’t the only one who thought so. My husband was resigned to it. She might just be waiting for the day we both dwindled down to wraiths and died, a day not far off, when she would skillfully have freed herself from us and become completely respectable, ready for a good match.

  “Mitsu seems to be thriving, but look how sickly you and I are,” he said. “I’m sure she has something like that in mind.”

  By then both of us were so debilitated that we no longer felt the least pleasure; we lived only with the thought that today or tomorrow might be our last.

  Ah . . . how happy I would have been if we had died together then, as we expected. What changed everything was that newspaper article. It was around the twentieth of September, I think. Anyway, one morning my husband demanded I get up, to see what somebody had sent us. He spread out the gossip page of a newspaper I’d never seen before, and the first thing that struck my eye was a big photograph of that agreement Watanuki had had me sign, along with the heading (circled twice in read ink) of a long article! And I noticed an announcement that the reporter had accumulated a great deal of material; this was only the beginning of a series of articles exposing the sordid vices of the leisure class.

  “Look at that!” I said. “Watanuki tricked us after all!” Yet I felt curiously calm, not in the least bitter or angry. I thought that at last the end had come.

  “Yes, but he’s a fool!” My husband smiled coldly, the blood draining from his cheeks. “What good does it do him to make all that public?”

  “Never mind,” I said. “We can just ignore it.”

  I felt confident that people would find it hard to believe, since that so-called newspaper was really nothing but a scandal sheet; still, I called Mitsuko right away to warn her of what had happened.

  “Somebody sent us this paper—did you get one too, Mitsu?”

  She hurried out to look, and when she came back she said: “Yes, it’s here! Luckily n
obody else has seen it!”

  Hiding the paper under her kimono, she came straight over to our house.

  “What do you suppose we can do about it?” Mitsuko asked.

  At first we decided there was no need to be upset. If Watanuki had sold them the material, surely he wouldn’t have gone out of his way to incriminate himself; the gossip about my affair with Mitsuko was nothing new either, so it might all blow over without much effect. Mitsuko’s family found out about it in another two or three days, but we had my husband assure them that the reports were false.

  “It’s the same old slander,” he told them, “and this time it’s gone too far. You could sue the paper for publishing that forged signature.”

  For the moment we felt relieved. But those articles went on day after day, getting sharper and more revealing and bringing to light even facts unfavorable to Watanuki, along with stories about the Kasayamachi inn, our excursions to Nara, the time Mitsuko put stuffing under her kimono to meet my husband—the reporter seemed to know things Watanuki himself wouldn’t have known. At this rate, everything about the Hamadera episode would be coming out, from the suicide hoax to the way my husband was drawn into the whirlpool. Another funny thing was that although Mitsuko and I both locked away our letters, one of the letters I sent her—a terribly violent letter, full of embarrassing expressions—had somehow been stolen and a photo of it boldly published in the paper. Only Ume could have taken it, so we had to conclude that she was in league with Watanuki. In fact, she came to see me two or three times after being fired by Mitsuko’s family and loitered around suspiciously, with no particular business. Did she want more money, after everything I’d done for her? I wondered. Finally I just ignored her, thinking it wasn’t necessary to trouble myself any further, but she came again a few days before that first newspaper article, said something waspish about Mitsuko, and left. I never saw her again.

  “What an ungrateful woman!” Mitsuko exclaimed. “She was never just a servant, all the time she was at my house. I treated her like my own sister. . . .”

  “Probably you spoiled her.”

  “That’s what you call biting the hand that feeds you. How could she possibly complain, after all you did for her, Sister!”

  “She must have been bribed by Watanuki.”

  Well, it’s only a guess, but once the newspaper began to investigate on the basis of Watanuki’s information and started ferreting out one secret after another, perhaps they were lucky enough to get hold of Ume. Or else that awful Watanuki had worked with her from the beginning and maybe even sold the reporter his own secrets, out of desperation. No matter what, by this time we didn’t have a moment to waste. If we kept hesitating, sooner or later Mitsuko would be confined to her house, so she wanted us to go ahead with the plan we had agreed upon. Still, days went by, one after another, as we discussed exactly how to carry it out. In the meantime the story of Hamadera began to appear.

  As for what happened later, all the newspapers carried full reports of that scandal, so I’m sure you’ve read more than enough about it. I won’t try to go into everything that took place in those last days—talking on and on like this has me too excited to be coherent anyway—only there’s a certain detail the newspapers missed, and that’s the fact that the one who insisted we kill ourselves, and who made the final arrangements, was Mitsuko.

  I think it was the day we learned about the letter Ume had stolen that Mitsuko brought over all my old letters, everything she had.

  “It’s too dangerous to leave these at my house,” she declared.

  “Shall I burn them?” I asked.

  “No, no!” Mitsuko said quickly. “We can’t tell how soon we may have to die, and I want to leave this whole record behind in place of a suicide note. Please, Sister, save all these along with the letters in your cabinet.”

  She told us to put our own things in order, and a few days later, around one o’clock on the afternoon of October 28, she came to us and said: “It’s getting to be very difficult at home. I feel as if once I go back I’ll never be let out again.” She couldn’t bear the thought of running away and then being pursued and caught, she said; better to die in our familiar bedroom.

  Then we hung my portrait of Kannon on the wall over our beds, and together the three of us burned incense.

  “If I’m watched over by my Kannon bodhisattva, I’ll die happy,” I said.

  “After we’re dead, I suppose they’ll call this the ‘Mitsuko Kannon,’” my husband put in. “Everybody will respect it, and we can rest in peace.”

  Let’s nestle close, we agreed, one on either side of Mitsuko like the two bodhisattvas attending the Buddha—so close and intimate that we’d have no more jealous quarrels in our next lives. We joined the beds together and arranged three pillows side by side, with Mitsuko in the middle, and drank down that fatal medicine. . . .

  . . . What? Yes, it’s true, somehow I wondered whether I might be the only one left alive. As soon as I woke up the next morning I wanted to follow them to the other world. But the thought came to me that my survival might not have been an accident; maybe I’d been deceived by them even in death. Wasn’t leaving that packet of letters in my charge another clue? Perhaps they were afraid I might still come between them even after their love suicide! Ah. . . . (The widow Kakiuchi suddenly burst into tears.) If I hadn’t had those suspicions, I couldn’t have let myself go on living—and yet there’s no use holding a grievance against the dead. Even now, rather than feeling bitter or resentful, whenever I think of Mitsuko I feel that old longing, that love. . . . Oh, please, forgive me all these tears. . . .

  Table of Contents

  Cover

  Table of Contents

  Copyright

  About the Author

  Also by Junichirō Tanizaki

  A Note About the Author

  A Note About the Translator

  Quicksand

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33