The Makioka Sisters Read online

  Choosing a week-end in mid-April, they set out. Etsuko, who put on a kimono scarcely ten times a year, and would have been uncomfortable in any case, was wearing a kimono a little too small for her. An intent expression on her holiday face (it was touched up very slightly with cosmetics), she concentrated on keeping her sandals from slipping off and her kimono from coming open. At dinner, a bare knee finally slipped through. She was clearly more at home in Western clothes. She still had her own childish way of holding chopsticks, moreover, and the kimono sleeve seemed to get in her way. When a particularly slippery vegetable shot from the chopsticks, slithered across the veranda, and came to rest in the moss outside, she was as pleased as the rest. The year’s expedition was off to a good start.

  The next morning they strolled first of all along the banks of Hirosawa Pond. Teinosuke took a picture with his Leica of the four of them—Sachiko, Etsuko, Yukiko, and Taeko—lined up in that order under a cherry tree whose branches trailed off into the water. They had a happy memory of the spot: one spring, as they had been walking along the pond, a gentleman had asked them most politely if he might take their picture. Writing down their address, he promised to send prints if the snapshots turned out well; and among the prints that arrived some ten days later was a truly remarkable one. Sachiko and Etsuko, turned away from the camera, were looking out over the rippled surface of the lake from under this same cherry tree, and the two rapt figures, mother and daughter, with cherry petals falling on the gay kimono of the little girl, seemed the very incarnation of regret for the passing of spring. Ever since, they had made it a point to stand under the same tree and look out over the pond, and have their picture taken. Sachiko knew too that in the hedge that lined the path there would be a camellia loaded with crimson blossoms. She never forgot to look for it.

  They climbed the embankment of Osawa Pond for a brief look at the cherries there, and went on past the temple gates—the Temple of the Great Awakening, the Temple of Clean Coolness, the Temple of the Heavenly Dragon—to arrive at the Bridge of the Passing Moon, beyond which, rising from the river, was Storm Hill with its cherry blossoms. At Storm Hill there were always throngs of Korean women in the plain yet richly dyed clothes of their peninsula, bringing a touch of the exotic and cosmopolitan to spring in the old capital. This year too, under the cherry trees along the river, they were gathered in twos and threes and fives, some of them stirred by the cherry-blossom sake to a rather unladylike ebullience.

  The year before, the Makiokas had had lunch at the Pavilion of the All-Merciful, and the year before that at one of the tea houses by the bridge. This year they chose the precincts of the Temple of the All-Conquering Law—that temple to which, in April each year, the twelve-year-olds of Kyoto are brought to pray for a happy adolescence.

  “Remember the tongue-cut sparrow,1 Etsuko? This is where he lived.” They had crossed the bridge back toward the city, and were starting through the bamboo groves near the Temple of the Heavenly Dragon.

  A chilly wind had come up by the time they passed the Nono-miya, the Shrine in the Fields, where in ancient times court maidens retired for purification before leaving to become Shrine Virgins at Ise. At the Enrian Hermitage a shower of cherry petals was falling, to decorate their kimono sleeves. Again they walked through the Temple of Clean Coolness, and, taking a train, arrived back at the Bridge of the Passing Moon yet a third time. After a rest they hailed a cab and drove to the Heian Shrine.

  Those weeping cherries just beyond the gallery to the left as one steps inside the gate and faces the main hall—those cherries said to be famous even abroad—how would they be this year? Was it perhaps already too late? Always they stepped through the gallery with a strange rising of the heart, but the five of them cried out as one when they saw that cloud of pink spread across the late-afternoon sky.

  It was the climax of the pilgrimage, the moment treasured through a whole year. All was well, they had come again to the cherries in full bloom. There was a feeling of relief, and a hope that next year they might be as fortunate, and for Sachiko, at least, the thought that even if she herself stood here next year, Yukiko might be married and far away. The flowers would come again, but Yukiko would not. It was a saddening thought, and yet it contained almost a prayer that, for Yukiko’s sake, she might indeed no longer be with them. Sachiko had stood under these same trees with these same emotions the year before and the year before that, and each time she had found it hard to understand why they should still be together. She could not bear to look at Yukiko.

  The willows and oaks beyond the cherry grove were sending out new buds. The oleanders had been clipped into round balls. Sending the four ahead, Teinosuke photographed them at all the usual spots: White Tiger Pond, with its iris-lined shore; the stepping stones called the Bridge of the Reclining Tiger, reflected from the water with the four figures. He had them line up under the truly glorious branches that trail down over the path from the pine-topped hillock to the west of the Pond of the Nesting Phoenix. All sorts of strangers took pictures of the Makioka procession. The polite would carefully ask permission, the rude would simply snap. There the family had had tea, here they had fed the red carp— they remembered the smallest details of earlier pilgrimages.

  “Look, Mother. A bride.”

  A wedding party was just leaving the Purification Hall. The curious had gathered to see the bride into her automobile, and the Makiokas caught only a glimpse of the white headdress and the brilliant bridal cloak. This was not the first time they had seen a bride at the Heian Shrine. Sachiko always felt a stabbing at the heart and walked on, but Yukiko and Taeko seemed strangely undisturbed. Sometimes they would join the crowd and wait for the bride to appear, and afterwards they would tell Sachiko how she had looked and how she had been dressed.

  Sachiko and Teinosuke stayed another night in Kyoto. On Monday they visited a nunnery which Sachiko’s father, then at the height of his prosperity, had built on Mt. Takao, to the west of the city, and spent a quiet half day exchanging reminiscences with the old abbess. The maples carried but a touch of new green, and over the bamboo drain a single bud of Indian quince was opening. In the stillness, one seemed to know the very heart of the nunnery. Delighted with the mountain water, Sachiko and her husband drank glass after glass. They walked the mile or so back down the mountain while it was still daylight. Although she knew that the cherries at Omuro would not yet be in bloom, Sachiko wanted to rest there a moment and taste the herb-scented spring cakes for which the temple is famous. But if they dallied too long they would want to stay another night—this had happened before— and shortly after five they left Kyoto Station, with regrets for the mountains and valleys to the north and east and west that they had had to leave unvisited.

  One morning some days later, when Teinosuke had left for work and Sachiko was cleaning his study, she noticed a sheet of paper on the desk. In the margin, beside several lines written in the cursive style, was this poem:

  Near Kyoto, on a day in April:

  “The beauties gather in festive dress.

  For the cherries are in bloom,

  At Saga in old Miyako.”

  Sachiko had been fond of poetry when she was in school, and recently, under the influence of her husband, she had taken to jotting down poems as they came to her. Teinosuke’s poem aroused her interest. A verse that she had not been able to finish at the Heian Shrine presently finished itself in her mind:

  Under the falling flowers, at the Heian Shrine:

  “The cherry blossoms that fall

  And leave us to mourn the spring—

  I shall hide them here in my sleeve.”

  She wrote it beside Teinosuke’s verse, and left the paper as she had found it. Teinosuke said nothing when he came home that evening, and Sachiko herself quite forgot her poem. The next morning as she started to clean the study, she found a new verse penned in after hers. Possibly it was a suggested revision.

  “Let me hide at least a petal

  In the sleeve of my f
lower-viewing robe,

  That I may remember the spring.”

  1 Of a well-known Japanese fairy tale.

  20

  “I THINK you ought to stop,” said Sachiko. “You will only wear yourself out, trying to do it all at once.”

  “But I can never stop once I begin.”

  It was Sunday. Although they had been there for the cherry blossoms but a month before, Teinosuke thought he would like to go to Kyoto again, this time for the new spring greenery. Sachiko had been feeling sluggish all day, however, and Teinosuke decided he might better stay home and cut the grass.

  Although the previous owner of the house had assured them that grass would not grow in the garden, Teinosuke was determined to have a try. He did indeed succeed in producing a lawn, but it was a very sickly lawn, always late to turn green in the spring. He worked twice as hard over it as most men would have. Discovering that the feebleness of the grass was owing at least in part to the fact that sparrows ate the early shoots, he worked almost full time each spring stoning sparrows. The rest of the family must help him, he insisted, and as the season approached they would say: “The time for the throwing of stones has come.” In a sun hat, kimono, and loose trousers, Teinosuke would go out on sunny days to dig weeds and cut the grass.

  “A bee, a bee! An enormous bee!”

  “Where?”

  “Over there. See?”

  On the terrace, under a reed awning, Sachiko was sitting in a chair of untrimrned birch logs. The bee skimmed her shoulder, circled a potted peony three or four times, and droned on to a bed of red and white Hirado lilies. Quite absorbed in trimming the grass, Teinosuke was advancing on the dark tangle of shrubbery and bamboo by the fence. Sachiko could see only the wide brim of his hat beyond a cluster of lilies.

  “The mosquitoes are more of a problem than any bee. They manage to bite their way through the gloves.”

  “I did tell you to stop, did I not?”

  “But a more important question is why you are not in bed.”

  “I only feel worse in bed. I thought I might be more comfortable here.”

  “How exactly do you ‘feel worse’?”

  “My head is heavy, my feet are draggy, I feel like vomiting. I wonder if it might not be the start of something really serious.”

  “Come, now. You have a case of nerves. And that,” he announced in a loud voice, “is all I mean to do.” The bamboo leaves rustled as he stood up. He threw down the knife he had been using to dig out plantain roots, took off his gloves, wiped the sweat from his forehead with a mosquito-bitten hand, and, rubbing at the small of his back, went over to rinse his hands under the faucet beside the flower bed.

  “Have we any Mosquiton?” He was scratching a wrist as he came up to the terrace.

  “O-haru, bring the Mosquiton, please.”

  Teinosuke went down into the garden again and began picking lilies. At their best four or five days before, the lilies were beginning to look faded and dirty. In particular, he objected to the white ones, yellowed like bits of old scrap paper. He earnestly pulled off the petals, and then the stamens that had been left behind like whiskers.

  “Here is the Mosquiton.”

  “Thank you.” He went on working for a time. “Have them clean all this up. Wait a minute—what have we here?” He looked into Sachiko’s eyes as he took the Mosquiton from her. “Come out in the light.”

  The terrace, under the reed awning, was already dusky. Teinosuke led his wife out into the direct light of the evening sun.

  “Your eyes are yellow.”

  “Yellow?”

  “The whites.”

  “What does that mean? Jaundice?”

  “I suppose so. Did you eat anything greasy?”

  “You know perfectly well that I had steak yesterday.”

  “That explains it.”

  “That does explain it. That explains why I have felt so strange all day.” Sachiko had taken alarm at the tone of Teinosuke’s voice. But if it was only jaundice, there was nothing to worry about. She looked strangely happy.

  “Let me see, let me see.” Teinosuke pressed his forehead to hers. “Not much fever. But it will not do for you to get excited. Go to bed, and we can have Dr. Kushida come look at you.”

  Dr. Kushida, an excellent diagnostician, was always much in demand. He was out on calls until eleven every night, not even going home for dinner. Since it was not easy to catch him, Teinosuke himself always went to the telephone and talked to the elderly nurse when they thought they really needed a doctor, but unless the illness seemed serious, they could not be sure that he would come promptly, or indeed that he would come at all. Teinosuke generally had to make the symptoms more impressive than they actually were. Now it was past ten, and still they were waiting.

  “It looks as though Dr. Kushida has deserted us.”

  But just before eleven an automobile stopped at the gate.

  “Jaundice. There’s no doubt about it.”

  “I had a very large steak yesterday.”

  “That’s the reason. Over-eating.” Dr. Kushida had a hearty way with his patients. “Have clam broth every day, and you’ll be well in no time.” He always swept in like a gale, conducted a brisk examination, and swept out again.

  Sachiko stayed in bed the following day. She did not feel really ill, and yet she did not feel well. For one thing, the weather was of the heavy, muggy sort, neither stormy nor clear, that comes before the beginning of the June rains; and for another, she had been unable to take a bath for several days. Feeling damp and sticky, she changed nightgowns repeatedly, and had O-haru sponge her back with alcohol.

  Etsuko came into the room.

  “What is that flower, Mother?” She pointed at the flower in the alcove.

  “A poppy.”

  “I think you should take it away.”

  “Why?”

  “Look at it—it sucks you up inside it.”

  “I see what you mean.” The child had a point. Sachiko herself had been feeling strangely oppressed by something in this sick room, and, without being able to say what it was, she could not help thinking that the cause was right before her eyes. Etsuko had put her finger on it. In the fields, the poppy was a pretty enough flower, but the single poppy in the alcove was somehow repulsive. You felt as though you were being “sucked up inside it.”

  “I see exactly what she means. It takes a child to see what is wrong,” said Yukiko admiringly. She took away the poppy and put flags and lilies in its place. But Sachiko still felt oppressed. It would be better to have no flowers at all, she concluded, and she asked Teinosuke to hang a poem in the alcove, a fresh, clean sort of poem. Although it referred to the quick evening showers that come in late summer and early autumn and was therefore a little unseasonal, Teinosuke decided upon this poem by Kagawa Kageki:l

  A far-off evening shower, on the Peak of Atago.

  Soon it will be roiling our Clear Cascade.

  Perhaps the change made a difference. Sachiko began to feel better the next morning. At about three in the afternoon the doorbell rang.

  “Mrs. Niu is at the door. A lady named Mrs. Shimozuma and a lady named Mrs. Sagara are with her.”

  Sachiko wondered what to do. Had Mrs. Niu been alone, Sachiko would have invited her upstairs. She had not seen Mrs. Niu for some time, and the lady had twice called while she was out. But she did not know Mrs. Shimozuma well, and she could not remember having met Mrs. Sagara at all. It would help if Yukiko would go down to receive them, but that was too much to expect. Yukiko was quite unable to talk to strangers. Sachiko could not turn Mrs. Niu away after all those fruitless calls—and besides, she was bored. Sending down word that she was unwell, in and out of bed, and that her appearance would therefore be nothing to do them honor, she had O-haru see the guests into the parlor. She rushed to the mirror, but it was a half hour before she had finished powdering her neglected face and making herself fairly presentable in a fresh kimono.

  “This is Mrs. Sagara.” Mrs.
Niu nodded toward a lady dressed in the American manner. One knew at a glance that she had just come back from abroad, “We were friends in school. Her husband’s with N.Y.K. They were in Los Angeles.”

  “How do you do,” said Sachiko. She regretted immediately that she had come down. Haggard as she was, she had had doubts about meeting any stranger, and she had not dreamed that the stranger would be so fearfully stylish.

  “You’ve been ill? What’s the trouble?”

  “I have had jaundice. If you look you can see the yellow in my eyes.”

  “You’re right. They’re very yellow.”

  “You’re still not feeling well?” asked Mrs. Shimozuma.

  “Today I am much better.”

  “We shouldn’t have bothered you. It’s your fault, Mrs. Niu. We should’ve left our names at the door.”

  “That’s not fair. The truth of the matter, Sachiko, is that Mrs. Sagara here came very suddenly. I’m to show her around. I asked her what she wanted to see, and she said she’d like to see a typical Osaka lady,”

  “And what do you mean by typical?” asked Sachiko.

  “I don’t really know—typical in all sorts of ways. I thought and I thought, and finally I chose you.”

  “Very foolish of you.”

  “But now that you’ve been chosen, you really must talk to us even if you don’t feel well. Oh, yes.” Mrs. Niu undid a bundle she had laid on the piano stool. Inside were two boxes of wonderfully large tomatoes. “From Mrs. Sagara.”

  “How beautiful. Where did you find such large ones?”

  “They’re from Mrs. Sagara’s. Tomatoes like these aren’t for sale.”

  “I should think not. And where do you live, Mrs. Sagara?”

  “North Kamakura. But I came back from abroad only last year, and I’ve been there only a month or two.”