The Makioka Sisters Read online

  Sachiko could see too that Taeko was determined not to join the main family in Tokyo. Yukiko had said that they were much too crowded to be summoning new additions, but it seemed clear that even if the summons were to come, Taeko would now ignore it. Taeko said that with her brother-in-law so bent on economy, she would not mind if he reduced her allowance. She had her savings and the income from her dolls. The expenses at the main house being heavy—there were six growing children to look after, and there was Yukiko—Taeko wanted somehow to lessen the burden, she said. She hoped that one day she might get along with no allowance at all. But there were favors she wanted in return. She wanted her brother-in-law’s permission to go to France, perhaps the following year, and she wanted him to let her have part, or all, of the money her father had left for her wedding expenses. She did not know how large a sum Tatsuo was holding, but she thought it would probably be at least enough to pay for six months or a year in Paris and for passage both ways. If she used up the whole of it and there was nothing left to pay for her wedding, she could not complain.

  Taeko then asked Sachiko to choose a good time—it did not have to be immediately—for approaching the main house. Taeko would not mind going herself to state her case. The idea of having Okubata pay for the trip was out of the question. He was fond of making such offers, but what in fact could he do? Taeko knew the answer better than Okubata himself. Possibly he meant to go crying to his mother again, but Taeko disliked the thought of taking money from him before they were married. Even after they were married, she had no intention of touching his property, and indeed she meant to keep him from touching it himself. She wanted to make her way alone, she would see to it that he did not come bothering Sachiko again, and she hoped that Sachiko would worry herself no more.

  Teinosuke, upon hearing all this from his wife, said he thought it best not to interfere. They should see how serious Taeko was, and if it appeared that her decision was final, they could take up the task of winning over the main house. So the matter ended.

  Taeko was as busy as ever. She denied that she was no longer interested in dolls. It was true that she would as soon stop work, but for many reasons she had to work harder than ever: orders were coming in, and she wanted to save a little more money, and it was costing her a great deal to live, and so on. And, she added, the knowledge that sooner or later she would give up doll-making only made her the more eager. She wanted to leave behind as many masterpieces as she possibly could. She also went for an hour or two every day to Mrs. Tamaki’s sewing school, and she still kept up her dancing.

  It appeared that the dancing was more than a hobby. She hoped to become a teacher. She went once a week to practice under Yamamura Saku, the second dance mistress to carry that name. Saku, a granddaughter of the Kabuki actor Ichikawa Sagijūrō, was popularly known as Sagi-saku. Of the two or three schools that called themselves Yamamura, Sagi-saku’s was said to be truest to the old tradition. Her studio was in second floor rooms up a narrow alley in one of the pleasure quarters, and most of her pupils were professional ladies. Only a few were amateurs, and among them still fewer could really be called chaste young women. Taeko always brought her dancing kimono and fan with her and changed in a corner of the studio. As she waited among the professionals for her turn, she would watch the dancing and now and then nod to a geisha acquaintance. Her behavior was not at all improper when one considered her age, but she was uncomfortably aware that the others, even Saku, took her to be no more than twenty, and thought her a pert and knowing young lady indeed. Saku’s pupils, amateurs and professionals alike, were much grieved to see the Osaka dance lose to the Tokyo dance. In their devotion to the Yamamura school and their desire to show the Osaka dance to the world, some of the more enthusiastic among them had formed a club called the Daughters of Osaka, which presented a dance recital once a month at the home of Mrs. Kamisugi, widow of an Osaka lawyer. Taeko occasionally danced in the recitals—such was her devotion to the art.

  Teinosuke and Sachiko always took Etsuko and Yukiko to the recitals in which Taeko was to appear. Presently they came to know the other Daughters of Osaka. Toward the end of April, Taeko brought a request from one of the officers that they be allowed to use the Ashiya house for the June recital. The Daughters had been inactive since July of the preceding year because of the China Incident. But since theirs was such an unpretentious organization, no one could object to its having an occasional recital even in time of crisis, said one of the members, provided it took care to purge itself of frivolity, and they might well change the meeting place occasionally, lest the burden on Mrs. Kamisugi be too heavy. Sachiko, very fond of the dance, replied that the group would be most welcome, though she could not offer the facilities Mrs. Kamisugi could. Because it would be a nuisance to bring Mrs. Kamisugi’s portable stage from Osaka, they decided to move the furniture from the two Western-style rooms on the first floor of the Ashiya house, to have the dances before a gold screen in the dining room, and to seat the guests on the parlor carpet as on the matted floor of an old-style theater. The dressing room was to be upstairs, the recital was to be from one to four on the afternoon of the first Sunday in June, and Taeko was to dance “Snow.”

  From the beginning of May, Taeko went to Osaka two or three times a week to practice, and for a week from about the twentieth Saku herself came out to Ashiya every day. Saku, who was fifty-seven and naturally delicate, and who to make matters worse had in recent years been suffering from a kidney ailment, almost never went out. For her to go all the way from the south end of Osaka to Ashiya in the summer heat was quite unprecedented. No doubt she wanted to show her gratitude to Taeko, so devoted to the Osaka dance that she did not hesitate to mingle with professional ladies, but in addition she may have seen that she could not continue to live in retirement if she meant to revive the fortunes of the Yamamura school. Etsuko, who had been resigned to the fact that Saku’s studio was not the place for her, announced that she too would like to take up dancing. Saku replied that she would not at all mind visiting Ashiya ten days or so a month.

  Saku generally told them when they might expect her the following day, but she never arrived on time. She would be an hour or two late, and when the weather was bad she would not come at all. Taeko, busy with her dolls, soon found the answer: she had someone telephone when Saku arrived, and while she was hurrying home, Etsuko had a lesson.

  After Saku had talked twenty minutes or a half hour with Sachiko, they would slowly begin to clear away the furniture. Humming the accompaniment and demonstrating the steps and gestures, Saku would soon be gasping for breath. Sometimes she would arrive with blanched face and report that she had had a kidney attack the evening before. Fond of telling people that she had to stay healthy for her dancing, however, she appeared not to let the illness worry her. She was also fond of saying that she was no talker, but as a matter of fact she was an excellent conversationalist and mimic, and she had no trouble leaving Sachiko helpless with laughter. Perhaps it was a talent she had inherited from her actor grandfather. Her face, when one thought about it, was rather long and bold for her frail body, and suggested theater breeding. One could not help thinking how it would have become her, had she been born long ago, to shave her eyebrows and blacken her teeth, and wear long, trailing skirts in the old manner. A thousand expressions moved over her face as she went through one of her imitations. She could take on another’s mannerisms as she would put on a mask.

  Back from school, Etsuko would change to the unfamiliar kimono—she almost never wore Japanese clothes except to go viewing cherry blossoms—and Japanese socks that happened to be a little too large for her, take up the Yamamura fan with its flower-and-wave pattern, and dance the opening lines of “Ebisu Fair”:

  The April cherries bloom at Omuro.

  To the sound of samisen and drum,

  One face turns to the other.

  In the long summer afternoon, the last of the Hirado lilies glowed as if aflame. It was still daylight when Etsuko finished and Tae
ko began her “Snow.” The two younger Stolz children, who played in the parlor with Etsuko almost every evening after school, stared curiously in from the terrace, resigned to having lost their .playmate and playground. Sometimes the older boy, Peter, would join them. One day Fritz came inside.

  “Miss Saku.” He imitated Sachiko.

  “Ye-e-es?”

  “Miss Saku.” Rosemarie joined in. “Ye-e-es?” “Miss Saku.”

  “Ye-e-es?” With the utmost seriousness, Saku kept up her part of the game with the little blue-eyed foreigners.

  3

  “KOI-SAN, the photographer wants to know is it all right for him to come in.”

  Opening the recital with a special attraction, Saku had had Etsuko dance first. Etsuko was still in her dance kimono when she came upstairs.

  “Please.”

  Taeko, dressed for her dance, was leaning against a pillar while O-haru helped her into her socks. Only her eyes turned toward Etsuko—the heavy Japanese coiffure did not move. Etsuko of course knew that this young aunt, to be ready for the recital, had for some ten days been wearing kimono rather than foreign dress and tying her hair up in the Japanese manner, and yet the change seemed to come as a fresh surprise. Taeko’s kimono was the undermost of Tsuruko’s three wedding kimonos. Because the gathering was to be such a small one, and because the times did not permit extravagance, Taeko had decided not to have a new kimono made. Discussing the problem with Sachiko, she remembered that the wedding kimonos were still at the main Osaka house. Sachiko’s father, in his most prosperous period, had commissioned three famous artists to paint the designs, representations of the “three scenic spots of Japan”: the shrine at Itsukushima on a black ground, the pine-covered islands of Matsu-shima Bay on a red ground, and the strand at Amanohashidate on a white ground. The kimono was almost new, having been worn only at the wedding some sixteen or seventeen years before. In the white kimono and a black damask obi, Taeko seemed larger and more mature than usual and somehow more like Sachiko. Her full, rather round face had taken on a weight and dignity lacking when she wore foreign clothes.

  “Photographer.” Etsuko called to a young man, twenty-six or twenty-seven, who stood looking in at Taeko. Only his head showed over the stairs. “She says for you to come in.”

  “Please, Etsuko. It is rude to call the gentleman ‘Photographer.’ Say ‘Mr. Itakura.’“

  Itakura was already in the room. “Stand exactly as you are, Koi-san.” He knelt down in the door and aimed his Leica at her. He took five or six pictures in quick succession, from the front, the back, the left, and the right.

  Etsuko’s dance had been followed by “Dark Hair,” “The Maiden at the Well,” and “Great Buddha.” After the fifth dance, “Gift from Edo,” by one of Saku’s leading disciples, there was an intermission for refreshments. The audience in the parlor, limited to the families of the dancers, came to no more than twenty or thirty people. In the very front row, Fritz and Rosemarie Stolz had been watching solemnly from the very beginning, a little uncomfortable on Japanese-style cushions. Their mother sat outside on the terrace. She had said when she heard of the recital that she must see it, and she came in through the garden at a signal from Fritz that Etsuko was about to begin. No, the terrace would do nicely—she watched from a rattan chair someone brought her.

  “You are being very good today, Fritz.” Saku came from behind the gold screen, where she had been helping the dancers. She wore a formal black kimono embroidered with her family crest.

  “They are behaving beautifully,” said Mrs. Kamisugi. “What nationality are they?”

  “They are friends of the little girl here, German children. We have become great friends ourselves. They call me ‘Miss Saku.’“

  “Really? They seem most interested.”

  “And see how properly they sit.”

  “Little German girl—I am sure someone told me your name.” Saku had trouble remembering Rosemarie’s name. “Are you and Fritz comfortable on the floor? Stretch your legs if you like.”

  Fritz and Rosemarie sat in stem silence. They hardly seemed the Stolz children with whom Etsuko played every day.

  “Can you eat this food, Mrs. Stolz?” Teinosuke noticed that Mrs. Stolz was using the chopsticks most inexpertly as she attacked the dish on her knee—and that it was a Japanese delicacy of a sort foreigners were thought not to eat. “You must find it impossible. Bring Mrs. Stolz something she can eat, someone.” He saw O-hana pouring tea. “Bring a piece of cake for Mrs. Stolz. Take that other away.”

  “No, really. I am doing very well.”

  “You mean you can eat it?”

  “I like it … very much,” said Mrs. Stolz in hesitant Japanese.

  “Really? You really like it? Bring the lady a spoon.”

  It appeared that she was telling the truth, and she left not a grain of rice on the plate when O-hana had brought her a spoon.

  Taeko’s dance was to come after the intermission. Teinosuke, very much on edge, had been up and down the stairs any number of times. Just when they thought he had finally settled down among the guests, he would be off up the stairs again.

  “It is almost time.”

  “I am quite ready, as you can see.”

  Sachiko, Etsuko, and the photographer Itakura sat at Taeko’s feet. Refreshments had been brought to them too. Taeko, a napkin spread over her lap, took the food in tiny bites, so as not to disturb her make-up. Her full lips, opened into a round “O,” seemed fuller than ever, and after each bite she took a sip from the teacup O-haru held for her.

  “You are not eating?” Sachiko asked her husband.

  “I ate downstairs. Is it all right for Koi-san to eat so much? I know they say an army never fights on an empty stomach, but do you dance when you are stuffed?”

  “She had almost no lunch. She says she is so weak from hunger that she might collapse right in the middle of her dance.”

  “But the singers in the puppet theater go without food until they have finished a performance. I know dancing and singing are different, but ought you to be eating so much?”

  “I am really eating very little. It looks like more because I have to take such tiny bites.”

  “I have been admiring her,” said Itakura.

  “Why?”

  “She struggles away at it like a goldfish eating bread, and yet she does manage to put it down.”

  “I thought you were staring harder than you needed to.”

  “You do look like a goldfish, Koi-san.” Etsuko laughed happily.

  “I have had lessons in how to eat.”

  “From whom?”

  “From geishas who come to Miss Saku’s. Once they have on their make-up, they have to keep their lips dry. The trick is to put food deep in the mouth without touching the lips. They practice when they are very young, on the drippiest things they can find.”

  “You have a most remarkable store of knowledge.”

  “And did you come to see the dancing, Mr. Itakura?” asked Teinosuke.

  “Yes. But more to take pictures.”

  “You mean to use the pictures on postcards?”

  “Not this time. It is not often you see Koi-san with her hair up. These pictures are to remember the occasion by.”

  “He is taking them for nothing,” said Taeko.

  Itakura had opened a small studio where he specialized in “art photography.” Once an apprentice in the Okubata shop, he had gone to American before being graduated from middle school, and had studied photography in Hollywood for five or six years— it was said that he had hoped to become a movie photographer, but had not found his chance. When, upon his return, he opened a studio, his employer, the brother of Taeko’s “Kei-boy,” lent him money and introduced him to prospective customers, and Kei-boy recommended him to Taeko, just then looking for someone to take advertising pictures. He now did all the photographs for her pamphlets and postcards, and was himself able to advertise through her. Knowing of her affair with young Okubata, he was most re
spectful toward her, sometimes behaving almost as if he were a servant. A certain American-style forwardness helped him work his way into any opening offered, and—they hardly knew how—he had somehow become very close to the Makioka family, on the best of terms with the maids. He liked to tell O-haru that he would have Sachiko talk her into marrying him.