The Makioka Sisters by Junichiro Tanizaki

Author:Junichiro Tanizaki
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Sisters
ISBN: 9780679761648
Publisher: Vintage
Published: 1958-01-01T17:00:00+00:00

25

TEARS STREAMED over her cheeks and she sniffled occasionally; but she had told her story thus far clearly and with great composure. Her tone became heavier as they moved on to the question of her relations with Itakura. Her replies to Sachiko’s questions being limited to affirmation or denial, Sachiko had to fill in the gaps for herself. This was the story Sachiko pieced together:

Itakura came to seem in many ways a pleasant contrast to Okubata. Laugh though she might at the people in the main house, Taeko was not wholly unconscious of family and position, and she tried to hold herself back; but her heart worked against her conservative mind. She was not one to lose her head, whatever the crisis, and even after she fell in love with Itakura she was by no means blind to his faults. Particularly because of her failure with Okubata, she looked far into the future and weighed the profit and loss, and after examining the balance as cooly as she could, she concluded that her happiness lay in marrying Itakura. Sachiko, who had guessed a good deal of the truth without even considering that her sister might want to marry the man, was stunned. Taeko, however, had taken the man’s defects into her calculations: that he was an uneducated person who began as an apprentice, that he came from a family of tenant farmers in Okayama Prefecture, that he had the peculiar coarseness of emigrants returned from America. All that was true, said Taeko, but as a man Itakura ranked several grades higher than Okubata, the pampered child of wealth. His physique was splendid, and he would not hesitate to plunge into a fire if it seemed necessary. And best of all, he could support himself and his sister—he stood in sharp contrast to a man who lived by begging from his mother and brother. Going off to America without a cent, he had made his way with help from no one, and learned his trade—and art photography required not a little intelligence. Although his formal education left much to be desired, he had his own sort of intelligence and sensibility. He was more of a student, she had discovered, than Okubata with his university diploma. Family and inherited property and diplomas had lost their appeal for her; Okubata had been enough to show her how worthless they were. She meant now to be quite practical. She asked only that her husband satisfy three conditions: he must have a strong body, he must have a trade, and he must be willing to offer up his very life for her. In Itakura all three conditions were satisfied, and there was another point in his favor: with three brothers back on the farm, he had no family responsibilities. (The sister who kept house for him would go home once he was married.) She would have his affections to herself. Her position would be far easier than that of the wife of the oldest and wealthiest family imaginable.

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