1936: osaka
arranging a marriage
some, it would appear, looked for deep and sub
tle reasons to explain the fact that Yukiko, the
third of four sisters, had passed the marriage
able age and reached thirty without a husband.
There was in fact no “deep” reason worth the
name. or if a reason had to be found, perhaps
it was that her sister Tsuruko in the main house
and her other sister sachiko, and Yukiko herself,
all remembered the luxury of their father’s last
years and the dignity of the Makioka name—in
a word, they were thralls to the family name, to
the fact that they were members of an old and
onceimportant family. in their hopes of find
ing Yukiko a worthy husband, they had refused
the proposals that in earlier years had showered
upon them. not one seemed quite what they
wanted. presently the world grew tired of their
rebuffs, and people no longer mentioned likely
candidates. Meanwhile the family fortunes
were declining. The best days for the Makiokas
had lasted perhaps into the midtwenties. Their
prosperity lived now only in the mind of the
osakan who knew the old days well. indeed
even in the midtwenties, extravagance and bad
management were having their effect on the
family business. The first of a series of crises had
overtaken them then. soon afterward sachiko’s
father died, the business was cut back, and the
shop in semba, the heart of old osaka—a shop
that boasted a history from the middle of the
last century and the days of the shogunate—
had to be sold. sachiko and Yukiko found it
hard to forget how it had been while their father
lived. before the shop was torn down to make
way for a more modern building, they could not
pass the solid earthen front and look in through
the shop windows at the dusky interior without
a twinge of sorrow.
The other night I ate at a real nice family
restaurant. Every table had an argument going.
—George Carlin, 1997
of a man who had once been a family retainer.
Tatsuo himself went back to his old bank. Quite
the opposite of sachiko’s father, who had been a
rather ostentatious spender, Tatsuo was austere
and retired almost to the point of timidity. such
being his nature, he concluded that rather than
try to manage an unfamiliar business heavily in
debt, he ought to take the safer course and let the
shop go, and that he had thus fulfilled his duty
to the Makioka family—had in fact chosen that
course precisely because he worried so about his
duties as family heir. To Yukiko, however, drawn
as she was to the past, there was something very
unsatisfactory about this brotherinlaw, and she
was sure that from his grave her father too was
reproaching Tatsuo. it was in this crisis, shortly
after the father’s death, that Tatsuo became most
enthusiastic about finding a husband for Yukiko.
The candidate in question was the heir of a
wealthy family and executive of a bank in Toyo
hashi, not far from nagoya. since that bank and
Tatsuo’s were correspondents, Tatsuo knew all he
needed to know about the man’s character and fi
nances. The social position of the saigusa family
of Toyohashi was unassailable, indeed a little too
high for what the Makioka family had become.
The man himself was admirable in every respect,
and presently a meeting with Yukiko was ar
