Convenience Store Woman (2016) by SAYAKA MURATA

 

Bungeishunju first Japanese edition, 2016

 

 

The morning period is passing normally in the brightly lit box of the convenience store, I feel.  Visible outside the windows, polished free of fingerprints, are the figures of people rushing by.  It is the start of another day, the time when the world wakes up and the cogs of society begin to move.  I am one of those cogs, going round and round.  I have become a functioning part of the world, rotating in the time of day called morning.

 

 

Translated by

GINNY TAPLEY TAKEMORI

 

 

The Novel:  Keiko Furukura, a thirty-six year old 'convenience store woman,' is considered a disappointing oddball by her family and small circle of friends because she chooses to work part-time in a low-paying, unglamorous service-related job rather than accept either of the traditional roles — motivated career woman or stay-at-home wife and mother — that Japanese society demands that she accept.  Keiko has no interest in sex, no interest in finding a husband and none whatsoever in climbing the corporate ladder despite the fact that she is exceedingly bright and is the holder of a university degree.  Her entire life, indeed her entire identity, is inseparable from the job she does and the place in which she's been doing it for eighteen highly regimented, uneventful years.  'When I first started here,' she states early on in the novel, 'there was a detailed manual that taught me how to be a store worker, and I still don't have a clue how to be a normal person outside that manual.'  

 

Keiko is not lying.  She literally has no clue how to be a so-called 'normal person' and never has.  Her life has been a prolonged attempt to conceal her oddness from other people, starting with her parents and conventionally-minded younger sister.  She's become an expert at assuming poses and adopting attitudes designed to make her 'fit in' with others, a process that began when she was a child after she suggested, quite logically in her view, that her family take home and cook rather than bury a dead bird she had found in the park.  This off-putting behavior was soon followed by her decision to end a schoolyard fight between two of her male classmates by clouting one of them over the head with a shovel.  

 

These behaviors, completely natural as far as she was concerned, made Keiko the subject of censure and taught her that the best way to get along in life was to speak as little as possible and, when she was obliged to speak in order to maintain the appearance of normalcy, then to automatically echo whatever was being said by everyone around her.

 

The quest to camouflage her true self and avoid the hypercritical scrutiny of the world carried over into adulthood, defining Keiko's life both inside and outside the controlled, neon-lit fishbowl that is the convenience store.  'I'd noticed soon after starting the job,' we're told, 'that whenever I got angry at the same things as everyone else, they all seemed happy.  If I went along with the manager when he was annoyed or joined in the general irritation at someone skiving off the night shift, there was a strange sense of solidarity as everyone seemed pleased that I was angry too.'  And her efforts to assimilate are not exclusively limited to acts of verbal conformity.  She also copies the clothing styles and speech patterns of her co-workers Mrs Izumi and Sugawara, women with whom she has nothing in common beyond the fact they're employed by the same unnamed corporate entity and the three of them do their morning pre-shift exercises together each day, shouting motivational phrases in unison at the appropriate moments when prompted to do so by their manager.  'Good,' she congratulates herself one day after this tactic has once again prevented her from being viewed as a freak.  'I pulled off being a "person".'

This dishonest life, which Keiko accepts and to some extent even learns to enjoy, is thrown into turmoil by the arrival of Shiraha, a new employee whose poor attitude is matched by his slovenliness and air of scornful negativity.  Unlike Keiko and the store's hardworking manager, Shiraha views himself as being too good for the position he's been hired to fill, deliberately flouting the rigid store rules by arriving late and talking on his cell phone while operating the cash register.  He dismisses Keiko and their fellow convenience store workers as 'stupid losers… housewives who can't get by on their husbands' salary, job-hoppers without plans for the future, and the crappiest students who can't get better jobs like being a home tutor.'  

 

Far from being offended by these cynical observations, Keiko recognizes them as the musings of a kindred spirit.  'He was really just like me,' she realizes, 'uttering words that sounded human when really he wasn't saying anything at all.'  But Shiraha does surprise her by admitting that he only took the job to find himself a wife, an admission that leads to what becomes a frequently repeated rant on the subject of how a world that considers itself so clean and modern is, in fact, in the process of disintegrating and reverting to the Stone Age.  'The youngest, prettiest girls in the village,' he complains to Keiko, 'go to the strongest hunters.  They leave strong genes, while the rest of us [ie. weaker, less attractive single men or 'incels' like himself] just have to console ourselves with what's left.'  

 

Of course, Mrs Izumi and Sugawara and the store's other employees dislike and disdain Shiraha, accusing him of being a weirdo and referring to him as a 'creep' behind his back.  They feel relieved when, having broken the rules once too often, he is promptly fired, assuring themselves that things will now return to normal because he's been, in Keiko's phrase, 'eliminated' from the staff roster and, by implication, from life itself.  'The normal world has no room for exceptions and always quietly eliminates foreign objects.  Anyone who is lacking is disposed of.'

Grove, Atlantic first US edition, 2018

But Shiraha proves much harder to dispose of than Keiko imagined.  After attending a barbecue where she is once again subjected to the criticism of her married friends and their husbands for being single and leading what, to them, appears to be a dull and directionless life, she begins to think it might be convenient to have a man around not for reasons of companionship and sexual gratification but as another, even more visible means of demonstrating that she is, in every sense, 'normal.'  To this end she invites Shiraha — whom she meets by chance on the street one day and visits a restaurant with, only to learn he's been evicted from the apartment he shares with another man for failing to pay his half of the rent — to share her own tiny apartment, her one stipulation being that he pay for his own food.  

 

Shiraha is happy to become Keiko's new roommate, promising her that he has no sexual interest in her because he too is seeking an opportunity to hide from a world which does nothing but criticize and condemn him for making what it considers to be unorthodox life choices.  Keiko soon tells her sister that she has a man living with her, an announcement her sister greets with surprise and unconcealed delight.  At last, it seems, Keiko is behaving like a normal young woman with normal sexual urges and the desire to marry.

This is also the reaction Keiko receives from her co-workers when they learn she now has a live-in boyfriend.  Suddenly they forget their former distrust of Shiraha and begin to joke with her about getting married and settling down.  They insist that she and Shiraha come out drinking with them after work — something she has never done in all the years she's worked at the convenience store — unaware that her new lodger sleeps and eats in the bath and, true to his word, displays zero interest in the idea of having sex with her.  Instead, Shiraha prefers to treat her like dirt while continuing to complain about society having reverted to the Stone Age.  'Society has reached the stage,' he angrily declares, 'in which not being of any use to the village means being condemned just for existing… Your uterus belongs to the village too, you know,' he reminds the perpetually unmoved Keiko.  'The only reason the villagers aren't paying it any attention is because it's useless.  I want to spend my whole life doing nothing.  For my whole life, until I die, I want to just breathe without anyone interfering in my life.'  

 

This mirrors Keiko's own desire to live under the radar, as it were, and soon sees them enter into a mutally beneficial arrangement that remains unaffected by her co-workers and friends — formerly so excited to hear that she had at last found herself a man — learning that he openly exploits her.  Better to be sponged off, their knowing looks and resigned shrugs imply, than to go through life as a lonely, unwanted spinster.  Rather than contradict them, Keiko says nothing and allows them to believe whatever they feel comfortable believing, viewing this as another aspect of her initiation to the desired if elusive state of normalcy.  'I had the feeling,' she admits, 'they were all welcoming me on board.'  

 

And Shiraha does the same, telling his own nagging sister-in-law — someone to whom he owes money — that they plan to marry as means of getting the woman off his back, explaining that Keiko is planning to quit the convenience store and find herself a proper job while he starts an online business and raises the child they plan to have together.  

 

Keiko becomes swept up in this fantasy and takes the previously unimaginable step of handing in her notice at the convenience store.  'Over the course of eighteen years I'd seen any number of people leaving,' she recollects toward the end of her final shift, 'and in no time at all the gap they left was filled.  The space I had occupied, too, would quickly be replenished, and from tomorrow the convenience store would carry on operating as usual.'  Cut adrift from the only kind of life she's ever known or felt in any sense comfortable with, Keiko finds herself wondering if she should actually go ahead and have a baby, only to be told by Shiraha's sister-in-law that she could serve the world much better by choosing not to procreate and taking her 'faulty genes' to the grave with her. 

 

Keiko arrives home to find Shiraha scanning the job vacancy advertisements and, a few days later, goes through the motions of attending an interview for a job as a temporary secretary that he plans to accompany her to.  Having arrived more than an hour early for the appointment, Shiraha enters a nearby convenience store to use its bathroom, prompting Keiko to do the same — a decision that sees her instantly revert to her old in-store habits, obsessively checking shelves and rearranging stock while worrying if there are enough beverages in its refrigerator to meet the needs of the customers, many of whom begin to give her funny looks as do the store's legitimately employed staff.  

 

Shiraha is disgusted to find her behaving like this, but for once Keiko refuses to be bullied by him.  "I'm a convenience store worker," she reminds him when he questions her behavior.  "Even if that means I'm abnormal and can't make a living and drop down dead, I can't escape that fact.  My very cells exist for the convenience store."  It's only a matter of time, we're led to believe, before Keiko once again takes her place behind the cash register, ready to recite the morning sales chant and greet her customers with an enthusiastic cry of "Irasshaimase!  Good morning!"  She may never be normal, no, but at least she knows where she belongs.   

 

It's easy to see why Convenience Store Woman has become a worldwide publishing phenomenon and has now been translated into more than thirty languages.  Combining brevity, dark humour and a highly intelligent dissection of what it means to be young and alienated, the book conjures up a world that is compellingly reflective of the contemporary world yet also strangely timeless and, on occasion, eerily unsettling.  Murata examines issues of conformity, expectation and the role of women in society in ways that force the reader to question their own attitudes to these issues, using the convenience store — arguably the most ubiquitous commercial institution in the developed world — as a striking and highly original metaphor for human life — or, in Keiko's case, what she accepts as being her life — as it is experienced by a staggering number of people in the twenty-first century.   

 

 

 

SAYAKA MURATA, c 2018

 

 

The Writer:  "Since my debut book," Sayaka Murata told one of her many interviewers in 2019, "I have always been writing about women who are considered abnormal.  Girls who have issues with their parents, or girls who struggle to live ‘normally’… Sense of congruity is a grand theme for me, ever since I was small."

 

Murata's own life could be described as being very much against the norm by Japanese standards.  The daughter of a District Court Judge, she was born on 14 August 1979 and grew up in a suburb of Tokyo where she began writing at the age of ten, inspired by the science fiction novels passed along to her by her mother and brother.  Like the latter, she was expected to embrace and accept the future her parents had planned for her.  "It was a strict, old-fashioned house: I was told I was a girl so I should learn how to cook or something… The expectations were all on my older brother," she recalled in another interview published in 2020.  "It looked really hard to be him — I’d have gone crazy."

 

Yet Murata did make the effort to conform for a time, becoming romantically involved with a convenience store manager — she began working part-time in one of Japan's more than 50,000 konbini while she was a university student and remained in the job until 2017 — and striving to present herself as a quintessentially 'cute' Japanese girl, an experience she later described as "horrible…I felt like I'd lost my will.  It felt like being physically and mentally exploited." 

 

 

Allen & Unwin UK, 2018

 

 

Shortly after graduating from Tamagawa University, Murata published her debut novel Jyunyū [Breastfeeding], a book which won her the 2005 Gunzo Prize for New Writers.  It was followed by Mausu [Mouse, 2008], Gin'iro no uta [Silver Song, 2009], Hoshi ga su mizu [Water for the Stars], Hakobune [Ark, 2010] and Shiro-iro no machi no, sone hone no taion no [Of Bones, Of Body Heat, Of Whitening City, 2012] which won her the Mishima Yukio Prize the following year, an award that honors Japanese writers whose work is deemed to have broken new literary ground.  

 

It was Murata's tenth novel Konbini ningen [Convenience Store Person, 2016] that made her a literary superstar in Japan, winning her the coveted Akutagawa Prize and selling 1.5 million copies before being translated as Convenience Store Woman two years later and selling several million more copies in the West and other parts of the world.  Popular as it remains, this book is uncharacteristic of the majority of her work, much of which is dystopian in theme and sometimes contains graphic descriptions of violence and sexual abuse and depictions of women confronting the misogyny that remains an endemic element of Japanese society.

 

This is very much in evidence in Chikyu seijin [Earthlings, 2018], her eleventh novel and the second to be translated into English, a work that features another female protagonist who experiences sexual abuse and resolves her situation through violence. "The people who know me through Convenience Store Woman are disappointed [with this new book]," she remarked following the novel's hotly anticipated publication and subsequent translation.  "But I was a cult writer before that success.  People [who appreciate my older work] are saying the old Murata has returned."

 

Murata, who has not published anything since the collection of stories Shinko [Faith] in 2022, remains one of Japan's most popular writers, particularly among young women who recognise in her work their own struggles to obtain a greater sense of automony and individual freedom in a society that has traditionally compelled them to conform to an idealized vision of 'womanhood' created and maintained exclusively by men.   

 

 

 

 

Use the link below to read a 2020 interview with Japanese novelist SAYAKA MURATA:

 

 

 

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/oct/09/sayaka-murata-i-acted-how-i-thought-a-cute-woman-should-act-it-was-horrible

 

 

 

 

 

 

You might also enjoy:

 

 

The Makioka Sisters (1948) by JUNCHIRO TANIZAKI

 

 

 

The Buddha Tree (1956) by FUMIO NIWA

 

 

 

Remember the House (1956) by SANTHA RAMA RAU

 

 

Think About It 008: YASUNARI KAWABATA

Time passed.  But time flows in many streams.  Like a river, an inner stream of time will flow rapidly at some places and sluggishly at others, or perhaps even stand hopelessly stagnant.  Cosmic time is the same for everyone, but human time differs with each person.  Time flows in the same way for all human beings; every human being flows through time in a different way.

Beauty and Sadness (1975, translated by H HIBBERT)



Use the link below to read an article about Japanese novelist and short story writer YASUNARI KAWABATA:

 

https://tonymckibbin.com/article/yasunari-kawabata.html

 

 

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Think About It 006: MARCUS AURELIUS

 
Think About It 001: ROLLO MAY

 
Think About It 037: THICH NHAT HANH

The Makioka Sisters (1948) by JUNICHIRO TANIZAKI

Vintage Books US edition, 1995

 

 

It was nonetheless out of the question to have the younger sister marry first, and since a match for Taeko was as good as arranged, it became more urgent than ever to find a husband for Yukiko.  In addition to the complications we have already described, however, yet another fact operated to Yukiko's disadvantage: she had been born in a bad year.  In Tokyo the Year of the Horse is sometimes unlucky for women.  In Osaka, on the other hand, it is the Year of the Ram that keeps a girl from finding a husband…The superstition is a deep-rooted one in Osaka, so strongly colored by the merchant and his beliefs, and Tsuruko liked to say that the Year of the Ram was really responsible for poor Yukiko's failure to find a husband.  Everything considered, then, the people in the main house, too, had finally concluded that it would be senseless to cling to their high standards.

Translated by  

EDWARD G SEIDENSTICKER

 

 

 

The Novel:  Say the word 'Japan' to most Westerners and two very different images will often spring to mind –– the devastated post-nuclear cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki or the glittering technopolis that is modern day Tokyo.  It can be easy to forget that Japan was, until the Meiji Restoration of 1868 which saw the country modernize virtually overnight, an ancient, tradition-bound society which had hardly changed for a thousand years.  When change finally did occur Japanese society became a strange hybrid of Occidental modernity and the timeless Oriental traditions of its proud feudal past, a place where young women were allowed, even encouraged, to bob their hair and dress in Western-style clothes but were still expected, if they came from honorable families, to abide by the same strict rules of etiquette and conduct which had governed the lives of their forbears for centuries before them.

 

It is this clash of cultures, and the conflicts it inspires, that Junichiro Tanizaki examines and so faithfully re-creates in his 1948 masterpiece The Makioka Sisters.

 

The time is the late 1930s and the Makioka family –– four daughters, only the eldest two of whom are married –– is no longer the prestigious clan it was considered to be prior to the death of its art-collecting, pleasure-loving patriarch.  The new head of the household is Tatsuo, ultra-conservative husband of the eldest daughter Tsuruko, who runs the 'main' house in Osaka while the second daughter Sachiko, along with her more liberal-minded husband Teinosuke, maintains a separate residence in the nearby town of Ashiya.  Unusually, Sachiko and Teinosuke share the Ashiya house with the unmarried third and fourth daughters, Yukiko and Taeko, and their own daughter, a precocious schoolgirl named Etsuko.  Although the free-spirited, forward-thinking Taeko –– known by the affectionate nickname 'Koi-san' [youngest daughter] –– attempted to elope with Okubata, the pampered son of a local merchant, when she was nineteen, she has been prevented from marrying him, despite the scandal their behavior caused, because Japanese custom dictates that is unthinkable for her to marry while Yukiko remains officially 'unspoken for.'   Taeko continues to see her playboy lover in secret, hoping that a husband will soon be found for Yukiko so their thwarted liaison can be sanctioned by her family and formally legitimized.

 

Yukiko is the shyest, most outwardly docile and most accomplished of the four sisters, a talented musician who is studying French and has been trained to perform the tea ceremony and other 'feminine arts' believed to be essential accomplishments for a Japanese lady of her rank to possess.  Her refinement is offset, however, by her age –– she has now reached thirty –– her delicate health and her family's rejection, for one reason or another, of every suitor who has approached them seeking her hand in marriage.  Tsuruko and particularly Sachiko are worried.  Will they ever find their slender, softly spoken sister –– who has a visible blemish above her left eyelid that is becoming more noticeable over time –– a suitable husband?  Will the shame that Taeko's scandalous 'modern' behavior has brought upon the family ever be eradicated by her long expected, long delayed betrothal to the untrustworthy but nevertheless socially acceptable Okubata?  

 

Their friends share their misgivings and one of them, a gossiping hairdresser named Itani, takes it upon herself to arrange a match for Yukiko with an unmarried engineer named Segoshi.  The couple meet for dinner at a hotel –– under the strict supervision of Sachiko, Teinosuke and Itani herself –– and Segoshi is immediately captivated by the elegance, grace and beauty of his potential bride-to-be.  A second, more formal meeting known as a 'miai', during which the couple are briefly permitted to speak to each other unchaperoned, is enough to quell Segoshi's misgivings about Yukiko's health and the troublesome blemish above her eye which seems to appear and disappear at random.  Everything is on track for a happy and successful union until a routine investigation of Segoshi's background reveals that his mother suffers from 'palsy' –– a tactful pseudonym, it's soon discovered by informants employed by Tatsuo, for mental illness.  Tatsuo and Tsuruko cannot permit a Makioka to marry into a family prone to mental illness.  Segoshi, like every prospective bridegroom before him, is rejected and Yukiko, stoic as ever in the face of what has now become a familiar disappointment, is once again denied her chance to marry by her family's insistence on arranging the quintessentially 'perfect' match for her.

 

 

Vintage/Random House UK, 2000

 

 

Happily, Segoshi's is far from being the last proposal that Yukiko receives.  Another family friend, aware that the negotiations with him ended badly, arranges another miai with a conservative bank manager in his fifties named Nomura who, in addition to being a widower, is also the father of five children.  Unfortunately, this match also proves unsuitable, this time on the grounds that Yukiko finds Nomura too old, garrulous and insensitive to accept the idea that she might ever learn to love him.  Sachiko, more worried than ever about Yukiko's future and what off-putting signals their apparently unjustified fussiness and haughtiness might be sending to other prospective suitors, is sent to break off the negotiations while Yukiko herself is summoned back to the 'new' main house in Tokyo where it is hoped a better match can be arranged for her by Tatsuo and Tsuruko.

 

In the meantime Taeko, eager to establish a life of her own independent of her family, begins to question the wisdom of remaining perpetually engaged to a self-confessed hedonist like Okubata.  A talented dancer and dollmaker, Taeko wants to branch out and open her own dress shop where she hopes, in time, to design and create haute couture fashions for well-heeled ladies like her sisters.  

 

This plan troubles Tsuruko, who is already concerned about Taeko's burgeoning friendship with Itakura, a low-born photographer who learned his trade during an extended visit to the United States.  They have enough to worry about, she explains to her husband, without adding the possibility that Taeko might forsake Okubata and run off with this liberty-taking peasant adding to their list of woes.  But Taeko, whose outlook is so 'modern' that even her sisters have begun to view her behavior as vulgar, defies them and begins seeing Itakura in secret –– a fact it becomes increasingly difficult to hide when he selflessly risks his life, in a way that the dandified Okubata would never dream of doing, to rescue her when severe flooding unexpectedly strikes the Osaka/Kobe region.  Eventually, it is the spurned Okubata himself who reveals the affair to the Makiokas, writing a note to Sachiko that makes the truth of the matter painfully if undeniably plain to them.

 

The situation worsens when Itakura develops a serious infection after undergoing what should have been a routine ear operation.  When the infection spreads, Taeko cuts short her visit to Tokyo to be at his side, only to watch him die as a result of his doctor's incompetence and his timid family's inability to decide whether or not he should have undergone a second operation which might have saved his life.  

 

In time, Itakura's death pushes Taeko back into the arms of Okubata, who is experiencing family-related troubles of his own in the form of being disinherited due to his inability to choose an acceptable career.  When they're observed behaving 'indecently' together in public, their brazenness proves to be the last straw for Tatsuo and Tsuruko.  Taeko cannot live under the Makioka roof, they tell her, if she insists on behaving like a common tramp.  She leaves the Ashiya house and rents a cheap room in the center of town where she intends to support herself –– and, by implication, her disinherited and unemployed lover –– by working as a seamstress.

 

None of this, of course, improves the family's chances of finding a suitable husband for Yukiko.  Tsuruko's sister-in-law attempts to arrange another match with a wealthy, aristocratic landowner named Sawazaki –– another widower with children older than Yukiko –– but the family's visit to his impressive Nagoya estate, ostensibly undertaken on the pretext of hunting fireflies, seems doomed to failure right from the beginning.  Sawazaki finds Yukiko too reserved for his tastes and quickly makes it known that he has no intention of making her family an offer for her hand in marriage.  

 

Outwardly disappointed if privately relieved, the Makiokas return to Osaka only to discover that Itani has a new prospective husband in mind for Yukiko, a recently widowed pharmaceutical executive named Hashidera who, at first, seems as reluctant as she is to attend another miai.  Like Sawazaki, Hashidera expresses concern about what he calls Yukiko's 'moodiness.'  He wants a wife, he explains, who will be a kind and attentive mother to his twelve year old daughter and an asset to him in his professional life.  Acknowledging that Hashidera is the most suitable candidate they have met since Yukiko was in the first flush of her now-faded youth, the Makiokas set about the task of wooing him with an enthusiasm and forwardness they have never displayed toward a prospective suitor.  Nevertheless, their efforts once again prove futile.  A second, private meeting with Yukiko is enough to persuade Hashidera that he does not want such a 'spineless, quivering, old-fashioned woman' as a bride.

 

The issue of Yukiko's disappointment –– an emotion which, as has always been the case with her, is assumed rather than confirmed –– is soon swept aside by the news that Taeko, who has been secretly living with her penniless fiancee for some time, has fallen ill with dysentery.  Taeko's life-threatening illness reunites her with her sisters, with Yukiko soon volunteering to replace the traumatized Okubata and personally nurse her back to health.  

 

Seizing on this opportunity to permanently separate Taeko from her disgraced lover –– and thereby avoid another scandal which may further restrict Yukiko's chances of finding a respectable husband –– the Makiokas repay Okubata the money he spent on caring for her during the first stage of her illness and send him on his way, grateful to hear, a few months later, that he's applied for an administrative position in far-off Manchuria.  

 

In time Teinosuke, admitting that he may have treated his invalid sister-in-law too harshly, finds it in his heart to forgive her and re-admits her to the family.  This symbolic gesture is followed by another visit from Itani, who has stumbled across yet another prospective suitor who might, she says, be the perfect match for Yukiko –– the charming, highly cultured, well-traveled son of the aristocrat Viscount Mimaki.  Another miai is swiftly arranged and a favorable impression is made by the worldly and sophisticated Mimaki, who declares his intention to buy a house in Toyko following his marriage and pursue a career as an architect in the city.  Unlike her previous suitors, Mimaki finds Yukiko's natural reserve enchanting.  A proposal, it seems, is imminent.  At last, thinks Sachiko, she will be free of the burden which has plagued her all these years, never suspecting that a new, more serious problem awaits her in the form of Taeko's unspoken of pregnancy.

 

To make matters worse, Taeko informs her astonished sisters that the child she is carrying is not that of the still disliked but socially acceptable Okubata.  Her pregnancy is the result, she confesses, of her liaison with another peasant –– this time a bartender named Miyoshi.  Although Miyoshi behaves like a true gentleman when Teinosuke visits him to discuss what must be done, arrangements are soon made for Taeko never to see the man again and for her to have her baby in the country so as not to jeopardize the promising marriage negotiations the family is now engaged in on Yukiko's behalf with Mimaki and his aristocrat father.  

 

Sachiko's fears, however, prove groundless.  The proposal is offered and accepted and even Yukiko, shy and reserved as ever, seems pleased by the thought of becoming Mimaki's bride.  Fate then does the family another favor, bitter though it is, by taking the life of Taeko's little girl –– an event which, while tragic for the new mother, does not  prevent her from going off, once the shock of losing her child has passed, to share an apartment with the kind if thoroughly unsuitable Miyoshi.  She takes her leave of the Ashiya house as Yukiko, feeling glum now that her wedding day has at long last arrived, prepares for the train journey to Tokyo that will see her finally become the wife she's never quite succeeded in convincing herself that she wants to be.

 

 

Vintage/Random House UK, c 2008

 

 

While The Makioka Sisters is often referred to as the 'most Japanese' of Japanese novels, it also reveals Tanizaki to be a writer thoroughly familiar with Western idioms who clearly had no problem with the notion of adapting and replicating them in his work.  

 

The four Makioka sisters share much in common with the five unmarried Bennett sisters in Jane Austen's best-loved novel Pride and Prejudice (1813).  Like Elizabeth Bennett and her unmarried elder sibling Jane, Sachiko and Yukiko are prey to social forces they neither control nor possess the power to change, tradition obliging them to do what their families demand of them even though, in Yukiko's case, these demands clash with their own wishes and continually fail to take their own unvoiced desires into account.  Only Taeko, who is fortunate enough to have youth on her side, is permitted to break with tradition and only then at the cost of her respectability and the life of her newborn child.  

 

But Tanizaki is careful not to overlook or diminish the beauty, grace and elegance of this world –– a world that was to vanish forever when the Imperial Japanese Navy attacked the US Naval Base at Pearl Harbor on 7 December 1941, just eight months after Yukiko's long-awaited wedding –– or, by way of contrast, its sometimes stifling banality.  

 

The novel's lyrical passages –– describing, among other things, cherry blossom time and the loveliness of a nighttime firefly hunt –– are skilfully juxtaposed with images of the sisters' often mundane daily lives.  They see doctors (an activity which seems to consume a disproportionate amount of their time), care for their children, shop, visit the theater and cinema together, deal with servants (Sachiko's sturdy young maid O-haru features throughout the novel as a minor but crucially important character) and complain about each other's character flaws as privileged members of a privileged class which, while still respectful of Japanese tradition, is also willing to include and even embrace 'foreigners' like Sachiko's German neighbors the Stolzes and the Kyrilenkos, a White Russian family who sought refuge in Japan after fleeing the 1917 Bolshevik revolution. 

 

It's also worth noting that the censors of Japan's wartime government suspended the novel's serial publication in 1943 on the grounds that it highlighted 'the very thing we are most supposed to be on our guard against during this period of wartime emergency: the soft, effeminate, grossly individualistic lives of women.'  It is a priceless social document and a valuable reminder of a more genteel time in Japanese history, before the militarists took over and led the country into a war of conquest that would see it conquered in turn and then occupied by the US Army until 1952.  War is a constant if undefined presence in The Makioka Sisters, be it the Second Sino-Japanese War which began in 1937 or the impending world war that would, with the dropping of the first atomic bomb on Hiroshima on 6 August 1945, make the rarefied, tradition-bound lives of Yukiko and her sisters seem as remote as those led by their equally demure and perhaps over-refined ancestors.

 

 

 

JUNICHIRO TANIZAKI, 1913

 

 

 

The Writer:  Junichiro Tanizaki, the grandson of a printer, was born in the Tokyo suburb of Nihonbashi on 24 July 1886.  Although he grew up in modestly privileged circumstances and attended Tokyo First Middle School, his family's fortunes had sunk so low by 1911 that he was forced to leave Tokyo Imperial University because his father could no longer afford to pay for his tuition.  This setback did not prevent him from becoming infatuated with all things Western or from co-founding a literary magazine which published his first one act play in 1909 and first widely read story, Shisei [The Tattoo Artist], the following year.  This story was followed by many others which combined the same elements of eroticism and sadomasochism in what, despite its Western influences, was still considered to be a uniquely 'Japanese' style.

 

Tanizaki married in 1915 but the marriage, perhaps because of his own interest in erotica and Western-style Bohemianism, began to falter after producing one child, a daughter, in 1916.  Its demise was hastened by Tanizaki himself, who encouraged his wife to have an affair with one of his friends, the writer Haruo Sato –– a situation he was to explore time and time again in much of his early work, including his provocative 1928 novel Manji [Quicksand] which depicts an unhappy ménage-à-trois that ends with two of the three participants committing suicide.  

 

In 1918, the successful young author moved from Tokyo to Yokohama to be closer to the Westerners –– the city was home to a large expatriate population at this time –– and the Western ideas, literature and fashions which continued to obsess him and inspire his work.  

 

This remained the case until 1922, when the Great Kanto earthquake, in addition to destroying his house and justifying his lifelong fear of earthquakes, sparked an interest in traditional Japanese culture that eventually saw him lose interest in Western art and literature and relocate to Kyoto, Japan's ancient capital.  It was in Kyoto, between 1923 and 1924, that he wrote his first truly successful novel Chijin no ai [Naomi], the serio-comic tale of a Japanese man who strives to transform a Eurasian girl into his idealized version of a modern Western woman.  

 

The clash between Japanese traditionalism and Western Modernism, combined with his insightful examinations of sexuality and its sometimes devastating impact on individuals torn between lust and their strong sense of social duty, were to recur frequently in his writing and, in time, would help secure his reputation as Japan's most widely read novelist after his Meiji-era forerunner, the justifiably revered Natsume Soseki.  

 

Tanizaki's most successful novels of the pre-war period –– Manji [Quicksand, 1928], Tade kuu mushi [Some Prefer Nettles, 1929] and Ashikari [The Reed Cutter, 1932] –– managed to combine traditional Japanese aestheticism with his interest in exploring the social, erotic and personal impact of what some Japanese felt had been the country's over-eagerness to modernize.  This did not prevent Tanizaki from translating the classic The Tale of Genji and other ancient works into modern Japanese in the hope they would be read and appreciated by new generations of his countrymen who, he feared, were in danger of permanently losing touch with their cultural and spiritual heritage.

 

 

JUNICHIRO TANIZAKI, c 1960

 

 

Tanizaki spent the war years working on The Makioka Sisters (Sasameyuki in Japanese, a word that literally translates as 'Lightly Falling Snow' in English) moving to the eastern resort town of Atami to escape Allied bombing and find the peace and quiet required to re-submerge himself in a past that was literally being destroyed stone by stone right before his eyes.  He remained in Atami after the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and did not return to Kyoto until 1946, where he finally completed what is generally regarded to be his masterpiece, and one of Japan's truly outstanding works of modern literature, in 1948.  

 

It was followed a year later by Sosho Shigemoto no haha [General Shigemoto's Mother, 1958], a moving statement on a favorite Tanizaki theme of a son's secret longing for his mother.  The success of this novel, plus his winning of the Asahi Prize and the Japanese Order of Merit award he received in 1949, set the seal on his reputation as Japan's greatest living author.

 

Although he suffered from paralysis in his right hand from 1958 and was diagnosed with angina pectoris two years later, neither condition prevented Tanizaki from writing and publishing his last major novels Kagi [The Key, 1956] and Futen Rojin Nikki [Diary of a Mad Old Man, 1961] and the memoir Yosho Jidai [Childhood Memories, 1957] prior to his death, from heart disease, on 30 July 1965. 

 

 

 

 

 

Many works by JUNICHIRO TANIZAKI have been translated into English (and many other foreign languages), while several of his novels, including Manji [Quicksand] and Sasameyuki [The Makioka Sisters], have also been adapted for the cinema.  

 

 

 

 

Use the link below to read about the latter film, made by Japanese writer/director KON ICHIKAWA in 1983, that was released as a Region 1 US DVD in June 2011:

 

 

 

https://www.amazon.com/Makioka-Sisters-Criterion-Collection/dp/B004S801ZO/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1466213148&sr=8-2&keywords=the+makioka+sisters 

 

 

 

 

 

You might also enjoy:

 

 

 
The Buddha Tree (1956) by FUMIO NIWA

 

 

 
The Guide (1958) by RK NARAYAN

 

 

 
Excellent Women (1952) by BARBARA PYM

 

 

 

Last updated 8 March 2021 

 

The Buddha Tree (1956) by FUMIO NIWA

Tuttle Classics, 2000

 

 

 

It was soon obvious to Mineyo that he was trying to keep away from her.  Then again –– it's too selfish to begin to avoid her so suddenly, he would remind himself.  Yet he no longer felt the temptation to take the easiest way, to give way wholly to his lust till it should free him at last by burning itself out.  There had been other such moments of repentance in the past; but on every occasion his courage had failed him, even when the break would have been easiest –– at the time of his marriage.  That was why he was still so weak even now, when his wife's flight, the result of all his previous failures, was forcing a decision upon him.

 

Translated by  

KENNETH STRONG  

(1966)

 

 

The Novel:  Soshu is a thirty-nine year old Buddhist priest of the True Pure Land Sect, whose Butsuoji temple is located in the small Japanese farming community of Tan'ami.  The clergy of this sect, which was founded by the 12th Century Buddhist saint Shinran, are permitted to marry, eat meat and live normal lives outside of their duties as priests, which include the regular reciting of sutras, or prayers, in the homes of parishioners who wish to honour their dead ancestors.  

 

Soshu is well-liked by his parishioners and considered a suitable guardian for the temple along with his wife Renko and mother-in-law Mineyo.  It was Mineyo, then a childless widow of thirty-four, who originally decided to adopt him into the temple family and pay for his education and ordination into the priesthood.  But her motives for doing so were less pure than they seemed.  She soon began to sleep with Soshu and, in time, arranged his marriage to Renko to ensure he would always be available to satisfy her lust.

 

Years pass and Renko gives birth to a son, Ryokun.  But all is not well within the self-enclosed world of the Butsuoji temple.  Renko, tired of Soshu's infidelity and his habit of ignoring her, seeks refuge in the arms of a famous kabuki actor and flees the claustrophobic life she's forced to live as a member of the temple family, leaving her son in the care of Mineyo who, at fifty-four, continues to seek sexual gratification from her reluctant, morally compromised lover.  Soshu is disgusted by the lust he feels for Mineyo but remains too weak-willed to end their affair, suffering continual attacks of guilt because he knows his behaviour makes him spiritually unworthy to advise his parishioners who, in their igonorance, continue to view him as their social and moral superior. 

 

The situation appears hopeless until Soshu meets Tomoko, a young widow who has recently moved to Tan'ami at the request of Yamaji, her wealthy businessman lover.  Tomoko hates Yamaji –– a cruel man whose treatment of her borders on the bestial –– but is trapped, as is Soshu by the misperceptions of his congregation, by her dependence on her lover's generosity to keep her fed, clothed and housed.  Tomoko falls in love with Soshu, in whom she recognizes a kindred spirit desperate to regain his dignity and self-respect, and her feelings are eagerly returned.  Soshu dreams of marrying her –– in fact, his parishioners are anxious for him to remarry in the wake of Renko's flight from the temple –– but realizes he must marry one of their daughters as a means of retaining his position as the community's long-serving spiritual leader.  Doing this, however, will not only be a betrayal of the intense love he and Tomoko now feel for each other but will also result in Mineyo, whom he no longer despises and no longer has sexual relations with, being forced to leave Butsuoji to make way for his new bride.

 

Tomoko, in the meantime, has her own problems to confront.  Although her resolve has been strengthened by her love for Soshu, she finds herself unable to make a clean break with Yamaji, who continues to treat her like a whore in exchange for paying her bills and keeping a roof over her head.  Although she and Soshu are able to meet in secret and spend an evening together at an inn (where they resist the urge to have sex to protect their rediscovered purity), she still baulks at taking the irrevocable step of leaving Yamaji and abandoning everything his lust and, by extension, his wealth have given her.  They go on a trip together, during which Yamaji treats her more like his wife than his mistress, her pining for Soshu gradually diminishing as she realizes she will always lack the courage needed to abandon her supportive if domineering older lover.

 

Soshu, unaware of what Tomoko has finally admitted to herself, reaches an important decision while she's away.  He calls a special meeting for the purpose of making what he hints to his parishioners will be a very important announcement.  The announcement takes the form of a long and startling confession, in which he blames himself and Mineyo equally for their affair (which has been an open secret in the town for twenty years) and for driving his former wife Renko from the temple.  He tells his congregation that he can no longer serve as their priest because he's morally unworthy to hold such a respected position in the Tan'ami community.  He regains his dignity by publicly confessing his sins and privately renouncing his love for Tomoko who, lacking his willpower if not his honesty, chooses to place financial security and the needs of her young daughter above those of her own tortured heart.

 

This long, morally complex, occasionally melodramatic tale of lust, jealousy and unrequited love remains as strangely relevant today as it must have been in what was the still tradition-bound Japan of 1956.  The struggles Niwa depicts through the characters of Soshu and Tomoko –– between lust and renunciation, acceptance of human weakness and our clumsy efforts to deny it, the desire to preserve traditional values in the face of rampant materialism –– call into question the ongoing value of religion in societies, Occidental as well as Oriental, in which spirituality has become increasingly subordinate to the demands of the flesh and the self-interested seizing of the moment.  Soshu happens to be a Buddhist clergyman, but he could just as easily be a Baptist, a Catholic or a North American television evangelist, publicly preaching virtue while privately indulging in a life of sin his parishioners are fully aware of but willingly turn a blind eye to for the sake of making their own lives less complicated.  While The Buddha Tree is not an easy book to read (or even to find nowadays) –– it contains a lot of Buddhist theology which, while sometimes interesting in itself, isn't strictly essential to its plot –– its premise that a life of compassionate self-acceptance is preferable to a life of self-imposed damnation remains a difficult one to ignore.  

 

 

 

FUMIO NIWA, c 1945

 

 

 

The Writer:  Born on 22 November 1904, Fumio Niwa was the descendant of a long line of Buddhist priests and, as the eldest son of the eldest son, was expected to carry on the tradition of temple life just as his ancestors had done for centuries before him.  After earning a degree in Japanese literature from Waseda University, Niwa dutifully returned to the family temple in the town of Yokkaichi and began to study for the priesthood –– studies he abandoned in 1932 so he could return to Tokyo and pursue a career as a writer.

 

He first rose to prominence with the story Ayu [Sweetfish], which was serialized in the literary magazine Bungei Shinju.  In 1933 he published his first novel, Zeiniku [Superfluous Flesh] –– an erotic tale of an adulterous affair based on an affair he himself had recently concluded with a married woman.  It was to be the first of eighty novels, many of which, like Bodaiju [The Buddha Tree], drew their inspiration directly from the circumstances of his own, often very turbulent life.  The character of Renko in Bodaiju, for example, was based on his mother –– a woman who abandoned him and his clergyman father to run off with and eventually wed a kabuki actor.  Niwa's relationships with women were forever clouded by this childhood trauma and perhaps explain his incredible success as a seducer in his adult years.  The character of Ryokun –– the son and future heir to the priesthood who struggles to understand why his mother has fled the family home — was identified by many critics as being a realistic self-portrait of the writer during his own uncertain childhood.

 

Niwa served as a war correspondent during World War Two and in 1942 published the novel Kaisen [Naval Engagement], based on the time he spent aboard the Japanese flagship Chokai and his subsequent wounding during the battle for Savo Island.  The book, like its sequel Kaeranu Chutai [Lost Company], were both heavily censored by Japan's military government –– neither the first nor the last time that Niwa's work would bring him into conflict with the authorities.  Although he feared he might be prosecuted as a war criminal during the US Army's post-war Occupation of Japan, Niwa was never arrested or even questioned by the country's temporary rulers.  He went on to win every major Japanese literary award and to serve for many years as the director of the Japanese Writer's Association –– a position that allowed him to purchase the land required to build a writer's cemetery and create a health fund to ensure his fellow authors would always have access to medical treatment when they needed it.

 

 

FUMIO NIWA, c 1960

 

 

Although Niwa's work was often criticized for what was seen as its immorality and its over-emphasis on the erotic side of life, it was his story Iyagarase no Nenrei [The Hateful Age], published in 1947, that proved to be his most controversial work of fiction.  Its depiction of a senile grandmother who becomes the bane of her family's lives went very much against the grain of Japanese society at the time, calling into question its long-standing traditions of venerating and caring for the elderly.  His attacks on post-war Japan's materialism and greed met with similar controversy.  His last great works were a five volume biography of the Buddhist saint Shinran and an eight volume life of Rennyo, a 15th Century Japanese monk who died during a pilgrimage to India.  The last of these works appeared when the author was well into his eighties.

 

Ironically, Niwa himself would live to be one hundred years old, dying from the combination of old age and Alzheimer's Disease on 20 April 2005.

 

 

 

 

Use the link below to read the (English) obituary of Japanese novelist FUMIO NIWA (1904-2005):

 

 

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/obituaries/fumio-niwa-526422.html

 

 

 

 

 

 

You might also enjoy:

 

 

 

 

The Makioka Sisters (1948) by JUNICHIRO TANIZAKI

 

 

 

 

The Guide (1958) by RK NARAYAN

 

 

 

 

The Fortunes of Richard Mahony (1917–1924) by HENRY HANDEL RICHARDSON

 

 

 

 

Last updated 14 December 2023 §