Some Prefer Nettles by Jun'ichirō Tanizaki

First published:Tade kuu mushi, 1928-1929, serial; 1936, book (English translation, 1955)

Type of work: Psychological realism

Time of work: March through June, 1929

Locale: Osaka, Awaji, Kobe, and Kyoto

Principal Characters:

• Kaname, the protagonist, in his mid-forties, a sinecurist in his father’s company, who for eight years has sexually withdrawn from his wife
• Misako, Kaname’s wife, who for the last two years has been having an affair
• Hiroshi, the ten-year-old son of Kaname and Misako, a sensitive boy who is trying to conceal his anxiety about his parents
• Misako’s Father
• O-Hisa, the longtime mistress of Misako’s father
• Hideo Takanatsu, Kaname’s divorced cousin, a businessman

The Novel

In the first of what may be regarded as the novel’s four main parts (chapters 1-3), the unhappy and taciturn couple dress in traditional kimono, take train and taxi to downtown Osaka, and then join Misako’s father and O-hisa at the Benten Theater to view the puppet play The Love Suicides at Amijima. While Kaname has accepted the invitation in order to ensure one filial act before his father-in-law is informed of the couple’s marital discord, he becomes intrigued by the play and the puppets, especially that of the heroine—a kind of prototype of the ideal woman for his father-in-law and himself. In contrast, Misako has unwillingly attended, seeking the earliest excuse for the couple’s departure so that she may “go to Suma,” the euphemism she and Kaname out of reciprocal consideration use for her trysts with a Mr. Aso. (Kaname has given his consent to the affair.)

In the second part (chapters 4-8), arriving from a regular business trip to China, Takanatsu delivers gifts to Hiroshi (a greyhound named “Lindy,” after the famous Charles Lindbergh), Kaname (an unexpurgated set of The Arabian Nights’ Entertainments), and Misako (her choice of scarves), although his main purpose at Kaname’s behest is spurring the indecisive and delaying couple to act: either to reconcile, or more probably to separate.

In the third part (chapters 9-12), the theater motif is resumed when, at the invitation of his father-in-law, Kaname joins him and O-hisa in Awaji to see performances of the puppet theater at its rural birthplace and possibly accompany the couple on a pilgrimage to shrines on the island. Staying a few days to see the plays and puppets, Kaname declines the pilgrimage and departs for Osaka, stopping at Kobe to visit an Englishwoman’s foreign brothel in the narrative’s surprise revelation of Kaname’s two-year relationship with the Eurasian courtesan Louise (of Russian and Korean extraction).

As the second part opens with a letter (Takanatsu’s to Hiroshi), so does the fourth section (chapters 13-14), with Misako’s father responding to Kaname’s detailed written report of the reasons for divorce and for Misako to marry Aso. Courteously but firmly summoned, Kaname and Misako travel to the aging parent’s house in Kyoto, where Kaname is importuned to reconsider and then left to dine with O-hisa while Misako’s father takes his daughter to dinner and attempts to dissuade her from the couple’s announced plan. The novel closes with Kaname in the guestroom bed at night, awaiting the return of Misako and her father, wondering if Misako has been dissuaded from divorce (a decision which Kaname would accept), listening to the rain that has been imminent for some time, and through the bed’s mosquito netting observing first the female puppet his father-in-law purchased in Awaji and then the doll-like O-hisa, who brings some old Japanese woodblock books for him to leaf through as he waits.

The Characters

Both this novel and Jun’ichirō Tanizaki’s Futen rojin nikki (1961-1962; Diary of a Mad Old Man, 1965) open with the protagonist attending the theater (art is a pervasive motif in the majority of Tanizaki’s novels) and relating to the drama by sexual attraction to the heroine. Whereas Tokusuke Utsugi in Diary of a Mad Old Man is enticed by a male actor playing a female role, emblematic of Utsugi’s masochism in the full sense, Kaname is allured by the puppet Koharu’s appearance of classical beauty that is “withdrawn, restrained, careful not to show too much individuality”—in short, the submissive “eternal woman” of Japanese tradition. The failure of Kaname’s complete attachment to Misako in part results from her being neither the courtesan type (Koharu’s role in the play) nor, as a modern woman, a puppet deprived of human individuality.

Nearly all the novel’s characters, caught in a variety of conflicting circumstances and forces, are described with the imagery and vocabulary of theater, reflecting their adoption of or coercion into roles. Obliged to conceal their unorthodox arrangement from Misako’s father and Aso’s relatives, Kaname and Misako have “to put on their disguises and act their parts”; Misako has to “play the part of the wife” before her father; irritated by her restlessness at the Benten Theater, Kaname thinks Misako “ought to restrain herself and play the part of the wife”; and the couple are relieved that “there was no need to act in front of” Takanatsu and that they are momentarily “free not to play at being husband and wife.” From dread of their separation as well as solicitude for his parents’ burdens, Hiroshi is “perhaps acting a part as carefully as they were, hiding his troubles from them.”

Devoted to tradition, Misako’s father at the Benten Theater wears clothing “like the costumes of the puppets,” at Awaji is “appointed like a doll on the stage,” and at his house in Kyoto looks “ready for the role of a poet on the stage.” O-hisa, from her upbringing and temperament accepting her pupillary role, is recurrently compared to a beautiful, docile puppet or doll; Misako’s father ultimately acquires a real doll as well (significantly, Misako relegates the dolls her father bought her for the Doll Festival). Indeed, even Kaname’s acquaintances in the demimonde are caught up in role-playing. The ostentatious brothel owner Madame Brent, even when mourning her brother, is “striking too many poses,” while the pretentious Louise has “the manner of a melodramatic actress of the new school” and a “dramatic bill of complaints” with “straining and storming.”

Only the admirable Takanatsu, cigar-smoking and garlic-chewing (the latter habit prophylactic, derived from his contact with Chinese culture), remains outside the role-playing and in his concluding letter (chapter 13) discloses the novel’s most trenchant actions (his telling Hiroshi the truth, to spare the boy further uncertainty and inure him to the ways of the real world) and analyzes (Misako’s absolute necessity to leave Kaname; Kaname’s self-pampering that needs a serious blow).

Critical Context

Among Tanizaki’s twenty-five or so original novels, Some Prefer Nettles falls among those that are short—the majority, with the notable exception of Sasame-yuki (1943-1948; The Makioka Sisters, 1957); set in the twentieth century (the other novels being set in the past, anytime from the Fujiwara to Tokugawa periods); and written after Tanizaki’s transforming experience of the great Tokyo-Yokohama earthquake of 1923 (referred to three times in Some Prefer Nettles) and his subsequent resettlement in the Kyoto-Osaka region (as several of the characters have also done in the novel). The novels of this period are generally considered to be his best, with Some Prefer Nettles often nominated as the leader; indeed, up to his death, Tanizaki was regarded as a leading candidate for the first Nobel Prize for Literature to be awarded to a Japanese writer. Tanizaki is reported to have written in 1948 that the novels he liked best were Some Prefer Nettles and Yoshino kuzu (1931; Arrowroot, 1982).

Some of the longest discussions of aesthetics occur in Some Prefer Nettles, in which art (drama, music, ceramics) is so often a part of the plot and the characters’ interests. On this point, the novel is closest to “Shisei” (“The Tatooer”), “Momoku monogatari” (“The Blind Man’s Tale”), and “Shunkin sho” (“A Portrait of Shunkin”). In fact, the blind samisen player from whom Misako’s father and O-hisa take lessons foreshadows the centrality of an analogous character in “The Blind Man’s Tale” and “A Portrait of Shunkin.” In the former short work, the narrator (who is the title character) receives and transmits clandestine coded messages through variations of samisen music, which leads to the climactic downfalls of himself and the noble samurai household he serves and loves; in the latter, the blind mistress Shunkin and her self-blinded servant (and lover) Sasuke devote their lives to their musical art, to the exclusion of the surrounding world. In Some Prefer Nettles, art and life are often shown interacting—comically when audience noise and public juvenile urination drown out the puppet play performance in Awaji, and when the puppeteers (possibly in retaliation) enact in one of their plays a character stepping outside to urinate before going to bed.

Bibliography

Keene, Donald. Dawn to the West: Japanese Literature of the Modern Era, 1984.

Lippit, Noriko Mizuta. Reality and Fiction in Modern Japanese Literature, 1980.

Petersen, Gwenn Boardman. The Moon in the Water: Understanding Tanizaki, Kawabata, and Mishima, 1979.

Seidensticker, Edward G. Introduction to Some Prefer Nettles, 1955.

Ueda, Makoto. Modern Japanese Writers and the Nature of Literature, 1976.