Some Prefer Nettles Read online

  Some Prefer Nettles

  Junichiro Tanizaki (1886-1965) is one of the major figures of 20th-century Japanese literature. Born in the heart of downtown Tokyo, he studied literature and led a bohemian existence at Tokyo Imperial University. His youthful experiences are reflected in his writings, as are the influences of such Western contemporaries as Poe, Baudelaire and Wilde. Following the Great Kanto Earthquake of 1923, Tanizaki left Tokyo for the Kyoto-Osaka region, where he wrote his finest works. As a young, cosmopolitan rake he abandoned the superficial Westernization of his student days and immersed himself in Japanese tradition and history. The emotional and intellectual crisis sparked by this transition turned a fine writer into one of Japan's greatest and most-loved novelists. Junichiro Tanizaki received the Imperial Prize in Literature in 1949.

  Originally published in Japanese as Tade Kuu Mushi

  Published by Tuttle Publishing, an imprint of Periplus Editions (HK) Ltd,

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  Copyright © 1955 by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc.

  First Tuttle edition, 1955

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  Every 'worm to his taste;

  some prefer to eat nettles.

  Japanese proverb

  NOTE

  on the Pronunciation of Japnese Names

  Consonants are pronounced approximately as in English, except that "g" is always hard, as in Gilbert. Vowels are pronounced as in Italian, and always sounded separately, never as diphthongs. Also as in Italian, the final "e" is always sounded. Thus die name Kaname is pronounced Kah-nah-meh. There is no heavy penultimate accent as in English; it is adequate to accent each syllable equally.

  INTRODUCTION

  ON SEPTEMBER 1, 1923, the day the earthquake destroyed Tokyo and Yokohama, Tanizaki Junichiro was in the Hakone Mountains south of Yokohama. Almost before he thought to worry about his family in Yokohama, he wrote later, he felt a perverse surge of happiness at the news of the disaster. " 'Now they will make Tokyo a decent city.' I could not keep back the glad thought." The darkness of the old city was gone, and the new city would be filled with horns and headlights, movie theaters, the bright cries of streetwalkers, the radiance of beauty parlors and Turkish baths.

  When Tanizaki wrote down these recollections some ten years later, he meant them to tell the story of his early career. He was thirty-seven years old in 1923, and he had been a well-known writer already for more than ten years. He was born of the old Tokyo merchant class, the class that was in charge of Japanese culture when Commodore Perry arrived to open the country, and the class that in 1923 still considered itself rather the finest fruit of the Japanese race; but he disliked both his class and the tradition it stood for. His early works, generally called "demoniac" by the Japanese, were written under the influence less of Japanese predecessors than of Poe, Baudelaire, and Wilde; and in his personal life he seems to have indulged, as the old man of this novel once did, "in foreign tastes of the most hair-raising variety." At the time of the earthquake, he was living on the Yokohama "Bluff," the very heart of the foreign enclave. Few Japanese went to such extremes even in an age that was fascinated with the West.

  After the earthquake he moved to Okamoto, between Kobe and Osaka. Like all natives of Tokyo, he had always viewed Osaka with a mixture of amusement and contempt. The Osakan was a penny-grabbing bumpkin who had not learned the fine Japanese art of concealing his emotions; and the Osakan seemed insensitive to the exhilarating succession of foreign influences that was sweeping the country. He was cloddishly behind the times.

  But presently a suggestion that the case was not so clear began to come into Tanizaki's writings. His first major post-earthquake novel, A Fool's Love, is a disquieting study of what can happen when one cuts oneself off from one's past. The hero, a young man who will live in the new way, finds a little bar girl who reminds him of Mary Pickford, and he proceeds to groom her so that he need not be ashamed of her in front of the golden-haired foreigners. At the end he is living a comfortless life in Yokohama while his fashionable wife takes foreign lovers.

  In 1928 Tanizaki began serial publication of two novels that in effect sum up his early career and announce a new beginning. Whirlpool brings up for final review all the perversions and cruelties of the early novels, and leaves its heroine, who has hoped to renounce convention and find sexual liberation thereby, in the darkest despair. Some Prefer Nettles is in many ways Tanizaki's own story, the story of a sexually disturbed Tokyo man with rather superficial Western tastes who almost against his will finds himself attracted to Osaka and to the Japanese past. The issue is clearly drawn, these two novels seem to tell us: to be foreign is to court unhappiness; a Japanese can find peace only by being as intensely Japanese as the times will allow.

  Between 1931 and 1935 Tanizaki turned out a series of short historical novels, all of them dreamy anthems to a day when beauty did not seem compelled to fight against its time. He was occupied until the war on a rendition into modern Japanese of The Tale of Genji, the great eleventh-century Japanese romance. Since the war he has published a massive novel called Sasame Yuki, a loving and detailed re-creation of the old Osaka way of life in what even Tanizaki had to admit were its last precarious days. Now he is back at the Genji, which he hopes to finish reworking this year.

  II

  Some Prefer Nettles is a personal confession and the story of a cultural conflict. The central situation, an unhappy marriage between two people who do not interest each other sexually and who feel a tormenting uncertainty over what to do about it, seems to be autobiographical. In August 1930 Tanizaki divorced his wife, who by previous arrangement became the wife of the poet and novelist Sato Haruo. Sato has written that one night after dinner Tanizaki remarked: "How would you like to marry O-chiyo?" and everything proceeded amicably from there. Tanizaki's first marriage, one judges from an interview Tanizaki gave the papers at the time and from Sato's recollections, was not unlike Kaname's in this novel: Tanizaki had nothing against his wife; she simply did not interest him. His unhappiness, it appears, had been growing for some time, and it is clear enough that he was thinking of his own marriage when he published Some Prefer Nettles two years before the divorce.

  The novel is also autobiographical, of course, in that it tells of Tanizaki's growing attachment to Osaka and traditional Japan. But so much contemporary Japanese fiction is thinly disguised autobiography that one pounces with joy on a novel that is more. Tanizaki's career, with its early liking for the West and its subsequent retreat into the Japanese past, tells so much about modern Japan that when he talks about himself he talks about much more than himself.

  The real theme of Some Prefer Nettles is the clash between the new and the old, the imported and the domestic
. The marital conflict and the cultural conflict are in a very general way coextensive. Misako, the wife, is drawn toward the new and foreign, and Kaname more and more strongly toward the traditional. And yet each is pulled by conflicting forces. Misako is the stylish young matron of the future, but we know that she is by no means sure of herself, and at the end of the book her father remarks sagely that her modernness is "a pretty thin veneer." Kaname for his part longs to bury his emotional troubles in the calm unity of the old Japanese way of life, and yet he is attracted to the Eurasian prostitute Louise. If the divorce is to come, one feels, it will settle more for Kaname than it will for Misako, and even Kaname has crises ahead.

  The new and the old. For Kaname and for Tanizaki there is on the one hand Tokyo and on the other Osaka, on the one hand the robust Eurasian Louise and on the other the fragile, vaguely unhealthy Japanese doll, O-hisa. Tokyo is the city of foreign fads and of journalism, and of an "intelligentsia" created by the two. "One cannot lightly dismiss the fact," Tanizaki lamented when he published his views of the two cities in 1934, "that Tokyo is the capital of the nation, and Tokyo shallowness is having its effect on every one of our arts."

  Osaka, on the other hand, is "the merchants' capital." The Osaka merchant is grasping, says the Tokyo man. "And indeed is it not natural that he should be?" Tanizaki replies. "He may distress you at first, if you are used to Tokyo, but presently you see that his very covetousness is in its way endearing. To me he is more progressive, more virile, he has more substance, than your callow Tokyo intellectual."

  The Osaka merchant, quite simply is still the Osaka merchant, while the Tokyo intellectual is a pale chaser after fads he can make nothing of and since the culture of old Japan was a merchants' culture, something of it must still remain in Osaka. Even in Osaka it is dying perhaps—the old puppet theater to which Tanizaki gives such affectionate attention in this novel can no longer attract crowds; the motion-picture company that supports it is getting restive. But in Osaka it should still be possible for a little while to live a life that is sufficient to itself.

  A tentative acceptance of the merchants' culture sets off the return to old Japan in Some Prefer Nettles. The return is in a sense a return to childhood. Kaname, we are told in Chapter Three, "had grown up in the merchants' section of Tokyo before the earthquake destroyed it, and the thought of it could fill him with the keenest nostalgia; but the very fact that he was a child of the merchants' quarter made him especially sensitive to its inadequacies." The urge to go back thus becomes a reaffirmation of a childhood that the adult intellect, if not the adult heart, has rejected. The Osaka song, "Snow," the first bit of Osaka art to which Kaname is attracted, brings memories of his early Tokyo years. The Osaka theater reminds him of an afternoon long ago when he was taken to a theater in Tokyo by his mother. In the last chapter O-hisa, the Kyoto beauty, is quite deprived of sex and reduced to a doll, and we are given to understand that Kaname will henceforth be interested in O-hisa-like dolls. He will have no more of adult problems, he will go back and relive his childhood.

  If he does go back, however, it cannot be for long, and Tanizaki knows it. The West is here to stay, and presently Tokyo will have everything its way. "I know as well as anyone," Tanizaki said in 1934 in a sad-and rather moving essay on the traditional arts called In Praise of Shadows, "that I am dreaming, and that, having come this far, we cannot turn back. I know that I am grumbling to myself and demanding the impossible. But there can be no harm, if my grumblings are taken for what they are, in considering how unlucky we have been, what losses we have suffered, in comparison with the Westerner. The Westerner has been able to move forward in ordered steps, while we have met a superior civilization and have had to surrender to it, and we have had to leave a road we have followed for thousands of years."

  Today the prospects for the old civilization seem even dimmer than when these words were written. The war seems to have completed the mischief that Tokyo began. All of the small cities to which we are directed in Chapter Ten if we would find a survival from an earlier day have been destroyed. The Osaka of Sasame Yuki is gone. Kyoto survived the bombings, and the earthen walls and the dusky old houses Tanizaki so loves are still to be found there; but inside them one is likely to come on young ladies who cut their hair in the manner of Audrey Hepburn, and young gentlemen who want to go off to Paris to study something called dessin or to Peking to learn of Paradise. Kyoto has no novelist of note except Tanizaki, and Tanizaki has no disciples. Yet some things do survive—the Osaka puppet theater, for instance, albeit amid voices prophesying the worst, and even the Awaji puppet theater, about which Tanizaki was even more pessimistic when he wrote Some Prefer Nettles. And the conflict that is at the heart of the novel continues to trouble the Japanese spirit. Almost everyone seems now to have chosen the new, but not everyone is happy with it.

  III

  It is easy to argue that Japanese is a hopelessly vague language from which it is impossible to translate, but the argument usually comes down to an unreal notion of what even the best translator can accomplish. No two languages make quite the same distinctions, and every translation is a makeshift insofar as this is true.

  It is undeniable, however, that the refusal of the Japanese language to make distinctions often seems scandalous, and the problems one faces in trying to make Japanese literature understandable in translation grow accordingly. Tanizaki takes the position, in an illuminating study of literary style called A Composition Reader, that it is the duty of the Japanese writer to know the genius of his language and to accommodate himself to it: if Japanese is vague, its vagueness must be made a virtue of.

  Tanizaki puts himself in a line of stylists stemming from The Tale of Genji, stylists who aim at a dreamy, floating prose. They are suspicious of too vivid a choice of words, too clear a view, too conspicuous a transition from one figure or idea to another. They prefer their prose to be misty, to suggest more than it says. They are, Tanizaki says, pure Japanese stylists, in opposition to Chinese-influenced writers who aim at conciseness and precision. One is left to conclude that the latter, who rather dominate the field today, are trying to do something that can only result in violence to the basic nature of the Japanese language.

  Among the precepts Tanizaki hands down to those who would be writers are these: Do not try to be too clear; leave some gaps in the meaning. "The modern writer seems to me to be too kind to his reader," he says, and again: "We Japanese scorn the bald fact, and we consider it good form to keép a thin sheet of paper between the fact or the object and the words that give expression to it." Once when he was criticized for not exploring the inner life of one of his characters, he retorted: "But why should I discuss his psychology? Can't the reader guess from what I've already told him?"

  These ideas are brought up not to show how difficult Tanizaki is to translate—the Tanizaki sentence, for all its poetic suggestiveness, is as a matter of fact a model of limpid expression—but rather in the hope that they will throw light on what to the Western reader may be a confused and uncertain ending. In the last chapter of Some Prefer Nettles we see that Kaname, the hero, is strongly drawn toward O-hisa, the Kyoto beauty who represents old Japan. We have his statement that he has made a decision for himself, and we know fairly well what the decision is: the old man, with his conservative tastes and his immersion in what still lives of the Japanese past, has come to Kaname as a vision of what he himself will one day be. At the very end we have, dim through linen netting, die pale face of an Awaji puppet, symbol of the disembodied Japanese femininity to which Kaname is turning; and we have O-hisa herself, equally dim and fragile, kneeling beside the door.

  But we are not told exactly what Kaname will do. Will he appear at the City Hall the next day dramatically announcing his break with the West as he turns in his divorce notice? Or will he choose a compromise whereby for the time being he can have both O-hisa and the Eurasian Louise and can perhaps even shelter his wife, Misako? We do not know. It is at this point that Tanizaki choo
ses to be "unkind." "And why should I tell you?" we can hear him saying. "I have already told you enough about Kaname. I prefer to leave some gaps."

  IV

  This does not seem the place for a detailed discussion of the puppet theater that stands for Osaka art and the Osaka past in Some Prefer Nettles. The reader will perhaps be less puzzled at descriptions of that theater, however, if he imagines puppets much larger than the familiar Punch and Judy, the principal ones manipulated each by three puppeteers in full view of the audience.

  Love Suicide at Amijima, which is being played in Chapters Two and Three, is by Chikamatsu Monzaemon, the greatest of writers for the puppet stage. It concerns the love of Jihei, a young Osaka paper merchant, for Koharu, a geisha. Jihei's wife, O-san, attempts to sacrifice herself for their happiness, but the pull of duties and counter-duties becomes too much and Jihei and Koharu kill themselves. Morning-Glory Diary, which is described in Chapter Eleven, is a melodrama about a beautiful lady, Miyuki, and a samurai, Komazawa, who love and part. Miyuki presently goes blind. The climax of the play is an Evangelinesque scene where Miyuki discovers just too late that she and Komazawa are stopping at the same inn. She follows him to a river fording, but is kept back by a flood after he has crossed. Unfortunately for the effect, however, she regains her eyesight and finds him after all. One may wish that the playwright had followed Tanizaki's advice and stopped a little sooner.

  The cuts of Bunraku puppets and puppeteers at the chapter heads are the work of Mr. Takahashi Sachio of Tokyo, a Kabuki actor whose stage name is Nakamura Tokie. They are repeated twice in this order: Koharu, Jihei, and O-san from Love Suicide at Amijima; Komazawa and Miyuki from Morning-Glory Diary; and Mitsuhide and his mother Satsuki from Taikoki, which is mentioned in Chapter Ten.