Some Prefer Nettles Read online

  "There's no point in worrying about an umbrella," the old man said curtly. "You'll be burned black before we get home anyway."

  O-hisa did not agree. While they waited in the entrance she took out the cream she had slipped into the bottom of her bag and applied it with soft little pats to her face, neck, wrists, even her ankles. The pains this Kyoto lady took with her fair complexion struck Kaname as at the same time charming and ridiculous. The pleasure-minded old man, however, for all that he seemed to be concerned with just such fine points, showed curiously little sympathy now that he had made his views known.

  "We won't be there before eleven." It was O-hisa's turn to prod the old man, who stopped now and then in front of an antique shop.

  "What lovely weather!" She looked up into the clear sky as she walked slowly on ahead with Kaname, adding in a low voice, a little wistfully: "On a day like this I'd rather be out looking for spring greens."

  "It is a better day for that than for a play."

  "I wonder if there are good greens around here."

  "I know nothing about this part of the country. I should think there would be plenty in the hills around Kyoto, though."

  "There are indeed. Just last month we went out to Yase to look for aster sprouts. We took in a great supply."

  "Aster sprouts?"

  "He eats them. I looked through the markets in Kyoto, but there were none to be had. The grocers all said the things were too bitter for human consumption."

  "Even in Tokyo it's not everybody who can get them down. So you went all the way to Yase after them?"

  "We filled a basket this big."

  "It's fun to go looking for greens, I suppose, but it's fun too just to wander through a country town on a day like this."

  The main road through the town stretched on under the blue sky before them, so clear and serene that they could count the people passing back and forth far into the distance. Even the bicycles tinkling their bells as they moved by seemed calm and unhurried. The town was not an especially remarkable one, but like every town in this part of the country it had its lines of fine earthen walls. The old man had gone into that too: the driving winds and rains farther to the east make it necessary to put up board fences rather than these earthen walls, he found, and the wood, no matter how fine it is, soon turns dark and begins to look dirty. Tokyo is a special problem of course, rebuilt with tin-roofed barracks after the earthquake, but one might expect the small provincial centers around it to have a patina in proportion as they are old. In fact they are gloomy as though overlaid with a coating of soot. Earthquakes and fires are common, and each rebuilding brings characterless houses of cheap imported woods that might better be used for matches, and shabby Western-style buildings that suggest a run-down, end-of-the-line town in the United States. A very old city in the east, the medieval military seat at Kamakura for instance, might not indeed have all the beauty of the ancient capital at Nara if it were moved west, but it would certainly have more repose and grace than it has. The country from Kyoto west has been blessed by nature, and disasters are few; and the earthen walls and tiles of even obscure town houses and farms can make the traveler stop and gaze for a moment. The smaller of the old castle towns have more of this charm than large, modernized cities like Osaka, or even Kyoto, a much less extreme example. With the heart of Kyoto changing so rapidly, one has to go to Wakayama, Sakai, Himeji, Nishinomiya, to find the old cities as they have always been.

  As his eye fell on a corner of crumbling wall with white blossoms arching out over the rounded tiles at its ridge, Kaname thought of something else the old man had once said: "People talk about famous places in the east like Shiobara and Hakone, but Japan is a volcanic country and you can find that kind of scenery everywhere. When the Mainichi was running its poll for the best eight views in the country, they say, it uncovered more 'lion rocks' than you could count. I don't doubt it a moment. The places really worth going to are the little towns and harbors from here on west."

  The island of Awaji showed not very large on the map, and its harbor very possibly consisted of but this one road. You go straight down, the inn manager had said, till you come out at the river, and the theater is in the flats beyond. The rows of houses therefore most probably ended at the river. This may have been the seat of some minor baron a century ago—even then it could hardly have been imposing enough to be called a castle town—and it had probably changed little since. A modern coating goes no farther than the large cities that are a country's arteries, and there are not many such cities anywhere. In an old country with a long tradition, China and Europe as well as Japan—any country, in fact, expect a very new one like the United States—the smaller cities, left aside by the flow of civilization, retain the flavor of an earlier day until they are overtaken by catastrophe.

  This little harbor, for instance: it had its electric wires and poles, its painted billboards, and here and there a display window, but one could ignore them and find on every side townsmen's houses that might have come from an illustration to a seventeenth-century novel. The earthen walls covered to the eaves with white plaster, the projecting lattice fronts with their solid, generous slats of wood, the heavy tiled roofs held down by round ridge-tiles, the shop signs—"Lacquer," "Soy," "Oil" —in fading letters on fine hardwood grounds, and inside, beyond earth-floored entrances, the shop names printed on dark-blue half-curtains—it was not the old man's remark this time, but every detail brought back—how vividly!—the mood and air of old Japan. Kaname felt as if he were being drunk up into the scene, as if he were losing himself in the clean white walls and the brilliant blue sky. Those walls were a little like the sash around O-hisa's waist: their first luster had disappeared in long years under the fresh sea winds and rains, and bright though they were, their brightness was tempered by a certain reserve, a soft austerity.

  Kaname felt a deep repose come over him. "These old houses are so dark you have no idea what's inside."

  "Partly it's because the road is so bright." The old man had come up beside them. "The ground here seems almost white."

  Kaname thought of the faces of the ancients in the dusk behind their shop curtains. Here on this street people with faces like theater dolls must have passed lives like stage lives. The world of the plays —of O-yumi, Jūrōbei of Awa, the pilgrim O-tsuru, and the rest—must have been just such a town as this. And wasn't O-hisa a part of it? Fifty years ago, a hundred years ago, a woman like her, dressed in the same kimono, was perhaps going down this same street in the spring sun, lunch in hand, on her way to the theater beyond the river. Or perhaps, behind one of these latticed fronts, she was playing "Snow" on her koto. O-hisa was a shade left behind by another age.

  NATIVES of Awaji say that the puppet theater originated there. In the center of the island there is a village called Ichimura that even now has seven puppet companies. Once there were thirty-six. Ichimura is known as "puppet-town," and its theater goes back, one hardly knows how many centuries, to a certain court nobleman who was banished from Kyoto and came to live in Ichimura, and who in his boredom with country life took to making puppets and to manipulating them for his own amusement. The famous Awaji Gennojo family descends from him, it is said. The family still has an impressive estate in the village, and its puppet company goes on tour from Awaji to Shikoku on the south and to western Honshu on the north. But the Gennojo family has no monopoly on the Ichimura puppets. One might say, in fact, with perhaps a little exaggeration, that the whole village is in some way occupied with the puppet theater, as singers and accompanists, puppeteers and stage managers. In busy seasons the people of Ichimura move out to work in the fields, and in slack seasons they fall into puppet companies to tour the island. The Awaji theater is in the truest sense a folk art, an art born long ago of rural tradition.

  January and May are the theater months. If one crosses over to Awaji then, one finds plays in the towns and in the fields, all over the island. In the larger towns a building is sometimes borrowed, but for the most part th
e plays are given half out of doors under makeshift shelters of logs and rush mats, and when it rains, that is the end of a day's performance. A real puppet madness occasionally seizes the Awaji farmer. He wanders from house to house with little one-hand marionettes, going through a favorite passage, himself both singer and puppeteer, when someone asks him in; he may even bring his house to ruin with his puppets, and he has been known in an extreme case to go quite insane.

  But with the new age and its pressures, even this proud art is dying. The old dolls deteriorate until they can no longer be used, and there is almost no one who can replace them. Only three men still call themselves puppet-makers, Tengu-Hisa and his student Tengu-Ben across the straits in Tokushima, and Yura-Game of Yura on Awaji. Tengu-Hisa, the only real master of the three, is an old man of sixty or seventy. When he dies, the old art will probably die with him. Tengu-Ben is in Osaka with the Bunraku puppet theater, but his work is actually limited to repairing old dolls and to retouching their faces; and while in his day old Yura-Game made some fine puppets, the younger Yura-Game is a barber or some such fellow who repairs puppets in his spare time. Since the old puppets are thus as good as irreplaceable, great pains are taken to preserve them. In the summer or just before the New Year broken puppets from all over the island are collected at the puppet-maker's for repairs, and a broken head or two can be had cheaply if one goes to Awaji at the right time, it is said.

  The old man had explored the possibility in great detail. "This time I am definitely going to get myself a puppet," he announced.

  He had been trying without much success to get an old puppet from the Bunraku theater in Osaka. The Awaji pilgrimage was planned at least partly to let him look for the puppet he had been assured could be found there. He would see a puppet play, he said he would visit the Gennojo family and Yura-Game, and on the way back to Osaka he would cross the straits and visit Tengu-Hisa in Tokushima.

  "Unhurried, isn't it? Did you ever see anything quite like it?"

  "Unhurried it is, all right," Kaname agreed. He and the old man exchanged glances as they entered the shelter with its rush-matted pit. Relaxed, unhurried—the words quite took in the mood of the place. Once, one day toward the end of an April, he did not remember how long ago, Kaname had gone to the pantomimes at the Mibu Temple in Kyoto. The lazy warmth of spring bathed the temple precincts, and in the stands he felt a pleasant drowsiness come over him. The voices of the children playing outside, the awnings of the little festival shops, the candy shops and the comic-mask shops, shining like stained glass in the sun—all the sounds and impressions from the street and the temple yard melted into the slow, genial sounds of the recitation and the twanging accompaniment on the stage with one quiet, liquid movement. Kaname would find himself drifting off to sleep and pull himself awake; twice, three times, the drowsing off and the quick awakening... and again and then again. And each time he opened his eyes the same farce still held the stage, the same slow recital still pushed its way along, the children still played outside, and the lazy sun still reflected from the awnings. A spring day that would never end, he almost felt.... It was as if a hundred formless and uncollected dreams were passing through his mind, the dreaming and the waking fused one into the other.... Call it a taste of the joys of great peace, call it a transport to some fairyland, it was a feeling of serene removal from the world such as Kaname had not felt since the day he had been taken, still a child, to see the Kagura dancing at the Shrine of the Sea God in the old downtown section of Tokyo.

  Here in the puppet theater he felt the mood come over him again. Although the roof and sides were covered with straw mats, irregular chinks where they met admitted rays of sunlight to the pit and the seats around it. Here and there a patch of blue sky showed, or a stretch of waving, rustling grass down toward the river. Where another theater would have been dark with tobacco smoke, this one was fresh as the out-of-doors, and a spring breeze came in over meadows bright with dandelions and the mauve of clover.

  In the pit, where rush mats and rows of cushions were laid out on the bare ground, the children of the village had taken over. Noisy games, oranges, candy—it was lively as the playground of a kindergarten, untroubled as a country shrine festival. No (me seemed to notice that a play was going on.

  "A bit different from what we find in Osaka."

  The three of them, boxes in hand, stood for a time looking down at the confusion of the small juvenile kingdom, not trying to move on inside.

  "The play must have started. The puppets seem to be moving."

  Across the kindergarten in the pit there flickered suggestions of something different in kind from the puppet theater Kaname had seen in Osaka. A world of fantasy, it seemed, childlike in its simplicity and its radiance. The silk backdrop was splashed with morning-glories, and the scene must be the firefly hunt on the River Uji at the beginning of Morning-Glory Diary, he decided. A young warrior puppet, Komazawa no doubt, and a beautiful young girl one would take for Miyuki knelt side by side on the deck of a boat, bent one toward the other, fans in hand, whispering of love. Kaname would have expected the scene to be sensuous, erotic; but he could hear neither the singing nor the samisen accompaniment, and the engaging little movements of the puppets suggested an art far removed from the realism of Bungoro and the Osaka theater. It was almost as if the puppets here were playing with the children in the pit, innocently, unaffectedly.

  O-hisa started for the stands. The old man, however, was of the opinion that the puppet stage should be seen from below. "This is what we want," he said, deliberately choosing a place in the open pit.

  The spring grass was pleasant enough, but the chill of the raw ground soon crept through the thin mats and cushions.

  "I shan't be able to stand up afterwards," said O-hisa, piling up three cushions for herself. "And it's hardly what you would call healthy, either."

  "You can't expect comfort at a place like this, and you don't get the feel of the play from up there. And think of the fun you'll have talking about the cold afterwards."

  It was evident, though, for all his determination to ignore it, that the old man felt the cold himself. Presently he had sake warming over an alcohol burner.

  "We seem to be quite in style. Everyone has boxes."

  "Some of them are elaborate enough, too—look at the lacquer-work," said Kaname. "I suppose when everyone automatically goes to the play, everyone automatically takes along the same lunch."

  "It used to be that way everywhere. It was in Osaka until not too long ago. In Kyoto you still see old families going out to look at the cherry blossoms, and the houseboy walking on ahead with the lunch and the saké. When they arrive at wherever they're going, they hire a kettle to heat the sake, and when they finish, they put what's left back in the bottle and take it home for cooking. A Tokyo man will tell you that shows how tightfisted they are in Kyoto, but when you think about it, it's not a bad idea to carry along your own lunch and not have to take your chances with a restaurant. At least you know what you're eating."

  The audience was mostly in the pit, gathered here and there in little knots, each knot beginning its own celebration. There were few men, perhaps because it was still early in the day. The village wives and daughters, usually with a few children, some with babes in arms, formed their ranks around the lunch boxes quite as though they had taken up housekeeping, quite untroubled by what was happening on the stage. The bustle and the clutter were immense.

  Stew and saké were on sale at the refreshment stand, which was patronized by a few of the parties. Most of the spectators, however, had their own lunches in the impressive boxes that had caught the old man's eye. It must have been rather like this at Asuka-yama and the other popular cherry resorts in Tokyo, Kaname thought, before the old system, the system of the centuries of isolation, began to break down. The elaborate lacquerware had always seemed to him a luxury whose day was past, but here for the first time he saw it as useful and unaffected. Indeed, now that he thought of it, the lacquer did go well w
ith the theater lunch, with the pale tones of its omelets and rice balls. There were lively reds and whites throughout the theater, and somehow the food was more appetizing by virtue of the color effect. Japanese food is meant to be looked at and not eaten, people sometimes say. Perhaps they are right if they are making fun of the formal banquet carefully laid out on its trays. But here the colors were more than only pleasant to look at; they worked on the appetite, made even the unremarkable rice and pickles seem a little more exciting.

  "It's the saké and the cold that do it," the old man said, getting up and excusing himself. He had already been outside two or three times.

  But the most in distress was O-hisa. Knowing what sort of place it would be, she had made what preparations she could to get through the day without incident. Her attempts to forestall a crisis only acted as a stimulant, however, and too, with die cold creeping up her spine, she had made the mistake of joining the old man in a cup or two. Presently the crisis was immediate.

  She got up. "Excuse me, but where..."

  Kaname went out to explore and came back frowning. "It will never do for you." The facilities were in fact limited to two or three buckets, quite out in the open and used without inhibition by men and women alike.

  "What should I do?"

  "What are you worried about?" the old man broke in. "If they stare at you, stare right back at them."

  "But I don't think I could manage—standing."

  "Don't women stand in Kyoto?"

  "I know at least one who never has."

  O-hisa went out to look for a restaurant in the neighborhood. It was nearly an hour before she came back. She had walked past the restaurants and found them all a little hard to go into, not the sort of restaurants she liked, and she had found herself at the inn and had hired a rickshaw to bring her back. She wondered what the other young women did (the old women, of course, were up to anything), whether they really managed with those open buckets. As she was turning the problem over in her mind, a disturbance broke out behind them.