Some Prefer Nettles Read online

  DEAR MISAKO:

  Thank you for your letter. I had thought that by now everything would be decided, but the other day I got a postcard from Awaji and saw that nothing had been. Your letter therefore did not surprise me.

  Kaname went up to the second floor of the foreign wing to finish the letter at his ease.

  If your decision is really find, would it not be wise to carry it through as quickly as you can? There seems to be no other way open to you, as a matter of fact, now that you have come this far. Kaname humors himself too much and so do you, and this is the result, I cannot help thinking. I do not mind having you come weeping to me, but why not go weeping to him instead? ("Weeping" is perhaps unfair. 1 suppose you do not mean to sound quite so tearful.) You are unable to, of course—that I understand, and I can think of nothing sadder. But if you feel so much reserve, then surely you cannot stay married to him. "He gave me too much freedom," you say, or "I wish I had never met Aso." If you could say only a fraction of that directly to Kaname—if there were only that much frankness between you two as husband and wife— but I shall say no more. I begin to sound peevish. I shall of course not mention your letter to Kaname. It would serve no purpose, only make things worse. I must seem heartless to you, I know, though in fact I think of my own experience with Yoshiko and am more moved than I can tell you. It is only that I must not let myself get emotional. I must keep to the central problem, that of your misfortune in having arrived at a point where there is no course open to you but to leave Kaname. Forget about the past, start over with a new and happy home, I beseech you, and see that you do not make the same mistake again. Kaname too will be happier, I feel sure. You must not think I am angry. I do not have a very subtle mind, however, and I have become convinced that it is hardly my place to plunge into the middle of this complicated relationship of yours, that it would be much wiser for me to stay away until you have made your own decision. I have delayed my sailing in the hope that you might make it soon, but it seems now that I shall have to take care of my business in Osaka and leave again without seeing you. I ant sure you will understand.

  There is something I have kept from you. I talked to Hiroshi when we were in Tokyo together. He took it very well, I thought. Have you noticed any change in him? I get letters now and then, though with never a mention of that evening. He is a bright lad—but do not think I am trying to beguile you into overlooking what I have done. If I have meddled more than I should, I apologize. Yet you will admit, I am sure, that it has been easier for me to tell him than it would have been for you.... Presumptuous though it may seem, I should like you to know that I want to do what little I can, as a relative and as the friend who knows them best, to help both Kaname and Hiroshi. I believe that both of them can stand a shock. The way through life is not always smooth, and it is good for a boy to have his troubles. Indeed, Kaname himself has had all too few. A really serious blow might teach him to pamper himself a little less.

  Good-by for now. I shall look forward to seeing you when you are married again.

  TAKANATSU HIDEO

  May 27

  It was for Takanatsu an unusually long letter. Kaname's eyes were filled with tears when he finished reading. Perhaps the empty house had weakened his defenses.

  CALL them part of the family if you would, they were still guests. O-hisa had arranged the star lilies in the alcove that morning and retouched them to the proper angles several times during the day. At a little after four she caught a glimpse through the summer blind of a parasol coming in under the greenery at the gate. She stepped out into the garden.

  "They're here?" the old man asked as he heard her wooden clogs behind him. He had gone out after his nap to clean caterpillar nests from the shrubbery.

  "They're here."

  "Misako too?"

  "I believe so."

  "Fine, fine. You get tea ready." He followed the steppingstones around the house and out the wicker garden gate. "Come in, come in," he called cheerfully. "It must have been a warm trip."

  "It was warm," Kaname agreed. "We should have come this morning, but somehow it was noon before we got ourselves started."

  "You really should have. The minute you think the weather is good, you find it's as sultry as the middle of August. But please come in."

  Kaname and Misako followed him into the house. The bamboo summer mats, reflecting the green of the June foliage up from the floor, were cool against their stockinged feet. There was a faint smell of incense—a grass seed, they would have guessed—through the house.

  "But I forgot. You'll want to cool yourselves off a bit first. O-hisa, bring some towels." The old man, looking covertly for clues to their intentions, noticed that Kaname's face was wet with perspiration and mirrored the green from outside. The garden was shaded to a faint dusk by the trees, and the room was darker still. They had taken seats where the breeze passed, out near the veranda.

  "Wouldn't hot towels really be better?" asked O-hisa.

  "I suppose so. And you might take off your coat, Kaname."

  "Thank you.... Your mosquitoes seem to be out even in the daytime."

  "Indeed they are. Honjo has nothing on us—they say it's New Year before the mosquitoes are gone from Honjo, you know. Ours here are big dryland ones, worse than any they have in Honjo. We could use ordinary mosquito-repellent, I suppose, but chrysanthemums aren't quite so unpleasant. We keep them burning here in a baking-dish."

  As Kaname had expected, the old man showed none of the dismay his letter had suggested. He was calm and amiable as ever, quite ignoring Misako, who sat glumly outside the conversation. O-hisa too was her usual tranquil self, even though she had no doubt been told of Kaname's letter. She brought in tea and towels, almost noiselessly, and disappeared. There was no trace of her through all the rooms that were visible, open for the summer, beyond light reed blinds.

  "You can stay tonight, can't you?" the old man asked.

  "We could, yes.... We came without deciding definitely, though." Kaname glanced for the first time at his wife.

  "I'm going back," she said almost defiantly. "Can't you have your talk and be finished early?"

  "Misako, we'd like to be alone for a few minutes." The quiet of the room was broken by a faint puff as the old man blew the ashes from his pipe. Misako left the room and went upstairs—O-hisa, she was afraid, might still be somewhere below— while he was refilling it and lighting it from a charcoal ember.

  "We have a problem, haven't we?"

  "I'm sorry we've had to upset you so. We haven't said anything before because we've thought perhaps we might find a way out without coming to this."

  "And now you can't?"

  "I'm afraid we can't. I tried to cover everything in my letter.... There must be parts of it you will want explained, though."

  "No, no—I understand in a general way. But, Kaname, if you want my opinion in a word, I say you're in the wrong."

  Startled at the directness, Kaname opened his mouth to answer. The old man cut him off and continued:

  "I suppose that is a little too strong. But don't you think you put too much faith in what you call being reasonable? The times are what they are, and I can't keep you from treating your wife as if she were another man of the world, I suppose. You shouldn't be surprised, though, if you find it doesn't work as you think it ought to. But let me come to the point and forget the preliminaries. You had Misako choose another husband on a trial basis because you didn't have the qualifications yourself, you say. That's not very realistic. You talk about being modern, but there are some things you simply can't do in that free, open way of yours."

  "I can't argue with you if that's the tone you're going to take."

  "Wait, Kaname. You may think I'm being sarcastic, but I'm saying what I feel very strongly. In the old days there were any number of couples like you and Misako. My wife and I were that way ourselves, as a matter of fact.... None of your one year or two years—sometimes for five years at a stretch I never went near her. But she just assumed
that was the way things were, and there was no problem. The world has come to be a much more complicated place, when you think about it.... But if you send a woman away, even for a trial, and she discovers halfway through that she's made a mistake, then she's in the predicament of not being able to come back, no matter how much she may want to. Talk of 'free choice' all you like, there's no free choice whatsoever in the matter. I don't know about your woman of the future, but Misako's education has been half old and half new, and all this modernness of hers is a pretty thin veneer."

  "Mine is thin too. In a way we're hurrying the divorce along because we both know it. And in the final analysis I do think we're doing the right thing."

  "I'll never tell her you said so, Kaname, but leaving the problem of Misako to me, would it be possible for you yourself to reconsider? I won't argue with you, maybe because old people want peace at any price. If the two of you aren't suited for each other, though, if you think you're not compatible, don't worry too much about it. Time will pass and you'll find that you are very much suited for each other after all. O-hisa's far younger than I, and we aren't what you could call well matched, but when two people live together, an affection does develop, and somehow they get by while they're waiting for it to. Can't you say after all that that's what a marriage is? But of course Misako's been unfaithful, and I can't blame you if you tell me I'm talking nonsense."

  "Please—that has nothing to do with it. She had my permission, and it's not fair to call her unfaithful."

  "But unfaithfulness is unfaithfulness. I only wish you'd told me before it came to that."

  Silence seemed the only possible reply to the soft reproach. There was room for rebuttal, but the old man was not really so unreasonable as to have rejected the explanation Kaname had already made. There lay behind the words a father's sorrow that Kaname felt he had to respect.

  "I could have done better in many ways, I suppose," he began finally. "I sometimes tell myself it would have been better if I had done this or that. But it's all past now, and the main thing is that Misako has definitely made up her mind."

  It was getting darker outside. Shadows deepened in the corners of the room. The old man knelt, fanning at the smoke from the smoldering chrysanthemums. The lines of his knees, thin perhaps from the heat, were sharply marked under the fine stripes of his kimono. He seemed to be blinking rapidly, as though his eyes smarted. Possibly it was Kaname's fancy. Or possibly the smoke.

  "You're right, of course. It was not clever of me to talk to you first. Anyway, you will let me have Misako for two or three hours?"

  "I'm sure it will do you no good. As a matter of fact, she dreaded having to talk to you—that's the real reason we're so late. We would have come sooner, but time went by while we argued. It really was something of a battle to get her to come even this late. Finally she agreed, but said that her mind was made up and that I'd have to do all the talking, and the listening if you had anything to say."

  "But after all, Kaname, even if the divorce has to come, I'm not to be brushed aside quite as simply as that."

  "So I kept telling her. Anyway, she's excited and upset and would rather not quarrel with you, and she wants me to act as her agent somehow and get your blessing—that I'm sure is how she feels. Shall we have her come in?"

  "No, what I have in mind—I think O-hisa has something ready, but I could take Misako out to dinner. You won't object, will you?"

  "I don't think it will be easy to persuade her."

  "I know that. I'll see what I can do. If she says she won't go, then that's all there is to it, but maybe we can arrange so that there will be something left to flatter the whims of an old man." He clapped for O-hisa and gave her instructions while Kaname sat fidgeting. "Could you call the Hyōtei, please? Tell them there will be two of us, and we'd like a quiet room."

  "Two of you are going out?"

  "You've probably put all your art into dinner, and it seems wrong to clear out all your guests."

  "But that's not fair to the one who has to stay. Wouldn't it be better for everyone to go?"

  "What can you offer your guest?"

  "Nothing decent."

  "The salmon roe?"

  "I thought I might deep-fry the salmon roe."

  "And what else?"

  "Baked trout-"

  "And?"

  "And a salad."

  "Well, Kaname, the food to go with it doesn't sound very promising, but maybe you could stay and have a few drinks."

  "Poor Kaname gets the booby prize."

  "Really, now," Kaname protested, "the cook is better than the cook at the Hyōtei. I'll have myself a feast."

  "Would you lay my clothes out, then?" The old man started upstairs.

  Kaname could not guess what the decisive arguments might have been, but they were perhaps not too different from the ones he had used himself on the way up from Osaka: "If you cross him, you may find your last chance gone for getting through this safely." In any case, fifteen minutes or so later Misako came darkly down the stairs. She retouched her face in the doorway and without a word went out ahead of her father.

  "We'll see you later." The old man slipped his white-stockinged feet into his sandals. He had on a silk-gauze cap and looked ready for the role of a poet on the stage.

  "Hurry back," said O-hisa.

  "We may not be able to hurry exactly.... I've already spoken to Misako about it, Kaname. We'll expect you to stay the night."

  "But we're making nuisances of ourselves.... Not that I wouldn't like to stay myself."

  "Bring me an umbrella, O-hisa. It's got sultry. It will probably be raining again before long."

  "Suppose you take a taxi," suggested O-hisa.

  "Nothing of the sort. It's much too near. We can walk."

  "Have a good time." O-hisa saw them to the gate, and a moment or so later followed Kaname back into the front room with a terry-cloth bath kimono over her arm. "And now how would you like a bath? It's ready whenever you say."

  "You're being very kind. I wonder if I should, though. I'll never be able to pick myself up and go back to Osaka afterwards."

  "But you're staying the night."

  "I'm not at all sure that we are."

  "Don't say that. Anyway, you're not going to have much of a dinner, and I want you at least to be hungry."

  Kaname did not know when he had last been in this bath. A typical Kyoto bath, so small that one could hardly sit in it comfortably and so sharp to the touch with its heated metal sides that one accustomed to soaking at his leisure in the ample wooden Tokyo bathtub could never feel afterwards that he had had a bath at all. It was made still more inhospitable by the gloom. The one small latticed window up near the ceiling admitted little enough light even during the brightest part of the day. Then, too, Kaname was used to a tiled bathroom at home, and he always found taking a bath here rather like being shut up in a dark cellar. The water, perfumed with cloves, suggested nothing so much as a cloudy, sediment-filled medicine bath. Misako held that the cloves were a trick to hide the dirty water, that there was no telling how many days it had gone unchanged, and she always managed to escape when she was urged to have a bath. The old man, however, was proud of his "clove bath." It was a particular treat he was able to offer his guests.

  He had developed his private scatological philosophy, something like this: "A pure white bath or toilet is a piece of Western foolishness. It matters little, you may say, because no one is around to see, but a device that sets your own sewage out in front of your eyes is highly offensive to good taste. How much more proper to dispose of it modestly in as dark and out-of-the-way a corner as you can find." He advocated stuffing the urinal with fresh green cedar twigs, it being his eccentric view that "a well-tended toilet in the pure Japanese style should have a delicate odor all its own. That gives one an inexpressible feeling of elegance and refinement." The toilet aside, O-hisa complained privately about the dark bath. And it would serve quite as well, she said, to perfume it with a drop or two of the
essence of cloves one can buy these days, but the old man would be satisfied only with the old way, the bag of clove heads stewing in the tub.

  "He offers to wash my back sometimes, but it's so dark he can't tell front from back," O-hisa had once confessed. Kaname's eye fell on a bran bag, the old Japanese substitute for soap, hanging from a pillar.

  "How is it?" O-hisa's voice came from outside, where she was putting wood in the water-heater.

  "Splendid. But if it wouldn't be too much trouble, could you turn on the light, please?"

  "I'm sorry. I did forget the light, didn't I?"

  The light—no doubt that too had its reasons—was a tiny night bulb that seemed only to intensify the gloom. As Kaname stepped out of his kimono, he was assailed by mosquitoes all over his body. He hurriedly wiped away the sweat, not bothering to wash himself as thoroughly as he might, and began soaking with the cloves. The mosquitoes hummed round his face and neck. For all the darkness inside, there seemed still to be a soft evening light in the garden, and the maple leaves through the high latticed window glowed a clearer, fresher green, like a silken fabric, than they had in the full daylight. He felt as though he were far away at some secluded mountain resort. "You can hear cuckoos in my garden," the old man was fond of boasting, and Kaname strained his ears to pick up a cuckoo's call even now. All he could hear, however, was a frog in some distant paddy prophesying rain, and the steady humming of the mosquitoes. What would die old man and Misako be doing in their restaurant? The old man had been reticent in front of his son-in-law, but his manner had suggested that he might apply considerable pressure when he had his daughter alone. Kaname was a little uneasy at the thought; but it did not dispel the vague light-heartedness he had felt since he saw the two of them off.

  He was taken with the odd fancy that this house, here where he was soaking in the bath, was his own house now that he had divorced Misako and begun a new life. Deep down he may have had unsuspected motives, it occurred to him, for seeking out the company of the old man these last few months. He had cherished a dream in secret, an extraordinary dream, and he had neither cautioned himself nor reproved himself for it. That may have been because O-hisa was to him less a specific person than a "type O-hisa." It would probably suit him as well if he had not this particular O-hisa, ministering to the old man here, but another who belonged to "type O-hisa." The O-hisa for whom his secret dream searched might not be O-hisa at all, but another, a more O-hisa-like O-hisa. And it might even be that this latter O-hisa was no more than a doll, perhaps even now quiet in the dusk of an inner chamber behind an arched stage doorway. A doll might do well enough, indeed.