Some Prefer Nettles Read online

  At Osaka station Kaname tore a ticket from his book and let Misako take care of her own, and with a precision that suggested careful planning they walked out into the plaza two or three paces apart. Kaname stepped into a taxi first, Misako followed. For the first time they were alone, husband and wife; but had anyone been watching them in their glass box, he would have seen them, like silhouettes pasted on paper, forehead against forehead, nose against nose, jaw against jaw, facing stiffly forward, shaking slightly with the motion of the taxi.

  "What is playing?" Misako asked.

  "Love Suicide, he said, and something else. I've forgotten."

  As if forced to one concession by the long silence, each made his one remark. They gazed rigidly forward as they spoke, the one seeing the line of the other's nose dimly through the corner of the eye.

  Misako, who had no idea where the Benten Theater was, had no choice but to follow when they left the cab. Kaname had apparently received instructions from the old man. They went first to a teahouse that catered to theater guests, and were guided from there by a kimono-clad maid. Misako felt more and more oppressed as the time approached when she would have to appear before her father and play the part of the wife. She pictured him on his cushion in the pit, his eyes fixed on the stage, a sake cup raised to his lips, and beside him his mistress, O-hisa. Misako felt tense and uncomfortable with her father, but O-hisa she actively disliked. O-hisa, younger than Misako, was a tranquil, unexcitable Kyoto type, whose conversation, no matter what was said to her, seldom went beyond one amiable sentence. Her lack of spirit went badly with Misako's own Tokyo briskness, but, more than that, the sight of her beside the old man was to Misako insufferable. It made him seem less her father than an old lecher whom she found generally repulsive.

  "I'm staying for only one act," she murmured as they stepped inside the door. The heavy, old-fashioned theater samisens, whose twanging echo assailed them in the lobby, seemed to stir her to rebellion.

  How many years had it been, Kaname wondered, since he had last been to the theater the old leisurely way, escorted by a teahouse maid? As he stepped from his sandals and felt the smooth, cold wood against his stockinged feet, he thought for an instant of a time, long ago—he could have been no more than four or five—when he had gone to a play in Tokyo with his mother. He remembered how he had sat on her lap as they took a rickshaw downtown from their house in the old merchants' quarter, and how afterwards his mother had led him by the hand, padding along in his holiday sandals, as they followed the maid from the teahouse. The sensation as he stepped into the theater, the smooth, cool wood against the soles of his feet, had been exactly the same then. Old-fashioned theaters with their open, straw-matted stalls somehow always seemed cold. And he had worn a kimono that day too—how clearly it called back his childhood, that feel of the air, like a penetrating, pungent mint, slipping through the kimono to his skin, chilly but pleasant, caressing as those cool, sunny days in very early spring when the plums are in bloom. "We're late," his mother had said, and he had hurried along with his heart racing.

  Today, for some reason, the pit seemed even colder than the lobby. As they moved forward along the passage used by Kabuki actors for grand entrances, Kaname and Misako felt the chill bite into their arms and legs with an almost numbing intensity. The theater was fairly large and the spectators were few, and the cold wind seemed to whistle through it as through the streets outside. Even the puppets on the stage looked forlorn, dejected; they called for one's pity as they pulled their necks deep into their robes, and the whole effect was wonderfully in harmony with the tense, sad tones of the samisens and the narrators. The pit was perhaps a third full, with the spectators clustered near the stage. The old man's half-bald head and O-hisa's shining, heavy Japanese coiffure were not hard to pick out even from the rear of the theater.

  O-hisa saw them as they came down the passage. "Oh, you're here," she said in her soft Kyoto accent. She carefully piled the lunch boxes at her knee, elaborate gold-flecked tiers of them, and moved back to make room for Misako beside the old man. "They've come," she said. He greeted them shortly and turned to concentrate again on the stage.

  His cloak was an indefinite color, a shade of green it could probably have been called, lively and yet with a touch of somberness, like the costumes of the puppets, or like one of those mellow old brocades the model dilettante might have chosen for his cloak in the Middle Ages. Under it he wore a dark kimono with a fine printed pattern, and under that an inch or two of saffron showed at the sleeve. He sat leaning on his elbow against the wooden stall-railing, his left arm bent against his back so that his kimono stood out stiffly from his neck, and his round shoulders were even more marked than usual. He was always careful to cultivate in his dress and his manner an impression of advanced years. "Old men should act like old men," he was fond of saying, and his choice of clothes today was apparently an application of his dictum that "old men only look older when they try to wear clothes too young for them." This constant emphasis on age rather amused Kaname. The old man was not really as old as all that. Assuming that he had married at twenty-five or twenty-six, and that his dead wife had borne Misako, her first daughter, not long after, he would be no more than fifty-six or so even now. He had, in Misako's expression, not yet "given up sex," and that rather substantiated the theory. "Being old is another of your father's hobbies," Kaname had once remarked to her.

  "You must be uncomfortable. Why don't you stretch your legs a little this way?" O-hisa said solicitously, and busied herself in the narrow little stall making tea, pressing sweets on the others, now and then trying softly to make conversation with Misako, who disdained to look around. The old man held his sake cup lightly behind him in his outstretched right hand, balanced against the corner of an ashtray, and among her other duties O-hisa had to be sure that it was never allowed to go dry. The cup was one of three decorated in gold on vermilion with scenes from Hiroshige's prints, the old man having recently taken to insisting that "sak must be drunk from wooden lacquerware." Everything— the sake, the sweets, the cups and boxes—had been brought from Kyoto; with just such an assortment of gold-flecked lacquer, one could imagine, court maidens set out long ago to view the cherry blossoms. The old man, so particular to bring his own supplies, was not a guest to make the theater teahouses prosper, and clearly it was an effort for O-hisa to plan such expeditions.

  "Won't you have some too?" O-hisa took another cup from a drawer and handed it to Kaname.

  "Thank you. I never drink in the daytime.... It is a little chilly, though. Possibly I should have just a swallow."

  She leaned to pour for him, and a suggestion of something like cloves seemed to come from her high, upswept hair as it touched against his cheek. He stared down into the cup at the gold-embossed Fuji, now shining through the sake, at the tiny village below it, done in the quick style of the color prints, and at the characters indicating which was the roadside station represented.

  "It makes me a little uncomfortable to drink out of anything so elegant."

  "Really?" One of the traditional charms of the Kyoto beauty, the discolored teeth, showed itself in O-hisa's laugh. Her two front teeth were as black at the roots as if they had been stained in the old court manner, and farther to the right an eye-tooth protruded sharp enough to bite into her lip. There were many who would have seen in such a mouth a winsome artlessness, but in honesty it could not have been called beautiful. Misako was of course being cruel when she pronounced it filthy and barbarous. To Kaname it seemed rather a little sad. That such an unhealthy mouth should be left uncared for suggested something of the woman's ignorance.

  "You brought all this from home with you?" he asked O-hisa.

  "We did indeed."

  "And you'll have to carry all the boxes back? I sympathize with you."

  "He says the food at theaters is inedible."

  Misako glanced back at them, then quickly turned to the stage again. Kaname had noticed how sharply she pulled herself away when i
n her efforts to find a comfortable position one of her feet brushed against his knee. He could not help smiling, a little wryly, at the trial it was for them to be put together in such a small space.

  "How do you like it?" he asked in a husbandly way, hoping to dispel the mood a little.

  "You must have so much excitement," O-hisa put in. "I should think you might like a nice quiet play now and then."

  "I've been watching the singers. They're really much more interesting than the puppets," said Misako.

  The old man coughed somewhat threateningly. His eyes still fixed on the stage, he groped about his knee for his pipe. The tooled-leather case had slipped under the cushion, however, and he was still feeling blindly for it when O-hisa noticed and retrieved it for him. She filled it, lighted it, and laid it carefully in the palm of his hand. Then, as if it made her want to smoke herself, she reached into her sash, took out an amber-red leather case, and pushed her small white hand in under the lid.

  There was much to be said for seeing a puppet play with a bottle of sake at one's side and a mistress to wait on one, Kaname thought as the conversation quieted and, for want of anything more to distract him, he turned his attention to the stage. The first act of Love Suicide was drawing to a close. The lovers, Jihei and the geisha Koharu, held the stage, Koharu seated to the right. The sake cup had been rather a large one, and Kaname felt a little heady. Perhaps because of the glittering reflections, the stage seemed a great distance away, and it was all he could do to make out the faces and the costumes. He concentrated on Koharu. Jihei's face had in it something of the dignity of classic dance masks, but his exaggerated clothes hung lifelessly from his shoulders as he moved about the stage, making it a little hard for one as unfamiliar with the puppet theater as Kaname to feel any human warmth in him. Koharu, kneeling with her head bowed, was infinitely more effective. Her clothing too was exaggerated, so that her turned-out skirt fell unnaturally before her knees, but Kaname found that easy to forget. The old man, when he discoursed on the puppet theater, liked to compare Japanese Bunraku puppets with Occidental string puppets. The latter could indeed be very active with their hands and feet, but the fact that they were suspended and worked from above made it impossible to suggest the line of the hips and the movement of the torso. There was in them none of the force and urgency of living flesh, one could find nothing that told of a live, warm human being. The Bunraku puppets, on the other hand, were worked from inside, so that the surge of life was actually presen' sensible, under the clothes. Their strongest points perhaps derived from the good use made in them of the Japanese kimono. The same effects would be impossible from puppets in foreign dress, even if the same manipulating techniques were adopted. The Bunraku puppet was therefore unique, inimitable, a medium so skillfully exploited that one would be hard put to find parallels for it anywhere.

  Kaname found himself agreeing. The active Jihei was ungainly, a little repulsive. That was undoubtedly because it was not possible to keep the body of the standing puppet from dangling a little and thus falling into the defects of the string puppet. If one pursued the old man's argument a little farther, the kneeling puppet, it would seem, ought to have more of the "urgency of living flesh" than the standing puppet; and indeed, as she knelt there, still but for the slightest movement of the shoulders to suggest breathing, and now and then a hint of coquetry, Koharu was almost disturbingly alive. Kaname looked at his program and saw that the puppeteer was Bungorō, one of the great names in the art. His face was gentle and refined, the sort of face an accomplished artist ought to have, and he seemed to hold Koharu in his arms as he would a treasured child, smiling tranquilly down on her hair, taking such obvious pleasure in his work that one could not but feel a little envious. Suddenly Koharu seemed to Kaname like one of the fairies he had seen in Peter Pan, a fairy in human form but smaller, more delicate, resting in Bungorō's arms, slight against the expanse of his formal, wide-shouldered stage dress.

  "I don't know much about it, but I do like Koharu," Kaname said, half to himself. O-hisa at least must have heard, but no one answered. Kaname blinked now and then in an effort to bring the stage into better focus. Presently the warmth of the sake began to clear away and Koharu emerged in sharper outline. She had been motionless for some time. Her left arm was drawn up inside her kimono, her right hand rested on a porcelain brazier, her head was sunk to her breast. As Kaname concentrated his attention on the still figure, he found that he was able to forget Bungorō, that Koharu was no longer a fairy in his arms but a live figure, kneeling solidly on the stage. Not that she was like the Koharu of one of the Kabuki actors. No matter how inspired an actor was, one still said to oneself: "That's Baikō," or, "That's Fukusuke." But here one had only Koharu herself. Her doll's features perhaps lacked the expressiveness of a Baikd or a Fukusuke, but did the geisha beauty of two centuries ago really show her emotions, her pains and her joys, as the actor does on the stage? Wasn't the real Koharu perhaps a "doll-like" woman? Whether she was or not, the ideal sought by theatergoers was surely not the Koharu of the actors but the Koharu of this puppet. The classical beauty was withdrawn, restrained, careful not to show too much individuality, and the puppet here quite fitted the requirements. A more distinctive, more colorful figure would only have ruined the effect. Perhaps, indeed, to their contemporaries all the tragic heroines, Koharu and Umegawa and the rest, had the same face. Perhaps this doll was the "eternal woman" as Japanese tradition had her....

  Kaname had seen the Bunraku puppets once ten years before. He had not been impressed—he could in fact remember only that he had been intensely bored. Today he had come solely out of a sense of duty, expecting to be bored again, and he was some-what astonished that he should almost against his will be drawn so completely into the play. He had grown older, he had to admit. He was no longer in a position to make fun of the old man's dilettantism. Given another ten years, he would find that he had come precisely the same distance over the same road as the old man. There he would be, a mistress like O-hisa at his side, a tooled-leather pipe-case hung at his hip, a tiered lunch box flecked with gold... but he might not need even ten years. He had always affected a maturity beyond his years, and he would age fast.... He looked at O-hisa. Her face was turned a little so that the line of her cheek showed, round, almost heavy, like that of a court beauty in a picture scroll. He compared her profile with Koharu's. Something about the slow, sleepy expression made him think of the two of them as not unlike each other.... A pair of conflicting emotions pressed themselves on him: old age brought its own pleasures and was not really to be dreaded; and yet that very thought, a symptom of approaching old age, was something he must resist, if only because of the advantage it might give Misako. The reason for their decision to separate, after all, was that they did not want to grow old, that they wanted to be free to live their youth again.

  "THANK you very much for the telephone call," Kaname said as the curtain fell and the old man turned half around to face him. "I'm beginning to see some of the good points in all this—I really am."

  "You needn't try to please me. I have no professional interest in it," the old man answered, with a touch of the self-satisfaction that comes with age. His shoulders were hunched for the cold, and his neck was buried in a scarf, a piece of silk crepe, softened with age, that had once been meant for a woman. "I don't expect you to enjoy yourself, but it does you no harm to see something like this at least once in your life."

  "I'm enjoying myself thoroughly, though. Why do you suppose it is?—I see a great deal I missed before."

  "These are almost the last of the great puppeteers. I wonder how it will be when they are gone."

  Misako cupped a small compact in the palm of her hand and began powdering her nose. "And so begins the dissertation," the expression on her face seemed to say as she bit back a sardonic smile.

  "It's a shame there aren't more people to see it." Kaname looked around the theater. "I don't suppose it's so empty as this week-ends."

  "On th
e contrary," the old man said, "this is a good crowd. The theater is just too big. The old Bunraku was better—small and cozy."

  "They won't be allowed to rebuild, the papers say."

  "It's more that the company doesn't want to put any more money in. No crowds, no profits. I say this, myself: it's an Osaka art and some Osaka philanthropist ought to be willing to take care of it."

  "Why don't you step up, Father?" Misako put in.

  "Because I'm not from Osaka." The old man took her quite seriously. "It's Osaka's duty to look after its own art."

  "But you're so fond of Osaka art. You've surrendered to Osaka."

  "And by the same token, Misako, you've surrendered to foreign music?"

  "Not necessarily. I do dislike this, though. Noisy."

  "Noisy? Your jazz is quieter, then? I had to listen to a little of it the other day, and it's nothing more than a gang of shrine noise-makers in foreign clothes. If that's what you want, you can find any amount in Japan without bothering to import it."

  "You heard it in a low-class movie theater, I suppose."

  "You mean there is high-class jazz?"

  "There is indeed. You don't dismiss jazz that easily."

  "Really, young people are beyond me. Look at this, for instance—women have simply forgotten how to take care of themselves. What's that thing in your hand?"

  "That thing is called a compact."

  "A compact. I don't object so much to the fad for compacts, but I do object to the way women take them out in public, no matter who might be watching. It's inelegant, ungraceful—a woman's charm disappears. I had to scold O-hisa about it just the other day."