Some Prefer Nettles Read online

  "A compact is very convenient." Misako turned to get a better light and, taking out a kiss-proof lipstick, solemnly drew a line of crimson across her mouth.

  "But that looks so dreadful. In my day a well-bred woman would never have thought of doing such a thing in public."

  "Well, everyone does now. I don't see how you're to stop it. I know a woman who is famous for making herself up at the table. Whenever we have lunch together, she takes out her compact and forgets the food. It takes forever to get through a meal. She's an extreme case, of course."

  "Who's that?" Kaname asked.

  "Mrs. Nakagawa. You don't know her."

  "Would you do something about this, please? It seems to have burned down." The old man took a stomach-warmer, a small charcoal brazier, from his kimono and handed it to O-hisa. "The place is so big and empty, I can't seem to keep warm."

  "How about something to warm you from inside?" Kaname took advantage of O-hisa's concentration on the brazier to offer the silver saké flask that had been brought with everything else from Kyoto.

  Misako meanwhile was getting impatient. The curtain was about to rise, and Kaname seemed quite uninterested in finding an excuse to leave. "I don't in the least want to go, and if I can I'll get away early and meet you by seven," she had as a matter of fact said at the end of that telephone call from Suma—though she had added that she could not be sure she would succeed.

  "I'll be sore all day tomorrow." She rubbed gingerly at her knee, intensely annoyed as Kaname's glance informed her that it hardly seemed decent to leave so early.

  "Why don't you sit here on the railing till the next act begins?" he suggested.

  "Or you might go out and walk around the lobby," added the old man.

  "Do you think I would find some excitement in the lobby?" She began bitterly, but quickly changed her manner. "I've surrendered to Osaka art even more than Father has. Only one act, and I've surrendered completely."

  O-hisa chuckled.

  "What do you want to do?" Misako turned to Kaname.

  "It makes no difference to me." His answer was as vague as ever, but he was not able to hide a certain irritation at the way she pressed him. He knew she did not want to stay long, and he intended to withdraw gracefully when the proper time came; but they had been invited and had accepted, after all, and she ought at least for the sake of appearances to let him make the decision this once—she ought to restrain herself and play the part of the wife to that small extent.

  "If we leave now, we should be just in time." Ignoring his displeasure, Misako took out her watch and flicked open the cloisonne lid, in near her sash. "I thought since we were downtown we might stop by and see what's at the Shochiku."

  "But Kaname is enjoying himself." There was a suggestion of the spoiled child in the old man's irritable frown. "You might be a little more sociable. You can go to the Shochiku any time."

  "If he wants to stay, we can stay, I suppose."

  "And O-hisa spent all yesterday evening and this morning getting the lunch ready," the old man persisted. "We can't possibly eat it by ourselves."

  "It's nothing, really. Don't stay just for that." O-hisa had been quite outside the conversation, listening as a child would listen to grownups, but at the old man's remark she somewhat uncomfortably readjusted the lid to hide the mosaic-like array inside the square box. Even the boiling of an egg was likely to call forth a lecture from the old man, and the training of his young mistress had involved a long course in cooking. Now, however, no one except O-hisa could cook a decent meal, and he was clearly anxious to show her off.

  "Suppose we put off the Shochiku till tomorrow." Kaname in his mind substituted "Suma" for "the Shochiku." "We can stay for one more act, possibly, and sample O-hisa's feast. After that..." But it was clear that the gap between them had not been closed.

  With the beginning of the second act, the last meeting between the ill-fated Jihei and his wife, O-san, Kaname's feelings underwent a quick change. For all that it was played by puppets with their exaggerated mannerisms, the domestic scene carried a telling authenticity that drew a wry smile from the lips of both Kaname and his wife. "Why am I left so alone? Do I nourish in my breast a serpent, a demon?" the narrator chanted for O-san, and to Kaname the line expressed, with grace and circumspection but with an acuteness that tightened his chest, the innermost secret of a marriage from which sexual passion had disappeared. He remembered vaguely that the play had been revised in the two centuries since it was first staged, but at least that line, he felt sure, must have been in the original. It was the sort of line the old man liked to seize upon when he proclaimed that the old plays contained subtleties which the modern novel could not approach. A chilling thought suddenly came to Kaname. What if the old man were to choose that very line to discourse upon? The curtain would go down and he would launch forth, with his usual missionary zeal: "They said things well in those days. 'Do I nourish in my breast a serpent, a demon?' " The possibility was a distressing one. Kaname regretted that he had not given in to Misako's wishes and left after the first act.

  But presently the uneasiness vanished, and the moment came when he was again lost in the play. In the first act he had been drawn to Koharu alone, but this time he found Jihei and his wife, O-san, equally attractive. The stage was set to show the townsman's house inside its vermilion-lacquered threshold. Jihei lay back listening to his wife's supplications, his head pillowed on a square of wood and his feet tucked under a quilt against the late-autumn chill—the picture of the young man, any young man, feeling with the approach of evening a vague restlessness, a desire for the lights of the entertainment quarter. There was nothing in the narrative to suggest that it was evening, but in Kaname's mind the picture was clear. There would be bats in the dusk outside the latticed window, circling over the streets of commercial, plebeian old Osaka. O-san, dressed in a subdued, wifely kimono, wore on her face, for all that it was a carved wooden face, the sadness of the unloved wife, in sharp contrast with the brightness of Koharu. It was the face of the virtuous, hard-principled townsman's wife. Now and then other characters, sometimes several of them at once, burst on the stage. The hanging, inert quality of the legs no longer bothered Kaname as it had in the first act. Indeed— how was he to account for it?—the movements of the puppets about die stage seemed completely natural.

  And at the center of the shouting and wailing, the wrangling and reviling—the heavy, loud-voiced sobbing even—was Koharu, her beauty brought out in relief against the tempest she had stirred up.

  Kaname began to wonder whether, in its place and done properly, the Osaka style of singing was really as coarse and noisy as he had always taken it to be. Or perhaps its very noisiness heightened the mood of tragedy. He disliked the Osaka samisen, but even more he disliked the uncouth Osaka narrator, the embodiment, it seemed to him, of certain Osaka traits that he, born and reared in Tokyo like his wife, found highly disagreeable, a sort of brashness, impudence, forwardness, a complete lack of tact when it came to pushing one's personal ends. The typical native of Tokyo has a natural reserve. Quite foreign to him is the openness of the Osakan, who strikes up a conversation with a stranger on the streetcar and proceeds—in an extreme case, it must be admitted—to ask how much his clothes cost and where he bought them. Such behavior in Tokyo would be considered outrageously rude. The plain sense of how to comport oneself is no doubt better developed in Tokyo than in Osaka. Sometimes, indeed, it is so well developed that it leads to an excessive concern with appearances and a timid unwillingness to act. But be that as it may, the son of Tokyo can, if he chooses, find in Osaka singing the perfect expression of Osaka crudeness. Surely, he may say to himself, the problem, no matter what strong emotions it stirs up, can be taken care of with less grimacing, less twisting of the lips and contorting of the features, less writhing and straining toward the skies. If in fact it cannot be expressed in less emphatic and dramatic terms, then our Tokyo man is more inclined to turn it off with a joke than try to express it at a
ll.

  Misako had recently taken to practicing the Tokyo samisen to dispel her unspoken sorrows, and its clear, thin tones aroused in Kaname a feeling of pleasant intimacy mixed with regret. The old man argued that the Tokyo style was uninteresting except in the hands of a master. The amateur, he said, tended to drown out the overtones in a dead clatter as his plectrum struck the taut leather face. It was true of course that the Osaka tones were fuller, but Misako said, and Kaname agreed with her, that Japanese music was simple and one-threaded in any case, and that the lightness of the Tokyo style did not weigh it down as the grossness of the Osaka style did. When they discussed Japanese music, Kaname and Misako always formed an alliance against the old man.

  The old man's arguments were full of references to "young people today." Any taste for things Occidental was found to have the same shallowness and lack of body as Occidental string puppets. What he said was never to be taken entirely at its face value, and he had himself in his earlier years indulged in foreign tastes of the most hair-raising variety. But when he heard Japanese music characterized as "one-threaded" and monotonous, he became genuinely aroused. Kaname usually found the argument not worth the effort and withdrew at a convenient juncture. It did seem unjust, though, that he should be called "shallow" because of his liking for foreign things. He had what seemed to him a profoundly good reason: pure Japanese tastes, such as the old man's, were dominated by the standards of the Edo period, the period of the two and a half centuries before the Restoration of 1868, and Kaname simply did not like the Edo period. He reacted sharply against it, but he would have been hard put to make the old man understand why. To himself he thought he could explain this antagonism very simply. Edo culture was colored through and through with the crassness of the merchant class, and no matter where one turned, one could not escape the scent of the market place. Not that Kaname found the scent an entirely repulsive one. He 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, to its vulgarity and its preoccupation with the material. He reacted from it toward the sublime and the ideal. It was not enough that something should be touching, charming, graceful; it had to have about it a certain radiance, the power to inspire veneration. One had to feel forced to one's knees before it, or lifted by it to the skies. Kaname required this not only in works of art. A woman-worshipper, he looked for the same divine attributes in women, but he had never come upon what he was looking for either in art or in women. He only harbored a vague dream, and its very refusal to become a reality made his longing the keener. He found in foreign novels, music, movies something that satisfied it a little, probably because of the Occidental view of women. The tradition of woman-worship in the West is a long one, and the Occidental sees in the woman he loves the figure of a Greek goddess, the image of the Virgin Mother. The attitude so pervades the customs and traditions of the West that it automatically finds expression in art and literature. Kaname had an intense feeling of loneliness and deprivation when he thought of the emotional life of the Japanese, so lacking in this particular feeling of worshipfulness. Ancient Japanese court literature and the drama of the feudal ages, with Buddhism a strong and living force behind it, had in its classical dignity something of what he sought, but with the Edo shogunate and the decline of Buddhism even that disappeared. While the dramatists and novelists of the Edo period were able to create soft, lovely women, women who were likely to dissolve in tears on a man's knee, they were quite unable to create the sort of woman a man would feel compelled to kneel before. Kaname therefore preferred a Hollywood movie to a seventeenth-century Kabuki play. For all its vulgarity, Hollywood was forever dancing attendance on women and seeking out new ways to display their beauty. And he felt that Japanese drama and music were far too much under the Edo-period influences that were so distasteful to him. Still, he could, if he tried, see a trace of a redeeming feature for the Tokyo school in the vigor and dash of the Tokyo personality. The Osaka school, to its very heart thick, coarse, heavy after the manner of the Edo period, he had always found insufferable.

  Why, then, did he feel no revulsion today? Almost without his knowing it, the play had made him surrender to even the heavy Osaka accompaniment, and indeed this immoderate display of passion, precisely what one would expect from the culture of the Osaka merchant, seemed to help him a little in his own pursuit of the ideal. The lacquered threshold on the stage, the shop curtain covering part of a tapering doorway, the low, latticed partition in the foreground, all gave him a depressing sense of the moldy darkness in which the Osaka townsman lived. And yet there was in it something too of the quiet, mysterious gloom of a temple, something of the dark radiance that a Buddha's halo sends out from the depth of its niche. It was far from the brightness of a Hollywood movie. Rather it was a low, burnished radiance, easy to miss, pulsing out from beneath the overlays of the centuries.

  "You must be hungry. It's nothing, really, but..." As the curtain fell, O-hisa began handing out the contents of the lacquer boxes.

  The images of the dolls, Koharu and O-san, were still vivid in Kaname's mind. He was on edge however, lest the old man begin his discourse on the serpent, the demon in a wife's breast, and he found it difficult to stay politely through the lunch.

  "You will have to forgive us if we eat and run," Kamane said.

  "Must you?"

  "I'd like to stay myself, but it seems she does want to stop by the Shochiku."

  "I can understand that, but—" O-hisa looked from Misako to the old man, as if to mediate between them.

  Kaname and Misako took the introduction to the last act for the proper moment to slip out. O-hisa saw them to the exit.

  "We didn't have to do so very much for filial piety after all," Misako said, clearly relieved, as they came out into the lights of the theater district. Kaname did not answer. "Where are you going? It's this way."

  "Oh?" He turned and followed as she started off impatiently in the other direction. "I only thought it might be easier to find a cab."

  "What time do you suppose it is?"

  "Six thirty."

  "I wonder what I should do." She took out her gloves and tugged at them as she hurried along.

  "It's still not too late, if you want to go."

  "What would be the quickest? A train from Osaka station?"

  "Take the electric and then a cab. We might as well say good-by here."

  "What will you do?"

  "Walk around a little and then go home."

  "If you get home before I do, will you have someone meet me at the station around eleven? I'll probably call, though."

  "Whatever you say."

  Kaname stopped a new American cab for her. With a glance at her glassed-in profile, he turned back into the evening crowds.

  DEAR HIROSHI:

  Are the examinations over? I expect to be there during your vacation.

  And what shall I bring you? I have been looking for your Cantonese dog, but there doesn't seem to be one in the city. Shanghai and Canton might as well be in different countries. I have been thinking I might bring you a greyhound instead. They are very popular here. I suppose you know what a greyhound is, but I am enclosing a snapshot anyway.

  The snapshot makes me think—maybe you would like a camera. Let me know which it is to be, a camera or a greyhound.

  Tell your father I found his Arabian Nights at Kelly and Walsh—not the sort of Arabian Nights you yourself are supposed to read, however. I have some brocade for your mother, but my taste being what it is, I suppose I shall be laughed at again. Tell her I have fretted much more over her brocade than over your dog.

  I shall have much more baggage than I can manage by myself. If I am bringing the dog I will cable, and possibly someone can meet the ship. It will be the Shanghai-mam, in Kobe the 26th.

  TAKANATSU HIDEO

  At noon on the 1
6th Kaname and Hiroshi were at the ship.

  "And the dog? Where is he?" Hiroshi burst out as soon as they had found Takanatsu's cabin.

  "Oh, the dog—he's outside," Takanatsu answered. He had on a light-colored tweed jacket, a gray sweater, and gray flannel trousers. Now and then he paused in his work on the baggage to take a puff at a cigar, and the concentration he lavished on it heightened the air of bustling activity that filled the narrow little cabin.

  "You seem to have brought enough baggage. How long do you stay?" Kaname asked.

  "Five or six days in this part of the country. I have business in Tokyo too."

  "What's this?"

  "Shaohsin wine, very old. You can have a bottle if you like."

  "Suppose we get these small bundles out of the way. My man's waiting below."

  "But what about the dog?" Hiroshi interrupted. "Isn't Jiiya going to take care of the dog?"

  "Don't worry about that. The dog's gentle enough. You can take care of him yourself," Takanatsu replied.

  "He won't bite?"

  "Absolutely not. You can do whatever you want with him. As soon as he sees you he'll be jumping all over you."

  "What's his name?"

  "Lindy. It's short for Lindbergh. A high-grade imported name."

  "Did you name him?"

  "No, he belonged to a foreigner and the name came with him."

  "Hiroshi," Kaname broke in to quiet the boy, who was quite carried away with himself, "would you go below and call Jiiya, please? The cabin boy can't manage all this by himself."

  Takanatsu glanced at the retreating Hiroshi, then bent to pull a bulky, heavy-looking bundle from under the bed. "He looks well enough."

  "Children always look well enough. He's nervous, though. Has he said anything in his letters?"

  "Not that I've noticed."

  "He wouldn't, I suppose. He doesn't know exactly what's wrong, and at his age he wouldn't know what to say."