Some Prefer Nettles: images, themes, women

1/ I don’t have much to say about Tanizaki’s prose (in Seidensticker’s translation). Some Prefer Nettles is mostly dialogue and Kaname’s thoughts and long passages about Japan or bunraku puppets. But once in a while there’s an interesting sentence. 

“The sea, clear into the distance, was so bright a blue that it turned black as one stared at it. Even the smoke from the ships seemed motionless. Now and then, with the faintest breath of a breeze, the leaflet stirred very lightly and a tear in the paper door rustled like a kite.” (Ch.10) 

Or this passage, when Kaname thinks about that time he went 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 came over him. […] 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.” (Ch.11) 

The mood comes over him again at the puppet theatre. 

“Here and there a patch of blue sky showed, or a stretch of waving, rustling grass down toward the river. When 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.” (ibid.) 

I like that.
This is a passage later during the day, also at the puppet theatre in Awaji: 

“… the sunlight showed no sign of fading, and through the chinks in the mats the blue sky still shone as happily as in the morning. It hardly seemed necessary to worry about the plot. Just to lose oneself in the movements of the puppets was enough, and the disorderliness of the audience was no hindrance. Rather the myriad noises and myriad colors combined into a brightness, a liveliness, like a kaleidoscope pointed into the sun, and the eye took from them an over-all harmony.” (ibid.) 

The first 4 sentences are not remarkable, but the last one in that passage has an interesting image. 

2/ See this description when Kaname’s on a ship. 

“Waves danced and shimmered across the ceiling, the serenity of spring on the Inland Sea reflected blue into the softly lighted room. Now and then, as the shadow of an island passed, a smell compounded of flowers and the tide seemed to press stealthily in on him.” (Ch.12) 

3/ The idea of performance runs through the entire novel. In the background we have the bunraku puppets, contrasting between the Osaka ones in the theatre and the larger Awaji ones performed outdoors, which are fascinating. In the foreground are the characters acting. 
Kaname and Misako put on a performance as husband and wife in the presence of people who don’t know about their open marriage, including their son Hiroshi. Hiroshi, they think, also puts on a performance—he senses that something’s not right, but goes along with it and pretends that everything is fine.
Misako in a way also puts on a performance when she’s alone with Kaname—she can’t be herself anymore. 
Kaname sees his mistress Louise crying about her circumstances and asking for money as a performance. He even thinks: 

“The dramatic bill of complaints, however, with its straining and its storming, contained enough comedy to dispel the threat.” (ibid.)  

4/ Is it not curious that Misako’s father doesn’t have a name? He’s known as “the old man” for the entire novel. 

5/ The theme about women in the novel is interesting. 
As I wrote in the previous blog post, Kaname divides women into 2 types—the mother type and the courtesan type, and he thinks a woman has to be either a goddess or a plaything. 
Here’s more: 

“A sensitive woman, a woman with ideas, can only get more troublesome and less likable with the years. Surely, then, one does better to fall in love with the soft of woman one can cherish as a doll.” (Ch.12)  

That is his conclusion after watching the old man with his geisha, O-hisa. 
See what Kaname thinks about his lover Louise, a Eurasian prostitute who is meant to be half Russian half Korean: 

“As a matter of fact, though, it had been the dark glow of her skin, with its faint suggestion of impurity, that had attracted Kaname…” (ibid.) 

I’ll let you judge. 
Later: 

“Had anyone asked about the attachment, he would have said that he found it safest for secret debauchery to go to a house that rarely admitted Japanese, that Mrs Brent’s was cheaper and less time-consuming than a Japanese teahouse, that after he and a woman had been behaving like animals it was somehow easier for them to forget, less damaging to their pride, when they were foreigners to each other.” (ibid.) 

2 sentences later: 

“But, for all that he tried to think of her as no more significant than a beautiful, furry, four-legged beast, Kaname felt in her something that suggested the gladness and exuberance of certain Lamaist statues.” (ibid.) 

Kaname is what the kids would call problematic.
Would I say so about the author, or at least, the book? Probably not.
In Kaname-Misako marriage, Tanizaki does highlight the importance of sex in marriage—Kaname has no hostility towards his wife and in fact can think of her as a friend as they have much in common, he just no longer gets excited by her sexually; Misako suffers in a sexless marriage, then gets a lover; Kaname accepts it, and creates rules for an open marriage and a trial run; they spend most of the novel deciding on when and whether to get a divorce. Tanizaki also depicts Misako as neither a goddess nor a plaything—she’s her own person, with her own ideas. She makes up her own mind to get a divorce, even if there’s no guarantee that she would be with Aso for the rest of her life (which appears shocking to the cousin).  
Louise doesn’t feature much in the novel—the blurb was misleading, as she doesn’t appear until ch.12 and Some Prefer Nettles has 14 chapters. 
What about O-hisa? 

“[The old man] lavished affection on her as on his principal treasure. He trained her in the arts, in cooking, in dress, wherever it was possible to cultivate and refine her […]. O-hisa was allowed to see only puppet shows and to eat only insubstantial Japanese delicacies, and it was hard to believe that she was really satisfied with no more. Now and then she must want to see a movie or to eat a beefsteak.” (Ch.9) 

Kaname’s father-in-law has extreme ideas about doing everything the traditional Japanese way, so he trains her in everything, makes her learn singing and playing the samisen, forces her to read “old dusty books”, dresses her up as a pilgrim, brings her with him to see the Awaji puppet theatre, and picks an uncomfortable area at the theatre because it’s the best spot (ignoring her discomfort), insists on her using the traditional Kyoto bathtub (smaller than the Tokyo bathtub and not as white and bright as the Western one) and not using soap, and so on and so forth. He has her in perfect control and tries to shape her into his ideal woman. 
Slowly Kaname wants to have his own O-hisa—“not this particular O-hisa, ministering to the old man here, but another who belonged to ‘type O-hisa’.” (Ch.14) 
To the old man, and perhaps to Kaname, O-hisa seems to be the perfect woman, satisfying his every whim. However, Tanizaki also shows, in small details here and there, that she’s not quite “converted”—on the surface she does everything the old man wants, but deep down she has little interest in all the things he forces on her. She doesn’t turn into a different person. 

This is a good read.