Jun'ichirō Tanizaki - Some Prefer Nettles

There are times when a relationship becomes terminal, and what remains is simply the waiting period before the break can be made. In some cases, this will be after children have grown up and moved away; in others, it will be when each partner has found a new person to love. Or there may be no reason, or hundreds – all there is is the certainty that the relationship is gone, and it will not return.

Japanese author Jun'ichirō Tanizaki's novel, Some Prefer Nettles, opens during the melancholy stage of a relationship's death. Kaname and Misako have long since come to an agreement that their marriage is dead, with Misako often taking trips 'to Suma', which is code for visiting her lover Aso. Kaname has nobody, though he considers himself something of a cultured man, forgoing the stale, conventional Japanese arts in favour of movies and mannerisms that have recently come in from the West. They are not happy with each other but not really unhappy, either, with Kaname admitting that he would probably enjoy time with his wife if only he weren't married to her.

This story is Kaname's. We are allowed glimpses into Misako's mind, and Tanizaki is careful to make her a sympathetic character, but the true struggle is Kaname's. He has given up his wife to another man, happily he believes, but his views on his relationship, himself, and Japan are shaken when he attends a theatre performance with Misako and her father and his mistress, O-hisa. “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 somewhat astonished that he should almost against his will be drawn so completely into the play.” For Kaname, the values displayed in the play, Love Suicide, offer him a chance to take back an aspect of Japan that is considered too simple and conventional for modern life – a wholly desirably possibility for a man whose life is entangled within marital complexity and moral ambiguity.

Kaname begins to romanticise the old Japanese ways as thoroughly a he did the Western, believing that Misako's father has life 'figured out'. These romantic notions are best expressed in O-hisa, who represents everything a 'true' Japanese woman should be – the bran bag for washing instead of soap, the old-fashioned clothing, the delicate submission. This is, of course, unfair to O-hisa, as there are many indications throughout the novel that part of her old-fashioned style comes from her lover's desire, and part from her own. She, like Misako, cannot be easily placed into a cultural category, no matter how much Kaname might wish to find a pure example.

The novel shows the difficulty in aligning the romanticism of the mind with the scuffs and sharp edges of daily life. Whatever Kaname may wish culturally from himself, his family members, and his peers, he must come to realise that no single person fits into the categories he so fervently desires to place them in. His wife cannot simply be a modern Japanese woman, and his relationship cannot simply be discarded to keep up with 'modern' thinking – but nor is a return to the values of old a guaranteed method for success. Kaname's heart leads his head, resulting in a series of disappointments in himself and others.

The writing is gauzy and vague, a style where little is plainly stated and much is left to allusion. At times, this gives the story a flimsy feel to it, but generally the vagueness of the text adds to the complexity of Kaname's role in life, and his relationship with his wife. Characters and situations are defined to the point where nobody is a crude 'bad' or 'good' character, and the importance of the story stems around the questions it raises rather than the answers it provides. At the same time, the layered morality of the novel provide some narrative weakness, a problem which Tanizaki solves with the clumsy intrusion of letters at opportune moments. Because the characters are so shrouded in their subtlety, they run the risk of becoming so obtuse to one another that paralysation sets in. This, too, becomes a theme of the novel, though the narrative force of the text falls away dramatically toward the end.

The moral ambiguity of the novel is its biggest strength and its greatest weakness. There is much here to absorb, and Kaname and Misako's predicament is one that will ring true with reader who have seen love die and then wondered where to go from there. Kaname's cultural obsession was relevant in the 1920s when this novel was first published in Japan, and remains relevant today in an age where cultures clash with one another, and the difficulty of a relationship becomes enhanced by each parties' understanding of the situation. A return to the past is never the answer, Tanizaki argues, but nor is a blind obeisance to the advances of the present. The result of either is entrapment within your own mind, the stiffening paralysis of inactivity and the cessation of productive thought and action. Some Prefer Nettles ends, as it must, on an ambiguous note, with Kaname and Misako unsure where their relationship is heading and how to navigate the churning waters of their past and present.

Author	Jun'ichirō Tanizaki
Title	Some Prefer Nettles (Original Title: Tade kuu mushi / 蓼喰ふ蟲)
Nationality	Japanese
Publisher	Vintage Classics (Random House)
Published	1955 (English) 1929 (Japanese)
Pages	151
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