Name: Some Prefer Nettles
Rating: 3.357142857142857 (14 reviews)
ISBN: 9780679752691

Jun'ichirō Tanizaki

Kaname's father-in-law plans to save Kaname's marriage by involving the couple in the classic traditions of Japan, especially the puppet theater

Some Prefer Nettles

ikkychan

This book is not the first Japanese writing that I ever read, Endo's Scandal is my first encounter. I didn't know whether they belong to the same period but their work did give me the same scent: culture clash, sexual frustration, the old and the new.... perhaps on some level Japanese writer did share the same thought and deprivation (even Murakami, who admitted his strong aversion toward traditional literature) or, It's just me being somewhat bad reader with limited literature knowledge. I prefer to say the latter. Reading Tanizaki is like looking toward a valley in a misty morning---everything move in a calm, curious manner. He rarely tells anything in blatant way, which is quite seldom for me to find in novels these days. Even to the ending, it wasn't clear for me to see what Kaname would choose to do for himself---will he leave Misako for good, or back to his pretentious western-wannabe mistress Louise, or just fire away and get it on with his hidden desire for Ohisa? Speaking about the women, each of their figures held specific meaning to me, well at least from how I see them. Ohisa, for one, is a contradiction. She appeared to be the symbol of conservative, traditional Japan---with her old style kimono and discolored teeth---and that's how Kaname drawn to her, turning her back from her modern, "Tokyo briskness" wife (but I believe, underneath all that, Ohisa had in fact grown a particular longing to the modern world, with her wanting to learn to play samisen in Tokyo style rather than Osakan). Louise, on the other hand, presented as a mean of self-relief for Kaname from his thirst of Western expedition---which he couldn't do, so he turned to the next easier achievement he could accomplished: owning a Eurasian plaything. Misako is a walking paradox herself. At the first chapters, she portraits as this contemporary Japanese woman who knows what she wants and trying (though timidly) to make something of herself, but as the chapters goes, it revealed to us that she, in fact, is not that assured of everything as she wanted everyone to see. "...all this modernness of hers is a pretty thin veneer" as the Old Man said to Kaname. A thin veneer. That's what Kaname fell in love with. He loves Misako as an idea of a wife, a filler of is house. He loves Louise as her chestnut hair and light brown eyes and foreign talks. He loves Ohisa-like Ohisa (as he admitted in the end) without really looking who Ohisa really is. In the end, she reduced to a doll, an ornament. This is an exceptional portrait of a modern Japanese man, who torn apart between the old way and new one, trying to comprehend where to stand in this fluid, uncertain ground.

Shreerag Plakazhi

Generally considered one of Tanizaki's finest works Some Prefer Nettles deals with the ramifications of a collapsing marriage. Kaname seeks escape from his vacuous domestic existence in the arms of a beautiful Eurasian, and closes his eyes to the possibility that his wife may take a lover. His father-in-law is a bourgeois of the old school, civilised, refined, trained in the elegant ambiguities of an ancient tradition. Instinctively the old man divines that his daughter's marriage has failed because the young couple have cut themselves off from the traditional Japanese roots of aesthetic and emotional fulfilment, and he tries to repair the breach by leading them back to the classical arts of the country. Beneath the calm, if shadowed, surface of the narrative there runs a violent and absorbing conflict between the debilitating indecision of the husband and the devious scheming of the older man.

lily lily 

soiled plants

Jennifer

Maureen

Joshua Line

The marriage of Kaname and Misako is disintegrating: whilst seeking passion and fulfilment in the arms of others, they contemplate the humiliation of divorce. Misako's father believes their relationship has been damaged by the influence of a new and alien culture, and so attempts to heal the breach by educating his son-in-law in the time-honoured Japanese traditions of aesthetic and sensual pleasure. The result is an absorbing, chilling conflict between ancient and modern, young and old.

Some Prefer Nettles

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