Some Prefer Nettles

by Junichiro Tanizaki

  A housewife, posting herself squarely in the aisle, had helped her small boy undo his buttons so that he could relieve himself. It was as though the plumbing had burst, and even the old man was a little upset.

  "Things are getting primitive. Practically in our lunch, too."

  Meanwhile, unaffected by the confusion, the play took its course and singers came and went. Perhaps a little heady from sake taken so early in the day and from the conversation buzzing so violently around him, Kaname saw it only as a succession of flickering images quite detached from any narrative. Not that he was bored or annoyed. The sensation was rather the pleasant one of pickling in a warm bath, or perhaps of sleeping fitfully on a warm morning, a sweet, unhurried, languorous sensation. While he watched the play in this absent mood, Miyuki and Komazawa apparently parted at Akashi, and several more scenes passed, and the action reached the shelter at Hamamatsu; but 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 overall harmony.

  "Unhurried." Kaname tried the word again.

  "But the puppets are remarkable. And the man handling Miyuki is not bad at all."

  "It might be better if it were even a little more primitive."

  "This sort of thing is fairly standard wherever you see it. The lines are the same and the action follows along."

  "And the Awaji singing?"

  "Some people say there's a difference, but I've never been able to see it myself. Osaka and Awaji sound pretty much alike to me."

  To conform to a type, to be the captive of a form, means the decadence of an art, it is sometimes said. But what of folk arts like this puppet theater-have they not become what they are with the help of hard, fixed standards? The heavy-toned old country plays, in a sense, have in them the work of the race. Generation after generation of gifted performers has built each item in the repertoire to a standardization of property and action, handed on so carefully that by following its prescriptions the amateur can mount the singer's platform and bring forth a fair copy of the play, and the spectators as they watch can make the association in their minds with the great names whose work is there. Sometimes at a country inn one sees a sort of amateur theatrical put on by children. The instruction has been good, and the performers have learned well—one wonders how they can have learned so well. Perhaps it is that the old theater, unlike the modern theater with all its erratic individual flights, provides a guide and a reference to which women and children can turn, and makes the teaching and the learning easy. In the days before motion pictures, there was thus a happy substitute for them: a few hands and a little equipment, and a puppet theater could be put together to wander lightly over the country. It must have been a deep comfort to the farmers, this theater—one cannot know what a comfort and a diversion. How thoroughly the old theater must have penetrated into the corners of the country, one thinks, how deeply its roots must have sunk themselves into the life of the farms!

  Kaname had seen the parts of Morning-Glory Diary that everyone sees, the last encounter at the inn and the separation at the river crossing. He was therefore familiar with lines like "One year, firefly-hunting on the River Uji," and "Weeping, we await a sailing wind at Akashi," but he had never before actually seen the firefly hunt on the Uji, or the farewell at Akashi, or the present scene in the shelter at Hamamatsu. While it resembled a historical play in many ways, it fortunately lacked the contorted plot and the warrior's cruelty that so characterize the historical drama. Rather it moved forward with the simple brightness that one associates with the genre theater, with even a touch of light humor. Kaname did not know what period was supposed to be represented, or whether the love story was based on historical fact. He had heard somewhere that the hero, Komazawa, was modeled on the seventeenth-century Confucian scholar Kumazawa Banzan. Somehow, though, the play seemed to take one back to an earlier time, to the civil wars of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, or to the Muromachi Shogunate before them. Indeed, there were touches that seemed to suggest Heian, the great period of the court nobility—the warrior sending an old folksong to the maiden, and the maiden singing it to the accompaniment of the koto, the old Heian zither; or the maiden followed about by a faithful and diligent nurse named Asaka, "Faint Perfume." But while one was thus taken back to the far past, one had at the same time a feeling that the action was extremely near at hand, popular, plebeian. Asaka dressed as a pilgrim, singing her song, seemed to be close to these people, a close acquaintance. One would not be surprised to encounter now and then a woman dressed in the same clothes and singing the same song in the streets hereabouts. The puppet theater must seem as near and familiar to the native of this western part of the country as it seemed foreign to the easterner from Tokyo.

  "But we could have had a better play," the old man remarked suddenly, as though he had remembered something. "The Lady Tamamo or Song of Ise, for instance. You see things in them you never see in Osaka, they say."

  Passages that have been cut from the Osaka plays as gruesome or immodest are still shown at Awaji in their pure, untrimmed form, and it was to those eccentricities that the old man referred. The Lady Tamamo, for instance, is usually shown at Osaka in three acts only, but at Awaji it is played straight through from the prologue, and the nine-tailed fox, having killed the Lady Tamamo, is shown eating her entrails—wads of red cotton apparently. In Song of Ise the slaughter of the ten is shown most graphically, with arms and legs strewn about the stage. Or, in a somewhat more playful vein, a devil with a most monstrously large head arrives to be exorcised at the climax of Mount De.

  "That's what we need. None of this tameness. Tomorrow they do Mount lmose—something like that would be worth seeing."

  "But I like this one well enough. Possibly because this is the first time I've seen it through from the beginning."

  Kaname knew little about the finer points of handling puppets. He did feel, though, the roughness of this performance in comparison with the Osaka puppet theater; it could only be called countrified, he had to conclude. Part of this effect was no doubt due to the puppets themselves, to their features and their clothes. The faces were stiff, hard, at a distance from humanity. In Osaka the heroine would have had a round, gentle face; here she had a long, cold face, a high nose like a proud Kyoto carving or one of the dolls brought out in the spring for the Doll Festival. The face of the villain was violently red and evil, the face of a devil or an apparition rather than that of a man. Then too the puppets (this was particularly true of the heads) were a good deal larger than those in Osaka, the principal ones, indeed, as large as a child of seven or eight. The native of Awaji says that the Osaka puppets are too small, that it is not possible to catch the finer expressions from the Osaka stage. He objects also to the powdered faces of the Osaka puppets. The Osaka craftsmen, in their efforts to produce the effect of the human skin, leave a coating of powder over the paint, while at Awaji the sheen is purposely brought out by careful polishing, and the Osaka style is scorned as gauche and crude. Indeed, one has to admit that the Awaji puppets are expressive, their eyes in particular being active and versatile. The principal puppets can move their eyes up and down and to the right and left, can express red-eyed anger and pale-eyed astonishment. The Osaka puppet has no such skill. The lady puppet in fact is unable to use her eyes at all, while at Awaji, one is proudly told, even she can open and close them at will.

  In its general dramatic effect the Osaka performance seemed to Kaname superior; but here at Awaji the audience apparently paid less attention to the play itself than to the puppets. The puppets they watched as a parent would watch a performing child, dwelling carefully and fondly on each gesture. While the Osaka theate
r, subsidized by the great Shōchiku theater company, could afford certain fineries, however, the Awaji theater, the hobby of farmers, had to get by as best it could. The ornaments and the clothes were shabby, and both Miyuki and Komazawa looked more than a little threadbare.

  But the old man, with his fondness for old clothes, liked them. "Much better than in Osaka," he said. He had for some time been turning an envious eye on the puppets' clothing, calling attention to the choicer articles, here a stiff mohair sash, there a yellow Hachijō kimono. "It used to be this way in Osaka, but lately they've gone gaudy. It's all right, I suppose, for them to get new costumes every season, but it's a sign of decay when they start using muslin prints and gold dust. Puppets are like Noh actors. The older their clothes are, the better."

  Miyuki and her companion started off down the Tōkaidō Highway, and the long day came toward a close. It was quite dark when the curtain fell on the final roadside scene of Morning-Glory Diary. The stands began to fill, the clutter and disorder of the day gave way to the air of an evening at the theater, and small dinner parties took shape all through the building. Bare hundred-watt bulbs hung here and there, lighting up the place well enough, but giving off fearsome glare. The stage too was lighted with bare bulbs hung from above-no such theatrical frills here as footlights and flood-lights. As the next play began, the dolls' faces grew still shinier, and Jūjirō and Hatsugiku gave off such a radiance that it was quite impossible to see what they really looked like.

  The changes of singers began to bring on near-professionals. From one side of the hall someone shouted: "Be quiet, everybody. He's from my village. Good, isn't he?" And from somewhere else: "Let's have no more of that. Ours is a whole lot better." A good half of the audience, evidently aroused by the sake, took the part of one side or the other, and the competition between village and village grew intense as the evening progressed. At the poetic climax the loudest of the appreciators became quite intoxicated with emotion. "It's too much," they cried in tear-laden voices. The puppeteers, too, seemed to have had a cup or two. Their bloodshot eyes could have been overlooked had it not been for the remarkable way they had of hanging over the dolls—particularly the lady dolls—at crucial junctures. The same mannerisms are seen in Osaka, of course, but these men would have been striking enough anyway in their formal stage dress, their faces burned black from the days in the fields and flushed from liquor. The cries from the audience ("It is too much!") urged them on until, drunk with their art, they were following the movements of the puppets with their bodies, the voluptuousness of it plain on their faces. Presently, too, some of the capers the old man had missed in Morning-Glory Diary began to appear. Yojirō, the monkey-trainer in The Love of Oshun and Dembei, stepped outside the house to relieve himself before going to bed, and a dog wandered up from somewhere and backed away with the end of his loincloth in its mouth.

  It was ten o'clock before the last number, given conspicuous play on the program for its Osaka singer, came on the stage. Shortly after it began, there was a disturbance. A man in a dark-blue jacket buttoned high at the throat, a road-gang foreman he might have been, suddenly jumped up in the pit from the party of five or six he had been drinking with and began challenging someone in the stands to come out and fight. There had been some rancor in the audience, which was divided between supporters of the Osaka singer and local patriots who resented him, and one of the catcalls had particularly annoyed the boss-like gentleman. "Come on out, damn you. Come out," he shouted, and made as if to plunge into the stands. His friends tried to quiet him, but he struck a pose like one of the guardian warriors at a temple gate and continued to bellow, while the rest of the audience shouted their resentment at the noise. The singer from Osaka was quite lost in the turmoil.

  "WELL , Kaname, we'll see you later."

  "Take care of yourself. I only hope the weather holds for you. And don't let O-hisa get sunburned."

  O-hisa laughed softly, her dark front teeth showing under her deep cone-shaped sunshade. "Give my best to Misako," she said.

  It was eight o'clock in the morning. Kaname was taking the boat for Kobe, and the other two, in pilgrim's dress, were ready to start on around the island.

  "Do take care of yourselves. When will you be back in Kyoto?"

  "I really don't know. All thirty-three temples would be a few too many, I'm afraid. We'll have to cut some of them out. I do want to cross over to Tokushima, though, and go home from there."

  "And you're bringing home an Awaji puppet, remember."

  "Come up to Kyoto and I'll show it to you. I'll find you a good one this time."

  "I'll be up around the end of the month in any case. I have a few things to tend to."

  Kaname stood on deck waving his hat as the ship pulled away. The pious Buddhist aphorism written in large characters on the sections of O-hisa's sunshade (part of her pilgrim's equipment) gradually faded away: "For the benighted the illusions of the world. For the enlightened the knowledge that all is vanity. In the beginning there was no east and west. Where then is there a north and south?" It seemed to him, as he watched them there on the dock with their sunshades in the growing distance, that between the two of them there was indeed "no east and west" in spite of the thirty years' difference in their ages, that they were only another well-matched couple off on a pilgrimage. Presently, to a distant tinkling of bells, they turned and started off. The retreating figures made Kaname think of a line from the pilgrim's canticle they had practiced so earnestly with the innkeeper the evening before: "Hopefully we take the path from afar to the temple where blooms the flower of the good law." Kaname, audience for the rehearsal, had picked up the proper rhythms and intonations himself. The old man had with some regret come back early from Mount Imose, the day's play, and he and O-hisa had spent the evening from nine to twelve immersed in canticles and sutras. The canticle floated into Kaname's mind alternately with the image of O-hisa as she had started out that morning, the innkeeper helping her into straw sandals, her wrists and ankles bound in shiny white silk after the fashion of pilgrims. He had come along with them for one evening, and the one evening had grown to two and then three. Partly of course it was the puppet plays that had kept him on, but doubtless it was partly too his interest in the relationship between the old man and O-hisa. 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 sort of woman one can cherish as a doll. Kaname had no illusions about his ability to imitate the old man; but still, when he thought of his own family affairs, of that perpetual knowing countenance and of the endless disagreements, the old man's life—off to Awaji appointed like a doll on the stage, accompanied by a doll, in search of an old doll to buy—seemed to suggest a profound spiritual peace reached without training and without effort. If only he could follow the old man's example, Kaname thought.

  The weather was flawless still, but apparently there were not many with time for excursions. The ship, a pleasure steamer with leisurely rows of special-class rooms, was almost empty. He had his choice of the Western-style rooms on the second deck or the Japanese-style rooms below. Stretching out on the straw mats in one of the Japanese rooms with his handbag for a pillow, he looked up at the ceiling. The room was deserted but for him. 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. Kaname was always careful about his clothes and he was not used to traveling; and even for a trip planned to take no more than two or three days he had brought along several changes of clothing. He had on a kimono for the return trip. Suddenly, however, he thought of something, and taking advantage of the solitude, he quickly changed to a gray flannel suit. Then he went to sleep. Several hours later he awoke to the sound of the anchor chain on the deck above.

  It was only eleven in the morning when the ship docked at Hy
ogo, to the west of the main Kobe harbor. Kaname did not start for home immediately, but went to the Oriental Hotel and for the first time since before his departure for Awaji had something rich and foreign to eat. He spent twenty minutes over a glass of Benedictine, and still felt a little heady when his cab pulled up in front of Mrs. Brent's house, high up in the hills behind the harbor. He pressed the bell at the gate with the tip of his umbrella.

  "Hello, hello. Why the baggage?"

  "I just got off the ship."

  "The ship?"

  "I was on Awaji for a couple of days. Is Louise in?"

  "She may still be in bed."

  "The Madam?"

  The boy pointed to the end of the hall. There, at the head of the steps leading down to the garden, Mrs. Brent sat with her back toward him. Usually when she heard his voice she brought her hundred and seventy or eighty pounds noisily down the stairs to greet him, but today she only sat and stared down into the garden, not even turning around. The house might have been built when the ports were opened, around the middle of the last century. High-ceilinged, dark, sedate, it must once have been a fine mansion, but it had been allowed to run to seed until now it suggested a haunted house. Rank and wasted though it was, however, the back garden was flooded with a radiance of May foliage, and the sun reflected from the Madam's curly brown hair and turned a lock of it here and there to the brightest silver.

  "What's the trouble? What's she staring at?"

  "She hasn't been feeling well. As a matter of fact, she's been crying."

  "Crying?"

  "She got a cable yesterday evening saying her brother was dead, and she's been this way ever since. Hasn't had a drink all morning. You might say something to her, if you don't mind."

  Kaname went up behind Mrs. Brent. "Hello, Mrs. Brent. Is it true?—they tell me your brother is dead."