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Some Prefer Nettles

Junichiro Tanizaki (1886-1965) is one of the major figures of 20th-century Japanese literature. Born in the heart of downtown Tokyo, he studied literature and led a bohemian existence at Tokyo Imperial University. His youthful experiences are reflected in his writings, as are the influences of such Western contemporaries as Poe, Baudelaire and Wilde. Following the Great Kanto Earthquake of 1923, Tanizaki left Tokyo for the Kyoto-Osaka region, where he wrote his finest works. As a young, cosmopolitan rake he abandoned the superficial Westernization of his student days and immersed himself in Japanese tradition and history. The emotional and intellectual crisis sparked by this transition turned a fine writer into one of Japan's greatest and most-loved novelists. Junichiro Tanizaki received the Imperial Prize in Literature in 1949.

Originally published in Japanese as Tade Kuu Mushi

Published by Tuttle Publishing, an imprint of Periplus Editions (HK) Ltd, with editorial offices at 364 Innovation Drive, North Clarendon, Vermont 05759 and 61 Tai Seng Avenue, #02-12, Singapore 534167 by special arrangement with Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. , New York

Copyright © 1955 by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. First Tuttle edition, 1955

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ISBN 978-1-4629-0350-4 (ebook)

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Every 'worm to his taste; some prefer to eat nettles. Japanese proverb

NOTE on the Pronunciation of Japnese Names

Consonants are pronounced approximately as in English, except that "g" is always hard, as in Gilbert. Vowels are pronounced as in Italian, and always sounded separately, never as diphthongs. Also as in Italian, the final "e" is always sounded.

Thus die name Kaname is pronounced Kah-nah-meh. There is no heavy penultimate accent as in English; it is adequate to accent each syllable equally.

INTRODUCTION

ON SEPTEMBER 1, 1923, the day the earthquake destroyed Tokyo and Yokohama, Tanizaki Junichiro was in the Hakone Mountains south of Yokohama. Almost before he thought to worry about his family in Yokohama, he wrote later, he felt a perverse surge of happiness at the news of the disaster. " 'Now they will make Tokyo a decent city. ' I could not keep back the glad thought. " The darkness of the old city was gone, and the new city would be filled with horns and headlights, movie theaters, the bright cries of streetwalkers, the radiance of beauty parlors and Turkish baths.

When Tanizaki wrote down these recollections some ten years later, he meant them to tell the story of his early career. He was thirty-seven years old in 1923, and he had been a well-known writer already for more than ten years. He was born of the old Tokyo merchant class, the class that was in charge of Japanese culture when Commodore Perry arrived to open the country, and the class that in 1923 still considered itself rather the finest fruit of the Japanese race; but he disliked both his class and the tradition it stood for. His early works, generally called "demoniac" by the Japanese, were written under the influence less of Japanese predecessors than of Poe, Baudelaire, and Wilde; and in his personal life he seems to have indulged, as the old man of this novel once did, "in foreign tastes of the most hair-raising variety. " At the time of the earthquake, he was living on the Yokohama "Bluff," the very heart of the foreign enclave. Few Japanese went to such extremes even in an age that was fascinated with the West.