Some Prefer Nettles

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.