Some Prefer Nettles by Jun'ichirō Tanizaki
Published 1929 · 51,843 words · about 4 hours at an average pace · Fiction, Literary Fiction
How hard is Some Prefer Nettles to read?
Some Prefer Nettles scores 60 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it quite demanding. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.
- Vocabulary: 42 out of 100
- Seidensticker's translation uses elegant, accessible prose with some Japanese cultural terms (kimono, samisen, bunraku, tatami) and classical literary references (Chikamatsu's Love Suicide at Amijima), but presents no sustained lexical difficulty. Readers encounter occasional unfamiliar cultural nouns, though context always supplies meaning. The register sits closer to The Great Gatsby than to Lolita.
- Sentence structure: 48 out of 100
- Sentences are measured and periodic, mirroring Kaname's ruminative indecision through subordinate clauses, but nowhere approach Jamesian hypotaxis. Paragraphs of interior reflection run long — Kaname's meditation on Tokyo vs. Osaka aesthetics sustains several pages — yet each sentence parses cleanly. The syntax is an instrument of mood, not an obstacle.
- Abstraction: 58 out of 100
- Philosophical content surfaces through domestic observation rather than direct discourse: a Bunraku puppet becomes the vehicle for Kaname's theory of ideal womanhood; a clove bath stages a meditation on Japanese vs. Western aesthetics. The novel grounds abstraction in sensory specificity, closer to Remains of the Day than to The Brothers Karamazov.
- Information density: 50 out of 100
- Cultural and aesthetic layers are embedded in everyday scenes — the Bunraku puppet tradition, Edo-period merchant culture, Tokyo/Osaka regional contrasts, the old man's scatological philosophy of dark bathrooms. Each scene carries thematic weight, but the pacing is deliberately spacious and unhurried, like Austerlitz rather than War and Peace.
- Narrative indirection: 68 out of 100
- Kaname's psychology operates entirely through displacement: he reflects on divorcing his father-in-law rather than his wife; he thinks about the Bunraku puppet rather than O-hisa; his drift toward archaic Japanese femininity is never stated, only enacted. Tanizaki tells the reader nothing directly about what the novel means. The reader must assemble the argument from what Kaname cannot say.
- Symbolic density: 70 out of 100
- The kneeling Bunraku puppet Koharu is the novel's organizing symbol: the ideal doll-like woman, expressionless, restrained, belonging to no particular century. O-hisa mirrors Koharu throughout. The novel's title — drawn from a Japanese proverb about preferring bitter, old pleasures to easy modern ones — is never quoted in the text itself, leaving the symbolic architecture for the reader to locate.
- Ironic distance: 62 out of 100
- Tanizaki maintains quiet, unobtrusive irony: Kaname's 'modern' open marriage is exposed as a flight into archaic fantasy, his stated rationalism covering a longing for the pre-modern ideal woman. The old man's lectures about Edo-period taste, which Kaname resists, turn out to describe exactly where Kaname is drifting. The irony never becomes satire — it stays interior, almost tender.
- Resolution withholding: 78 out of 100
- The novel ends on deliberate ambiguity: a figure sits faintly white in the shadows beyond the mosquito netting — is it O-hisa, or the puppet the old man brought from Awaji? The divorce remains undecided. Kaname reaches no choice. The ending withholds resolution more completely than The Great Gatsby, approaching the sustained irresolution of Lolita.
- Structural complexity: 45 out of 100
- The structure is mostly linear, with embedded letters (from Takanatsu, from the old man) that provide external perspective on Kaname's paralysis. There are no radical formal experiments, but the gradual erasure of dramatic incident in favour of atmospheric drift creates a subtle structural strangeness. It is closer to The Great Gatsby than to Flights.
How Some Prefer Nettles is regarded
Some Prefer Nettles holds a literary regard score of 71 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.