《Some Prefer Nettles》简介：

Junichiro Tanizaki’s Some Prefer Nettles is an exquisitely nuanced exploration of the allure of ancient Japanese tradition—and the profound disquiet that accompanied its passing.

It is the 1920s in Tokyo, and Kaname and his wife Misako are trapped in a parody of a progressive Western marriage. No longer attracted to one another, they have long since stopped sleeping together and Kaname has sanctioned his wife’s liaisons with another man. But at the heart of their arrangement lies a sadness that impels Kaname to take refuge in the past, in the serene rituals of the classical puppet theater—and in a growing fixation with his father-in-law’s mistress. Some Prefer Nettles is an ethereally suggestive, psychologically complex exploration of the crisis every culture faces as it hurtles headfirst into modernity.

《Some Prefer Nettles》摘录：

p36 ...the very fact that he was a child of the merchants' quarter made him especially sensitive to its inadequacies, to its vulgarity and its preoccupation with the material. He reacted from it toward the sublime and the ideal. It was not enough that something should be touching, charming, graceful; it had to have about it a certain radiance, the power to inspire veneration. One had to feel forced to one's knees before it, or lifted by it to the skies. Kaname required this not only in works of art. A woman-worshipper, he looked for the same divine attributes in women, but he had never come upon what he was looking for either in art or in women. p51 Kaname for his part was not purposely displaying a strength he did not feel; but perhaps a contagious air of strength and virility ab...