Some Prefer Nettles: Summary & Key Insights

Kaname and Misako’s life together is built less on affection than on ritual. They inhabit the same house, share their meals, speak politely, but their true intimacy ended long ago. This emotional distance is not born of hatred; rather, it stems from a subtle exhaustion—a quiet understanding that their marriage no longer holds anything vital. Theirs is a union of manners, not of hearts.

From the very beginning, I wanted to show how social order can persist even after its meaning collapses. They remain together for their son, for propriety, and because divorce still carries a moral weight. But the silence between them is heavy, and their gestures are filled with an almost ceremonial detachment. Misako confides in her father that she wishes to separate; Kaname, though unwilling to admit it, feels a complex relief. Their crisis mirrors the delicate disintegration of a culture that cannot decide whether to hold onto its formality or embrace honest freedom.

Their relationship is the emotional axis of *Some Prefer Nettles*—two modern people aware of their dissatisfaction yet paralyzed by convention. Each defers to the other’s will, creating a fragile harmony of avoidance. What binds them is neither love nor passion, but an almost aesthetic mutual restraint. I wanted their restraint to echo the old values of grace and control, now hollowed of purpose.

Kaname’s fascination with traditional aesthetics is both intellectual and sensual. He is drawn to old Japanese customs, yet his appreciation is curiously detached—more the admiration of a collector than the devotion of a believer. He delights in the careful rituals of dress, the beauty of porcelain, the rhythms of classical theater, but this pleasure is tinged with melancholy. The beauty of the past consoles him precisely because it is no longer living.

Through Kaname, I wanted to portray a man whose attraction to tradition is aesthetic rather than moral. He reveres the classical ideal of femininity—submissive, mysterious, refined—embodied in the courtesans and puppet heroines he observes. Yet he knows that such women no longer exist in his modern world. His admiration for ancient grace contrasts cruelly with his inability to feel genuine passion for Misako, a modern wife seeking honesty and change. The contradiction embodies Japan itself at that moment—still dreaming of its old beauty, yet unable to live by it.

Kaname reads Western novels and listens to gramophone recordings with the same detached curiosity that he brings to his study of old customs. Torn between two worlds, he drifts, never choosing one over the other. His nostalgia is not a solution but a refuge from the uncertainty of the present.