In Favor of the Sensitive Man and Other Essays (Original Harvest Book; Hb333) by Anaïs Nin Read Free Book Online Page A

identification and empathy.
    Although my publishers were young—twenty-eight and twenty-nine years old—they did not introduce me to their wives. They were not invited to share in any of the dinners we had in restaurants or visits to the Noh plays and kabuki. To console myself I collected a large amount of novels, thinking I would then become more intimate with the feelings and thoughts of Japanese women. It was a woman, Lady Murasaki, who wrote the first diary in the year 900, and although it is a Proustian work of subtle and elaborate detail, although the feelings and thoughts of the personages at court are described, the woman herself remains an image. The modern works of women writers are not translated. And the novels, as a whole, did not bring me any closer to the Japanese woman. The same element of selflessness enters into the novels. Very few of the women are dominant or self-assertive. There is a strong tendency to live according to the code, the mores, the religious or cultural rules. To live for a collective ideal. The one who breaks away is described as a monster of evil.
    On one of the touring buses on the way to Kiushu, there was a young woman guide in a light blue uniform, with a small white cap and white gloves. She was in reality homely, but her expression radiated such aliveness, such responsiveness, and participation to the voyagers, such warmth and friendliness that she kept the mood of the travellers high through an arduous and difficult day. At each village the bus stopped at, she sang the folk song of the region. Her voice was clear and sweet like a child’s, and yet it had a haunting quality like that of a wistful flute played in solitude. Through heat, through fatigue, through harassing travellers, she remained fresh, buoyant, light footed, carrying her modern burden of work as lightly as if it were a fan.
    The children present a different mystery: the mystery of discipline and love dosed in such balance that they appear as the most spontaneous children I have ever seen, and at the same time the best behaved. They are lively, cheerful, charming, outgoing, expressive, and free, but their freedom never ends in sullenness or anarchy. I witnessed Japanese school children being guided through a museum, who came upon an American child of their own age. They surrounded him gaily, twittering and speaking the few words of English they knew. The American child looked sullen, suspicious, and withdrawn.
    Through the gardens and the museums, they were responsive, curious. Their gaiety was continuous but contained. In Kyoto, during the Gion Festival, which lasts for several hours, the children were everywhere, but they did not disrupt the ceremony. The heat did not wilt them, the crowd did not dirty them, their clothes did not wrinkle. Had they learned so young to defeat slovenliness and ill-humor, to emerge fresh and gracious from the most wearing day? I thought of the gardens of Japan, the order, the stylization, the control of nature, so that they present only an aesthetically perfect image. Have the Japanese naturally achieved this miracle of aesthetic perfection? No weeds, no dead leaves, no disorder, no tangles, no withered flowers, no mud-splattered paths?
    Such is my memory of women and children of Japan.

In Favor of the Sensitive Man
     
From
Playgirl,
September 1974.
     
    This last year I spent most of my time with young women in colleges, young women doing their Ph.D.’s on my work. The talk about the diaries always led to private and intimate talks about their lives. I became aware that the ideals, fantasies, and desires of these women were going through a transition. Intelligent, gifted, participating in the creativity and activities of their time in history, they seem to have transcended the attraction for the conventional definition of a man.
    They had learned to expose the purely macho type, his false masculinity, physical force, dexterity in games, arrogance, but more dangerous still, his lack