The Key

The novel alternates entirely between two diaries, an unnamed fifty-five-year-old professor's and his wife Ikuko's, and the premise depends on a fiction each of them maintains for most of the book: that the other doesn't know these pages exist. The professor, anxious about his flagging virility and Ikuko's cooling interest, begins engineering situations meant to provoke her jealousy and desire, most calculatedly by taking nude photographs of her, first with a borrowed Polaroid and then with negative film, and making sure Kimura, a younger colleague circling their daughter Toshiko, gets a look at them. Tanizaki lets both diarists narrate their own manipulations as though recording private truth, and the dramatic irony compounds page by page as the reader starts to suspect, well before either character admits it, that both diaries are performances written for an audience of exactly one person each.

Kimura functions less as a rival than as a mechanism the professor deliberately installs into his own marriage, a jealousy-generating third party summoned specifically to reignite desire between a husband whose body is failing him and a wife whose obedience to social propriety has always outpaced her open desire. What the professor doesn't fully control is how effectively the device works on Ikuko herself, who begins meeting Kimura independent of her husband's engineering, and the novel becomes less a study of one man's scheme than a study of how completely a manipulation can outgrow the manipulator once another person's actual wants get involved in it.

The professor's diary tracks his declining virility with the same clinical attention he gives Ikuko's photographs, and his solution, doctor-administered hormone injections meant to restore his potency, produces dangerously elevated blood pressure and memory lapses he records without fully grasping their significance. Tanizaki, writing in his early seventies and managing his own declining health, gives the novel's eroticism a genuinely mortal undertow that sets it apart from Quicksand or Naomi's more purely psychological damage: here the body's actual, measurable limits keep intruding on a scheme built entirely around appetite, until the difference between arousal and medical emergency becomes difficult for the professor, and for the reader, to tell apart.