The couple begin drinking heavily; she becomes more Westernised. A formerly modest woman, she repeats, with her husband, the ways of lovemaking she has just practised with her lover, whom she meets in the afternoons. When she then calls out the name of this other man — the man who will, at the end of the book, marry her daughter — the husband writes in his diary, ‘At last, as her voice was rising once again, I took her. At that moment I felt I had burst into another world. This was reality, the past was only an illusion. Perhaps it would kill me, but this moment would last for ever.’ His wish is granted. In the end, he dies, or is killed, perhaps by the effort involved, while making love to his wife.
Desire is the devil in Tanizaki, a torment you can never escape or fulfil, except temporarily. Yet without it there is inertia, emptiness, routine. On top of this, particularly as people age and there is less novelty available to them, desire is only sustained by others; by jealousy, rivalry, secrecy and human obstacles. Relief is only ever a reprieve, and the characters are forced towards extinction by their never-ending desire. Tanizaki is not an experimental writer himself; he is a straightforward writer, not a modernist. But his characters’ lives become experimental once they engage with what they really want, once they realise they cannot escape their sexuality. Self-knowledge is impossible, foolish even, and wisdom a waste of time. All you can do is try to follow your body.
Feet are important to Tanizaki but there is something else too. Perverse objects are invested with symbolic magic. The fetish, not unlike Winnicott’s ‘transitional object’, enables the child to pass from the mother to the world, carrying a piece of her. It could be anything: shoes, an item of underwear, hair, leather, silk, depending on where in his life the subject became fascinated by something he desired but was unable to understand. Freud even quotes the example of a man who fetishises ‘the shine on someone’s nose’. Couldn’t a fetish be a book? Presumably this wouldn’t be unusual in a writer.
In the end, as it would have to be, we discover that the key to The Key is writing — the human desire to make an authentic mark. Whether it be a cave drawing, scratching one’s name on a cell wall, writing a novel, or cutting one’s arm, all are communications, addressed to someone else, whether or not they exist in reality. The Key is constructed from diaries; the entire adventure is sustained by the erotics of secret writing and the fact that none of the characters can be sure whether the other is reading their diary at all. They can only hope — and fear — that they are. It is only here, in the intimate confessional of their words, in the truth of their unconscious, as it were, that one may come to know the other.
What is amazing to me is how a writer like Tanizaki can still speak to us. Before, let’s say, the mid-70s, when the Murdoch press began in earnest in Britain, it seemed there were areas of privacy into which no one but the novelist could venture. A novel didn’t have to be sexually explicit to lay bare and obvious the intricacies of subjective private life. It did this fictionally and metaphorically. These were made-up stories, but we knew they represented real people in their deepest selves. But the ‘real’ itself was protected, it was behind the veil. Now, it seems, we know everything because nothing is hidden. I feel I would recognise Bill Clinton’s penis in a crowd of other penises.
Yet a novel like The Key can still resonate and seem aggressively contemporary, making our desire seem as strange, and even alien — surely the point of literature — as it was before the age of explicitness. What is the truth about sexuality? Is sex pornography, prostitution or perversion? Is it being blown by a stranger in a toilet? Is it being tied up or is it fantasy? Or is it really full genital sex with one’s spouse while thinking of no one else? Tanizaki shows us that sex is everywhere, and it involves not only transgression, but punishment, too, and suffering; it is a dirty business and probably has to be.
Tanizaki’s work reminds me in some ways of the photographer Araki’s work. (There is a photograph by Araki which leads me to Tanizaki. It is a nude in black gloves and stockings, with a key suspended from a band around her throat.) Araki has never taken an ugly picture; he is a photographer who, given time, would photograph the whole world. His pictures are a diary of his numerous interests. He is, obviously, more explicit in every way than Tanizaki, and perhaps more perverse. (In Tanizaki the women speak, act and deny; in Araki they are only ever objects.) But Araki is very good at picking up on the sexuality of the ordinary. He can photograph flowers, fruit, street scenes, and see the sexuality in them. Is this the extremity of perversion, or is it love for the world?
In Tanizaki’s earlier novel Naomi, the male protagonist, much older than his lover, who becomes a convert to the pleasures of group sex, states, ‘I started a diary in which I recorded everything about Naomi that caught my attention.’ Naomi herself becomes almost a prostitute, except that, subversively, she refuses to be paid for the pleasure she receives and gives.
Written four years after The Key, Diary of a Mad Old Man is, of course, another diary. ‘Even if you’re impotent you have a kind of sex life,’ writes the seventy-four-year-old protagonist, somewhat optimistically. Unfortunately, he has false teeth, and, looking at himself, states, ‘Not even monkeys have such hideous faces. How could anyone with a face like this appeal to a woman?’
But he does appeal to her — in some way — though Tanizaki doesn’t give us her point of view. And she appeals to him. This woman, his son’s wife, Satsuko, is spiteful, sarcastic, a bit of a liar, a little power-crazed. Even so, he begins to love her, horribly so. With some encouragement from her, he tries to peep at her in the shower. When she slaps him, he buys her jewellery. In return she lets him kiss her feet and suck her toes. She forbids him to kiss her — making it clear she finds him disgusting — but at one point she lets drop a little saliva into his mouth.
His deterioration, the story of a man becoming aware of his imminent death, takes up as much space as this intriguing lovemaking. There is also more than enough about pills, painkillers and suppositories. (Physical illness and decline serves, perhaps, as a metaphor for sexual corruption.) Then, in a delirium, he recalls a recent dream about his mother, a beautiful woman who smokes a pipe and whose feet, like those of Satsuko, he admires. ‘Mother’s feet were fairly broad, like those of the Bodhisattva of Mercy.’ His mother, he knows, would be appalled by him ‘petting’ with his son’s wife, ‘even sacrificing his wife and children to try to win her love,’ as he puts it.
When, for a short time, the old man’s health improves, he requests to be taken on a trip to Kyoto. He wants to see the city for the last time, and to find a burial place. He also wants to have his headstone carved. He will have the imprints of Satsuko’s feet — which he will take himself — carved into his headstone, along with an image of the Bodhisattva of Mercy. The women he loves, mother and ‘lover’ combined, will be walking on him throughout eternity.
It seems scandalous, humorously dishonest even, for an old man to prefer a young woman’s feet to his own wife, or to anyone in his family. Yet Tanizaki appears to be saying that even at the very end of a life the self doesn’t only want to survive. The Diary shows, at least, the persistence of desire; it is, perhaps, a tribute to its strength. But there is no doubt that it is a fetishistic relationship, and could be described as infatuation, not as love. This might have been intriguing had Tanizaki provided more idea of what Satsuko wants from the old man, apart from his fascination. He seems to suggest that she is only materialistic, and manipulative; anyhow, the relationship doesn’t alter much as it goes on.