The Key

Rating:	★★★
Category:	Books
Genre:	Literature & Fiction
Author:	Jun'ichirō Tanizaki

English version translated by Howard Hibbett.

Very interesting. Once you start reading, you don’t feel like putting it down.

This is a story about a dying marriage and the issue of sexuality in old age.

Tanizaki's characters are often driven by obsessive erotic desires.

In the story, a middle aged man, who is deeply in love with his younger wife, loads her with all sorts of stimulants, from liquor to a young handsome man, and arranges for his wife to commit adultery in order to boost his own sagging sexual desires.

The wife:
“In the beginning I myself felt a passionate love for him. I can’t deny that “I accepted a man who was utterly wrong for me,” nor that “sometimes the very sight of him made me queasy.” But that doesn’t mean I didn’t love him.”

As years passed by, in spite of the love, they have grown physically apart, they have problems understanding each other, unsure each other's thoughts and desires, till the day when the wife discovers the key to her husband's diary, to his soul.

The husband:
“Even though I have several hiding places for the key to the locked drawer where I keep this book, such a woman may well have searched out all of them."

From that moment onwards, the two characters start to “communicate” through their diaries. Both implicitly agree to read each other's diaries, while outwardly pretending that they do not.