The Key

By Junichiro Tanizaki

 

In 1923 following the Great Kanto Earthquake, Tanizaki left his wife and child and shifted to Osaka. Leaving behind the Western influences on his life and works, he developed an interest in more traditional Japanese culture and literature, especially The Tale of Genji. His books often dealt with obsessiveness and the eventual destruction of the characters.

The Key is a story of passion and isolation within a marriage. The wife has an ''old-fashioned Kyoto upbringing that has left her with an antiquated morality'' and the husband, in his middle age, has developed an uncontrollable obsession about his younger wife's naked body. The story is told through the writing of two parallel diaries. The husband writes down all the things he wants his wife to know about their sexual relationship in the hope that she will find the diary and read it. It is locked with a key, which is ''accidentally'' left for the wife to find.

The wife then starts her own diary as a way of escaping the constrictions of her background and records an honest response to her husband's bizarre and manipulative writings. Their lives become controlled by the obsessiveness of the records and at the same time liberated to a point previously thought impossible.

The Key was adapted for the screen in 1959 by Japanese director Kon Ichikawa and later by Italian filmmaker Tinto Brass. Author Junichiro Tanizaki died in Yugawara, south of Tokyo, in 1965.