Junichiro Tanizaki's The Key, published in 1956 and set in post-war Japan, is a frightening story of sexual obsession and compulsion in a twenty-year-old marriage. The husband, who remains nameless throughout the novella, is a middle-aged retired academic who finds himself unable to keep up with his wife's, Ikuko, sexual appetite. A peek into Ikuko's diary shows that she finds her husband increasingly inadequate and clumsy in bed and is often unsatisfied after their love-making. A chap named Kimura, supposedly dating the couple's daughter, soon enters this sexually fraught tableau and complicates the marriage, although the text betrays that this complication was neither unexpected nor unwanted.
Tanizaki's novella is written in the form of diary entries belonging to Ikuko and her husband. New Years' Day marks the first entry on his side and, literally, the beginning of a new chapter for Ikuko's husband.
"This year I intend to begin writing freely about a topic which, in the past, I have hesitated even to mention here. I have always avoided commenting on my sexual relations with Ikuko, for fear that she might surreptitiously read my diary and be offended... I have decided not to worry, but perhaps I really stopped worrying long ago. Secretly, I may have accepted, even hoped, that she was reading it. Then why do I lock the drawer and hide the key? Possibly to satisfy her weakness for spying."
Thus begins an enchanting but devious tale of furtive seduction. Ikuko's husband is often is a high state of unfulfilled arousal. He is still passionately in love with her but, unfortunately for him, lacks the vitality and vigour to demonstrate it. Having no lack of experience with other women, he knows she possesses a natural gift for love-making and mentions pointedly that her physical endowment is equaled by few other women. As much as this excites him, it cripples him too, for his physical stamina is "no match for hers". Ikuko's husband, I imagine, is in an uncomfortable position: he desires his wife, seeks to satisfy and please her but lacks the necessary apparatus to achieve this; the constant awareness of his lack rouses his insecurities. He writes, "If by any chance another man knew of (her natural gift), and knew that I am an unworthy partner, what would happen?"
Through the diary entries, we learn that Toshiko, the couple's daughter, is being courted by a chap by the name of Kimura, although how the courtship is developing is not very clear. Toshiko appears to be uninterested in the young man and refuses to go out alone with him unless accompanied by her mother. Indeed, later on in the novella, it will appear as though Toshiko and her father are closing the distance between Ikuko and Kimura, although what the daughter's motivations are remain ambiguous. Ikuko's husband remarks in his diary, "I wonder what he's after. Which one attracts him? ...Perhaps his real aim is to win Toshiko. Since she seems unenthusiastic, he may be trying to improve his chances by integrating himself with Ikuko..."
One thing that is inescapable is that Ikuko's husband is adamant on inspiring sexual jealousy. From an early stage, he feels jealous of Kimura but admits that he secretly enjoys it. "Such feelings have always given me an erotic stimulus...That night, stimulated by jealousy, I succeeded in satisfying Ikuko. I realize Kimura is becoming indespensible to our sexual life." We find that he feeds his sexual appetite by courting danger in the form of infidelity; his vigour rises to the occasion (no pun intended) only when it is threatened by an external stimulus. For this reason, he implicitly encourages her to incite his suspicion for "the sake of her own happiness."
A strange, illicit love affair develops, prompted by both husband and daughter. Ikuko falls into this easily, too easily, it seems, but it is not difficult to understand why. Already disgusted by her husband, his "waxy skin", his repulsive love-making and "revolting habits", his insistence on poring over every detail of her body and his unnatural attraction to her feet, she writes in her diary as an ending thought, "Are these gross, sticky, nasty caresses what you have to expect from all men?"
But even while Ikuko violently dislikes her husband, she obliges him as much as she can, especially (or conveniently?) in the matter of Kimura. One wonders, despite her "old morality" and old-fashioned Kyoto upbringing, whether she quietly enjoys the two-fold attention. On one hand is a desperate, ageing husband who gets off on the idea of jealousy. On the other is the instigated lust of her daughter's suitor, a young, handsome man who maintains only a paper-thin distance from her when she faints after too much brandy and has to be undressed in his presence; or when, asked by her husband, Kimura develops the naked pictures of Ikuko taken by her husband's camera. Ikuko claims to heed her husband's implicit/explicit promptings in the name of duty ("I was only obeying your father," she tells her daughter. "I do whatever he wants even against my will") yet doubt lingers over the text. Given that both husband and wife are unreliable communicators in that they write in their diaries thinking and knowing that the other reads it, normal laws of morality, modesty and truthfulness stop applying. This surreptitious dialogue between the two destabilizes what we assume are the normal laws of communication: Ikuko knows what her husband wants and is free to indulge herself as long as she does not admit that she reads her husband's diary. Similarly, her husband will encourage her behaviour even when he knows she is being unfaithful as long as he maintains the facade of ignorance. The art of subversion takes precedence over truthfulness in the text. Indeed, Tanizaki, without judging his characters, makes it seem as though it is a more important virtue to uphold than honesty.
Towards the end, Ikuko's husband becomes more and more aware of his single-mindedness. Rightfully, he calls himself "an animal good only for mating", an animal of the night. While his mind teems with sexual fantasies, his brain is "steadily deteriorating". At the same time that his concentrated need for sex and satisfaction takes priority, his body suffers the effects of neglect by responding to his fanatical over-doing, over-action with a paralysis of limbs, which leaves him bed-ridden for a good couple of weeks. I won't spoil the ending but I will say this: it ends on an ambiguous, amoral note that captures the very essence of the ambivalence Tanizaki employs in his language to discuss the sexual tensions in the novella..
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