Junichiro Tanizaki
La Chiave

Empire of the Japanese Rising Sun, postwar context: amid the unmentioned ruins of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the society, nuclearized in its core and its limbs, prepares to rise again from the catastrophe, to recover pagodas and temples, to restore the absolutely conflicting lifestyles of its people. A civilization immersed in a colossal gap between a feudal mentality and post-Fordian entrepreneurship, a gap that also affects the moral-sexual sphere: here is the land of rigid chastity from the pre-Meiji Ancien Regime and of the femmes fatales more fierce than their most uninhibited Western counterparts, a land of everlasting modesty nonetheless interrupted by sporadic - yet intense - trans-conjugal voluptuousness.

This, broadly speaking, is the setting of "The Key," a provocative novel-diary written in an era not exactly open to cultured and intellectual libertinism (see the works of Pasolini et similia), yet could no longer contain the erotic and impulsive ferment driven by Western-feminist emancipation. Tanizaki's masterpiece (also rendered into a film version by Tinto Brass) narrates precisely the deadly and venereal contrast between a human essence tied to a past of rigid and unyielding traditions and unfortunately driven by a burning instinct that is no longer deniable. This difficult situation will not only find an outlet in a "parallel" writing of diaries between husband and wife but will also uncover in the diary tool the murder weapon that will ultimately lead to the death of one of the two spouses, exhausted by a morbid and feverish sexual conduct.

The novel's fixed pivot is the triangle-no between an over-fifty husband, devoted to "deviant" and scandalous appetites, his wife Ikuko, an apparently virginal and modest woman yet the queen of the most vile and cynical machinations, and finally Kimura, a strongly ambiguous figure who will play a dual role throughout the narrative: friend of the male spouse and lover of the wife, marriage counselor and adulterer, drinking companion and murderer. Kimura, the paroxysm true protagonist of the work, will instrumentalize both spouses' appetites, helping the anonymous husband satisfy certain forbidden perversions by his wife (foreplay, foot fetishism) and meanwhile fulfilling in the usual inn the frustrations of Ikuko, a woman destined for an unhappy marriage and a lackluster sexual life who, however, through a stunning dialectic between modesty and erotic aggression, seeks to redeem a dull and desolate existence. Kimura-san's counseling will not only mend the spouses' relationship but will trigger a vortex of secrets and passions completely opposed to a possible resolution of the internal conflicts. And it is precisely Ikuko's deceiving coldness that kills the husband, pushing him with her consent to ever more ravenous and biting night performances that he cannot withstand.

Within this dark spiral of sex and machinations are the two diaries, tools that will however be used in different ways and uses by both spouses: while the unknown husband fills blank pages describing his fears about his erotic potential and adds his regret about the impossibility of acting on his wife certain deviant perversions (the aforementioned foot fetishism), the audacious Ikuko will exploit the husband's naivety to destroy him. The book, in fact, unfolds in an absurd game set up by the two participants aimed at the one's reading of the other's diary and vice versa: the man will succumb in this puzzle of traps and snare, misled by a false reality specifically drafted by Ikuko to divert him from the right track, he will be led to offer his body to his wife with such gruesome and destructive techniques and timing as to annihilate him.

The world exemplified by Tanizaki is therefore a semi-dystopian reality where the sexual sphere is torn apart by a dialectical paradox between modest repression and sexual-erotic voraciousness, a grip that if not abolished can lethally tear apart one of the game players: under false pretenses, the author probably meticulously describes the catastrophic effects of a feudal society dedicated to taboos and "red" censorship, which maniacally stigmatizes entirely normal appetites, appetites that must be carefully satisfied, or else they naturally exacerbate in a context of secrets and threats until the advent of a society based on the sadian "murderous passions." The novel's enigmatic and subversive scenarios in "The Key" can thus be considered as an already ominous "appetizer" to the sodomitic hell that Sade first and Pasolini later have staged with all possible and imaginable honors and set designs.