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Rating: The literary universe of Tanizaki is certainly characterized by an erotic-fetishistic aura quite pervasive, yet what best describes this author is the particular role of female subjects. Brazen, fatal, libertine, capricious, pretentious, deceitful, independent, sovereign over their husbands and lovers, capable even of resorting to murder without becoming serial killers: these are the women of Tanizaki, females who betray and kill almost mercilessly while maintaining their dignity as refined subjects, seemingly modest and even chaste and frugal. The author sketches a sort of ying-yang all in pink, dividing like day and night, white and black, a long curriculum of enigmatic and cryptic profiles, different if considered separately in various settings and contexts. The libertine and libertarian philosophy of extreme release is expressed mainly under the sheets, away from malicious conventions and distant from public places of exchange and rigorous traditionalist confrontation.
A Fool's Love is quite different from the red-light atmospheres of The Key, being a work that almost entirely removes the erotic-fetishistic component and the scabrousness to focus more on the psychological, behavioral, and relational profile of the protagonists and other characters. Kawai Joji, a twenty-seven-year-old submissive and timid Japanese employee, meets the beautiful Naomi, a fourteen-year-old waitress, with whom he initially establishes a friendship and then a true union sanctioned in a marriage contract. The young, spoiled and capricious girl enchants with her almost sorcerous charm her protector who becomes then lover and husband, dragging him into a whirlwind of demands and desires immediately satisfied by the husband. Meanwhile, Naomi grows up, begins to favor social life, and convinces Kawai to adopt behaviors, customs, and traditions primarily Western: she starts attending dance halls, socializes with family friends, imposes European etiquette lessons on her husband, and even indulges in a few too many drinks. The liaison between the docile Kawai and the imperious and fatal Naomi abruptly ends when he learns from others about his spouse's infidelity, allegedly an irreducible promiscuous and libertine. Despite forgiving her many times, the now thirty-year-old expels her from home and embarks on a difficult period of depression and self-annulment until Naomi, under the pretext of returning repeatedly to the abode of her temporarily ex-husband, prostrated and annihilated, agrees to return to him imposing her own conditions definitively.
Infused with a strong analytical and psychological component, the novel should be considered as one of the horizons of proto-feminism. Lacking seductive facets and sexual scenarios, A Fool's Love is the perfect counterpoint to the "old" order between man and woman, the ideal overturning of centuries of male domination over what was deemed the terrifying female weakness. In a particular role reversal game, it seems indeed that the protagonists wear opposite garments and live in a sort of world made in the image, likeness, and need of the Ladies. But not only: the degraded man does not simply support without power and command of his own but is ridiculed to a level never reached by female counterparts in the era of male domination: the male is bent, mercilessly humiliated, a toy, a wooden puppet in the hands of the femme fatale of the moment, reduced to super-malleable clay, a sort of gummy blob to be handled and rehandled at will. And so behaves Naomi: the girl, raised in balance between the often false and hypocritical rigor of oriental fanaticism and the allegorical representation of Western socialite fun, skillfully mixes the fatal chiaroscuro of the Land of the Rising Sun and the European sense of "freedom" and shapes her being a mature woman into a character devoid of self-control, lover of the good life and whims.
No mischievous crimson of The Key but an intriguing almost apocalyptic and dystopian apologia of the female universe: A Fool's Love is a raw, intense, and captivating work, useful for a thoughtful and reflective reading on sex and the sexes.
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