Things That Bang

If Junichiro Tanizaki wrote his book The Key during the mid-eighties or -nineties then the title of his book could well have been Sex, Lies and a Video Tape a Key. Written way back in 1956, the book seems strangely very modern in its take. It’s a story about a man in his mid-fifties unable to satisfy his over-sexed yet repressed wife. Though it may seem dichotomous, Ikuko, his wife, likes sex but due to her conservative upbringing denies her husband and herself exploratory acts in bed.

Frustrated, the husband decides to keep a diary of his sexual acts with his wife, hoping that she would read it and the book would act as a bridge between them. The book is in the form of diary entries made by both the husband and his wife separately.

The book is a splendid take on early-20th century Japan and the changes it wen through through post the Second World War. Times were changing fast and yet some things remained the same. Husbands and wives were still stuck in formal relationships where affection and even anger was left unexpressed, where sheer politeness suffocated a relationship and sex was merely a dirty act relegated to the darkened bedroom.

The desire expressed by the husband to see his forty-something wife’s body under a fluorescent lamp while she is lying in a drunken stupor reflected the need he felt to have an open relationship with his wife, whereas the wife initially drunk, took to the pattern of letting her husband get her drunk just to allow wild sex at night.

Ikuko, unlike her husband, does not love her husband freely; she loves him out of tradition and due to the urges of her body. In many ways her character gives us a peek into the repressed lives of Japanese women of the bygone era, with their dainty feminity covering their sexual urges.

While Ikuko is the modal of Japanese etiquette, her daughter Toshiko is far more open in her anger and embarrassment with her parents sudden out of control behavior. Groans and moans seeping through paper thin screens and a frequently drunk naked mother lying naked in a tub could hardly be acts that any young woman would tolerate especially when the person who’d be drinking with her parents very evening was a beau of hers, Kimura san.

Of course, Kimura san is the third spoke in the wheel and is the object of desire of the old mother and envy of the aging husband.

Though the book is a slim 160 pages, yet the storyline is rich and there is much one can glean about relationships and how they were mangled by the barriers of silence and hierarchy that existed in Japanese society.

Junichiro Tanizaki’s The Key was very impressive and a dark read, while delving into the depths of sexual obsessions, alcoholism and voyeurism he managed to get across a point quite clearly that even the most submissive or seemingly oppressed can be sociopathic in their make.