Diary of a Mad Old Man by Jun'ichirō Tanizaki

First published:Futen rojin nikki, 1961-1962, serial; 1962, book (English translation, 1965)

Type of work: Psychological realism

Time of work: June 16, 1960, to mid-April, 1961

Locale: Tokyo and Kyoto

Principal Characters:

• Tokusuke Utsugi, the affluent seventy-seven-year-old protagonist, rather corpulent, in ill health, and infatuated with his daughter-in-law
• Satsuko, Tokusuke’s flirtatious and self-seeking daughter-in-law, a former chorus girl who, with her husband and son, lives in Tokusuke’s house in Tokyo
• Jokichi, the only male of Tokusuke’s three grown children, thirty-six years old and immersed in his own business and extramarital affairs
• Haruhisa, Tokusuke’s devious nephew, who embarks on an extramarital affair with Satsuko
• Nurse Sasaki, Tokusuke’s burdened live-in private nurse, one of several medical professionals attending him

The Novel

Nine-tenths of Diary of a Mad Old Man is composed of entries from the protagonist’s diary (from June 16 to November 18, 1960) up to the point at which a series of seizures incapacitate Tokusuke and bring an end to his written autobiographical introspection, in which he has engaged for many years. The work’s remainder is composed of respective extracts from Nurse Sasaki’s report (November 20), Dr. Katsumi’s clinical record (from December 15, 1960, to February 7, 1961), and notes by the protagonist’s widowed elder daughter, Itsuko Shiroyama, which bring the story up to Tokusuke’s recuperation in mid-April, 1961.

Basically, the novel chronicles Tokusuke’s increasing obsession with Satsuko while his health and his relationships with the rest of his household and family deteriorate. The sexually impotent Tokusuke constantly schemes to be alone with Satsuko, and then, with her encouragement, to obtain a caress or kiss; Satsuko exacts material rewards for these favors: an automobile, an expensive beige suede handbag, and finally a fifteen-carat cat’s-eye ring costing three million yen (roughly $17,000), this last item perhaps symbolizing her feline predacity. Tokusuke’s wife (never named in the diary, suggesting the protagonist’s estrangement), younger daughter, Kugako, and elder daughter are increasingly chagrined by Tokusuke’s preferment of Satsuko and the callousness, spitefulness, and niggardliness he shows to them.

When, three-quarters of the way through the novel, the hope for a quick cure, through spinal injection, to the now-excruciating neuralgia in Tokusuke’s left hand is raised and then thwarted, the episode suggests that life’s problems are not so easily solved, as well as the Tanizakian notion that a novel’s plot cannot be resolved so quickly and neatly—as indeed it is not in this work. The rest of Tokusuke’s diary recounts his trip to Kyoto to arrange for his burial, his surreptitious plan to incorporate Satsuko into his Buddhist monument, revealing the protagonist’s deification of a femme fatale, a theme in many of Jun’ichirō Tanizaki’s works. Tokusuke’s quarrels about Satsuko with Itsuko—earlier the most retiring of his children—at the conclusion of the Kyoto trip and back in Tokyo precipitate Tokusuke’s stroke and angina pectoris, the latter emblematic of the heartache the old man feels in his frustrated, impracticable sexual longing. In a shift from the subjectivity of Tokusuke’s diary, the objective third-person accounts in the closing extracts document Tokusuke’s decline and convalescence, from hospital to home, unwittingly pointing to the crucial connection between clinical facts and emotions, desire, and mind. Unbeknown to Itsuko, her concluding matter-of-fact report on the impracticality of the beginning of the excavation of the garden for a swimming pool (since Tokusuke will not be allowed outdoors in the sun) recalls the diary entries of August 12, September 13, and October 23, which all mention the swimming pool and intimate that Tokusuke’s yearning to see Satsuko in her swimsuit is the spark that keeps him alive. The novel’s ending leaves unresolved the questions of whether Tokusuke’s convalescence is completed, whether he lives, whether the swimming pool is finished, and whether he ever sees Satsuko in the pool.

The Characters

A crux, implied by the work’s title, is whether—or to what extent—the protagonist is insane. Although Tokusuke uses or reports Satsuko’s words, such as “crazy” and “lunatic,” to refer to his infatuation no fewer than seven times, the overall clarity of his mind is confirmed by the astute analysis in his diary entries, his own anxieties about his mental health, and finally a psychiatrist’s opinion (quoted in Nurse Sasaki’s extract) that he is not mentally ill, though subject to abnormal sexual impulses. The power of sex to require an outlet, direct covertly much of human activity, and preserve or destroy life is recognized by both Tokusuke and Tanizaki. Blocked by impotence, Tokusuke is naturally attracted to the alluring former chorus girl who is constantly in his presence.

Abnormality arises in the hint of incest, analogous to that in Tanizaki’s “Yume no ukihashi” (“The Bridge of Dreams”) and emphasized by Satsuko’s reiterated term “father,” whenever addressing Tokusuke; foot fetishism (similar anatomical fetishes occur in many of Tanizaki’s other works); and the typical Tanizakian masochism, which with the preceding abnormality is symbolically blended in Tokusuke’s final choice of a burial monument having Satsuko’s footprint (in the guise of Buddha’s) placed over, as if stepping on, his remains. Also abnormal is Tokusuke’s abetting of a triangle among Satsuko, Haruhisa, and Jokichi, which has analogues in Tade kuu mushi (1928-1929; Some Prefer Nettles, 1955), Kagi (1956; The Key, 1960), and “The Bridge of Dreams.” Yet while Tokusuke claims that he would pursue the erotic even to death, it actually leads to the prolongation of his life, in contrast to its opposite result for the protagonist, the Professor, in The Key.

Also helping to create Tokusuke’s complex character, like the others in the novel a mixture of good and bad, are Tanizaki’s techniques, appropriate to the diary form, of juxtaposition of or consistency and inconsistency between entries. Both the silliness and the slyness of Tokusuke’s attempt to wrest a kiss from Satsuko by exaggerating his neuralgia and tearfully feigning a childlike entreaty (October 9 and 13) are set off against the six-year-old Keisuke’s genuine, innocent concern for his grandfather’s pain, which furthermore evokes from Tokusuke admirably authentic feelings and tears (October 19). Tokusuke’s machinations regarding Satsuko are satirized by the comical inconsistency of his plans for a trip to Kyoto, vehemently expressed in the entries of July 12 and November 10 (“There’s no need to be in a hurry!” versus “This isn’t the kind of thing you can afford to put off!”). His self-deceit and deceiving of the reader occur in the inconsistency between the entries of November 9 and 10, where in the former Tokusuke asserts that the time is ripe for the Kyoto trip because of the abeyance of his pain and the too-long protraction of delay, but in the latter that this is only another chance to flirt with Satsuko. Tokusuke does, however, show commendable steadiness in his resolve to face death, as suggested by the consistency in his accounts, in the entries of June 19 and October 22, of his feelings about his X rays appearing to yield a fatal prognosis.

Related to Tanizaki’s novelistic credo of leaving some points obscure or “in shadows,” Tokusuke’s craftiness in plotting is suggested by the meaningful reticence in certain entries. Tokusuke never explains his statement in the June 17 entry, “I had something else in mind.” The reader infers later that the “something” was his twenty-five-thousand-yen gift (or bribe) to Satsuko. The reader must infer from the July 29 entry that Tokusuke’s postponement of a trip to the resort town of Karuizawa is to enable a tete-a-tete with Satsuko; an obligatory inference from the August 19 entry is that Tokusuke’s whole detailed house-remodeling scheme is intended to incarcerate his wife, allowing him greater freedom with Satsuko.

Critical Context

Among Tanizaki’s twenty-five or so original novels, Diary of a Mad Old Man falls among those that are short—the majority, with the notable exception of Sasame-yuki (1943-1948; The Makioka Sisters, 1957), set in the twentieth century (the other novels being set in the past, anytime from the Fujiwara to Tokugawa periods) and written after Tanizaki’s transforming experience of the great Tokyo-Yokohoma earthquake of 1923 and his subsequent resettlement in the Kyoto-Osaka region. The novels of this period are generally considered his best; indeed, up to his death, Tanizaki was regarded as a leading candidate for the first Nobel Prize for Literature to be awarded to a Japanese writer.

The continuity in Tanizaki’s works is evidenced by his portrayal in the early ones of the femme fatale, as in “Shisei” (“The Tatooer”) and of the elderly, as in Misako’s father in Some Prefer Nettles. In the works The Makioka Sisters, Shosho Shigemoto no haha (1950; The Mother of Captain Shigemoto, 1956), The Key, “The Bridge of Dreams,” and Diary of a Mad Old Man, Tanizaki increasingly focuses on old age, aging, disease, illness, and death, very probably reflecting the concerns of an aging author, from his fifty-seventh to seventy-sixth year. Of these latter novels, Diary of a Mad Old Man has the closest affinity with The Key, which is also in the diary form (a professor’s and his wife’s respective diaries). While in Diary of a Mad Old Man Tokusuke views his escalating contact with Satsuko in popular-culture terms, as an “erotic thriller,” in The Key the Professor views his improved sexual relations in the more philosophical light of rationality surrendering to the animal. Moreover, Tokusuke repeatedly requests that Satsuko masticate some medication and administer it mouth to mouth to him, symbolizing the maternal life-giving force she is to him. In The Key, however, the Professor chews medication and transmits it mouth to mouth to his wife, symbolizing the life-draining force she is to him, which ultimately leads to his death (and cessation of his diary) toward the end of the novel.

Bibliography

Keene, Donald. Dawn to the West: Japanese Literature of the Modern Era. Vol. 1, Fiction, 1984.

Kimball, Arthur G. Crisis in Identity and Contemporary Japanese Novels, 1973.

Lippit, Noriko Mizuta. Reality and Fiction in Modern Japanese Literature, 1980.

Petersen, Gwenn Boardman. The Moon in the Water: Understanding Tanizaki, Kawabata, and Mishima, 1979.

Ueda, Makoto. Modern Japanese Writers and the Nature of Literature, 1976.