Junichiro Tanizaki, Diary of a Mad Old Man. Howard Hibbett, translator. Vintage, 1961/1965.
At the center of this book is an old man who manages to organize everyone else’s lives (family, caregivers) around him, catering to his needs, infirmities, and desires. He has in many ways lost physical independence, but he uses his dependence on others to subordinate their behavior to his needs. In that way, he creates for himself another kind of independence and remain as family patriarch. Marina Lewycka creates a similar character, 84 year old Nikolai, in A Short History of Tractors in Ukraine. After the death of his wife, he works desperately to maintain his independence and gets family and medical personnel to dance to his tune through an array of behaviors, from the rational to the crazy. The most famous old man story is Don Quixote, whose eponymous main character manages to pull in lots of characters into his orbit whether to protect, retrieve, save, or exploit him. But whereas Tanizaki and Lewycka allow their agéd protagonists to survive at the end of their novels, Cervantes kills off Don Quixote.
Diary of a Mad Old Man is one of Tanizaki’s late works. It is written in the form of a diary by a well-to-do 77 year old patriarch, Tokusuke Utsugi, whose is an aesthete (Kabuki, food, calligraphy, women’s bodies) but whose health is on the decline, and, although impotent, he remains sexually curious, open to and seeking out sexual attraction. He writes the diary because his eyesight is too poor for reading, and in it he gives vent to his concerns over his failing body and his sexual obsessions. He has had a stroke, after which he has had difficulty walking, but he also suffers from aches, numbness and tingling in his arms and hands(neuralgia) as well as angina. He knows the medical concepts and vocabulary that relate to his conditions as well as the myriad of drugs and treatments available to manage them. A nurse, doctors, and family members help manage his various and shifting maladies; the nurse sleeps in his bedroom to insure 24 hour care. As counterbalance to the sickroom, sick old man, narrative, he writes of his obsession with women, the female form, particularly his daughter-in-law, Satsuko. She is married to the old man’s son, Jokishi, and they live with their son, Neibuso, upstairs in the rambling family mansion. Both threads of Tokusuke’s diary become intertwined, and both are means of staving off death.
As the old man’s world shrinks, he finds no joy in the other members of his family (wife, children, grandchildren) or other people, really, so the focus of the diary quickly narrows to his body and Satsuko in a cycle of pain and pleasure or pain and relief. Satsuko and Jokishi have become estranged, and Satsuko does not seem much interested in their son, but she is very aware of her father-in-law’s interest in her, which she plays to. Tokusuke’s attraction to women is not only to their beauty but to their capacity to be a little evil (lie, scheme, make trouble, act selfishly), and Satsuko fits the bill. She was a dancer, not of the same class as the Utsugi family, and as gatekeeper Tokusune’s wife protested the marriage to her son, but the marriage went forward with the old man’s approval. Tokusuke wants what he wants, and he is wealthy and powerful enough, even as a sick old man, to break or bends customs, ethics, morals, expectations to get it. Satsuko is similar, but without her father-in-law’s power and position she must find other ways to bend the world to serve her. The soupçon of danger is stimulating.
Satsuko is having an affair with another man, in the house. Tokusuke is aware of what is going on and approves of the love affair, because of the courage it demonstrates. As compensation, in what are the novel’s most erotic moments, Satsuko allows the old man to watch her shower, kiss and lick her leg, and then stuff three of her toes into his mouth. Because of the stimulation, the old man’s blood pressure skyrockets and his eyes become bloodshot, which worries the nurse, but Tokusuke reveals nothing. A few days later, Satsuko gives him the chance to lick, kiss, and stuff again but the old man’s blood pressure doesn’t spike, so the experience is a let down. He is concerned with his decaying body and is doing everything he can to forestall his demise, but for the sake of his attraction to Satsuko the threat of danger to his well being is a necessary part of the stimulation. As this shower flirtation continues, Satsuko asks her father-in-law for a three million yen cat’s eye ring, which, after some token resistance, he pays for. The shower flirtation is followed by my favorite scene in the novel, when the old man dreams of his mother and her tiny feet. He has an Oedipal foot fetish! From east to westernized, he loves his mother’s tiny bound feet, and he loves Satsuko’s longer, slender unbound feet. His foot fetish survives the postwar transition. And when it is found out that that he has paid for Satsuko’s ring and his wife confronts him, he simply admits to buying it and argues back about his right to do what he wants with his money. Despite his age and decrepit body, he wills the world around him to serve his needs: the power of an old man’s narcissism.
Yet, Satsuko finds her power as well, and she finds ways to resist his needs and demands, particularly in a scene when she makes him look at himself in a mirror without his false teeth. By the old man’s own aesthetic values, her beauty defeats his ugliness, and for a moment he cannot compete and does not have power over her, and she walks out on him. As he suffers more and more pain, he struggles to remain a viable adult who can manage the balance between pain and pleasure to assert his will over others. As his health continues to slide, Tokusuke decides to go to Kyoto to decide on his gravesite at the appropriate temple and arrange for a headstone. Satsuko has gone with him, and he takes a rubbing of the bottom of her feet, which will be the pattern for the Buddha’s footprint on the base of his headstone: He will be under her feet, which he says “will be his nirvana.” The foot fetish of eternity! Satsuko is intrigued by his continuing obsession and allows the rubbing, which requires much handling of her feet. Nirvana on earth!
After arranging for his burial, and having upset almost everyone along the way, the old man returns home to Tokyo, which is where his diary ends, because he begins to suffer angina pains, heart attacks and strokes that make keeping a diary impossible. The final fifteen pages of the book are extracts from the observational notes of his daughter, nurse, and two doctors, which are all pretty bland, because they are not spiced with the old man’s desires for power, control, and sexual stimulation. I was sure at this point that Tanizaki was going to kill off the old man, just as Cervantes does to Don Quixote. How else to end the reign of old men and release the world back to its own devices? But Tanizaki doesn’t. After three months in the hospital, Tokusuke is sent home to recover and then, revitalized, begins to work on his plan to build a swimming pool. Old men organize everyone else’s worlds. Given that Tanizaki suffered from angina and the paralysis of his right hand, I can’t help thinking that the ending of The Diary of a Mad Old Man reflects Tanizaki’s own desire to hold on.