An Old Man's Mind

Press, Volume CVI, Issue 31089, 18 June 1966, Page 4

An Old Man's Mind

Diary of a Mad Old Man. By Junichiro Tanizaki. Seeker & Warburg. 177 pp. Here is a brilliant study of an old man’s mind. His motives, foibles, and idiosyncracies are laid bare with uncompromising clarity. Perhaps the writer of the Diary is mad—or perhaps he is merely old. He is obsessed with two topics, the first of which is his health. We are told in endless detail about his aches and pains, his pills and injections, his operations, and the mechanical apparatus supplied to alleviate his pain. The reader reacts much as the man in the street would react to such a human being in the flesh: alternately we are sympathetic, impatient, bored, exasperated, and indulgent. We know his arm is hurting, but we do wish he wouldn’t go on about it so, the poor old dear. The parts of the book which deal with the old man’s health have just the right degree of emphasis and volubility to make them thoroughly realistic. His relationship with his daughter-in-law, Satsuko, is fascinating to us as well as to him. She is faithless to her husband, provocative. Westernised, selfish. He dotes on her chiefly because she is heartless, for at this stage of his life, he notes, he takes pleasure in being hurt. He has been impotent for years, but she arouses him to a frenzy of sexual desire—of a sort. She balances the irrita-

tion of allowing him to kiss her legs against the possibility of wheedling large sums of money from him. He balances the physical dangers of raised blood pressure against the pleasure of the thrilling experiences which she gives him. Perversely, he settles for the dangerous sexual excitement. The high point of the old man’s declining years is an exhausting day spent in an attempt to obtain prints of Satsuko’s feet, in order to have his grave adorned with them —in the guise of Buddha’s footprints. This notion filled him with exquisite delight. “At the very thought of these Buddha's Footprints modelled after her own feet she would hear my bones wailing under the stone, between sobs I would scream: ‘lt hurts! It hurts! . . . Even though it hurts. I’m happy—l’ve never been more happy. I’m much, much happier than when I was alive! . . . Trample harder! Harder!’ ” Oddly enough, the total impression of this book is neither unhealthy nor morbid. One is left with the picture of a spoiled, selfish old man, having one wonderful conspiratorial, salacious, satisfying last fling. In spite of his illness and eventual death, the atmosphere is breathlessly exuberant, and his thrills are absurdly innocent, perforce. The book is a small work of art, to be savoured with conscious appreciation and approval.