Phenomenological Considerations on Love and Jealousy in Junichiro Tanizaki’s “The Key”

The novel “The Key”, by Japanese writer Junichiro Tanizaki, offers elements that allow for a thought-provoking reflection on the relationship between sexuality and phenomenology. Tanizaki tells the story of a couple in which the husband and wife write their respective diaries separately, initially without revealing the content to their partner, expressing intense confessions of an erotic nature within the pages. However, at a certain point, both suspect that they are secretly being read by each other. From then on, the reader is uncertain whether what is reported in the diaries corresponds to truth or to fabricated experiences and feelings, intended for one partner to intentionally confuse the other. Thus, the narrative reveals a dynamic in which the encounter with the other is replaced by games of manipulation and staging. In light of the chapter “The Body as a Sexed Being” from Merleau-Ponty’s “Phenomenology of Perception”, it is possible to identify distortions of the erotic condition in the plot. For the philosopher, sexuality is an original mode of presence in the world, a means of accessing the other as a subject. In Tanizaki, however, this dimension is corrupted: the gaze is not permeated by reciprocity, and the other's body is reduced to a fetishized object. Where there could be courtship, as a bodily expression of love, jealousy and betrayal emerge as artifices to sustain arousal. Thus, “The Key” exposes experiences in which sexuality, instead of a language of reciprocity, becomes a field of manipulation that denies the other's otherness.