[In Diary of a Mad Old Man Tanizaki's symbolic eroticism] is earthy, realistic, clinically detailed. (p. 109)

The efforts of Tanizaki's old man [Tokusuke] are not so much a quest for identity as an attempt to preserve the image he understands well and more or less accepts. He tries to extract the last bit of life-juice from the shriveled facts of his existence, affirming through diary and desire the significance of who he is. (pp. 109-10)

But he is hardly crazy. The title's assertion, that he is a mad old man (futen rojin), is surely ironic. For one thing, his diary account is lucid. When he looks at the record of a year before, he realizes he is getting forgetful and acknowledges it. His analysis of his own motives is perceptive. (p. 110)

The madness, rather, is the madness of life itself, the lunacy of a world where the creative...