The Key and Diary of a Mad Old Man by Junichiro Tanizaki

Author:Junichiro Tanizaki [Tanizaki, Junichiro]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2020-06-08T16:00:00+00:00

Jokichi doesn’t seem to be so much in love with Satsuko any more. Maybe his love has been cooling ever since Keisuke was born. Anyhow, he’s often away on business trips, and when he’s in Tokyo he spends most of his evenings at banquets and entertainments, and doesn’t come home till late at night. He may have found someone new, though I’m not sure about that. Nowadays he seems to be more interested in work than women. There was a time when he and Satsuko were passionately in love; I suppose he’s inherited his fickleness from me.

My wife was opposed to the marriage, but I believe in letting people do as they please, so I didn’t interfere. Satsuko said she used to be a chorus girl in the Nichigeki Music Hall. That was only for about half a year—what did she do afterward? I have the impression that she worked in a night club somewhere, perhaps in the Asakusa district.

“Do you do any toe dancing?” I once asked her.

“No, not any more,” she said. “I took lessons for a year or two, though, thinking I wanted to be a ballerina. I wonder if I could still dance at all.”

“Why did you give it up, if you studied that long?”

“But it spoiled my feet, they looked simply awful!”

“So you gave it up?”

“I can’t bear having my feet like that.”

“Like what?”

“Oh—just horrible! The toes all callused and swollen, the toenails coming off.”

“But your feet are pretty now.”

“They used to be a lot prettier! The calluses made them so ugly that when I stopped dancing I tried everything—pumice stone, emery boards, and what not, day after day. And they still aren’t the way they used to be!”

“Really? Let me see.”

I was quick to make the most of this chance to touch her bare feet. She stretched both legs out on the sofa and peeled off her nylons to show me. I put her feet on my lap and clasped each of her toes in my hand, one by one.

“They feel soft to me!” I said. “You don’t seem to have any calluses.”

“You’re not looking hard enough! Try pressing over there.”

“Here?”

“You see? I still haven’t got rid of them completely. A ballerina’s a pitiful creature, if you think about her feet!”

“You mean even Lepeshinskaya has trouble with her feet?”

“Of course she does. When I was practicing, the blood would often drip out of my ballet shoes. And it isn’t just your feet, you lose all the softness here in your calf—you get hard, bunchy muscles like a laborer. It makes you flatchested too, your breasts disappear, and your shoulder muscles are as tough and hard as a man’s. Even chorus girls begin to get that way, though luckily I didn’t.”

Obviously it was her figure that made her so intriguing to Jokichi, but she seems to have brains too, although she never finished school. She hates to be outdone: after coming to our house she studied till she could rattle away in broken French and English.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.