The book contains numerous descriptions of medical procedures and treatments, and ends in a series of short accounts given by his private nurse, doctor and daughter Itsuko.

[4] Tokosuke in Diary of a Mad Old Man, in describing his ideal of feminine beauty, says: ‘Above all, it’s essential for her to have white, slender legs and delicate feet.’ The treatment in Diary of a Mad Old Man shades strongly into sado-masochism, as in this passage toward the end of the book: ‘At the very thought of those Buddha’s footprints modelled after her own feet she would hear my bones wailing under the stone.

Harder!”’ In the period after the First World War a new type of modern young woman, the modan garu or mogaru, became widespread in urban Japan.

Satsuko in Diary of a Mad Old Man, who has worked as a dancing girl, is a late representative of this type, and presented much in contrast with her more traditional sisters-in-law Kugako and Itsuko.

Tanizaki had doubts about the encroachment of Western culture and commercialization,[5] and expressed it particularly in his contrast in the book between the capital Tokyo (which he describes as ‘an overturned rubbish heap’) and the more placid and traditional Kyoto, where he wishes to be buried.

[7] This situation appears in more than one other work by Tanizaki, for example the novels Kami to hito no aida (Between Men and the Gods, 1924) and Kagi (The Key, 1956), in which an old professor is complicit in his wife’s adultery as a stimulant to his own sexual desire.