Diary of a Mad Old Man by Jun'ichirō Tanizaki
Published 1962 · 45,000 words · about 4 hours at an average pace · Literary Fiction, Comic Fiction
How hard is Diary of a Mad Old Man to read?
Diary of a Mad Old Man scores 64 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it quite demanding. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.
- Vocabulary: 52 out of 100
- Medical terminology for hypertension and neuralgia, Buddhist funerary vocabulary and the technical language of stone-rubbing and calligraphy, in Hibbett's precise translation.
- Sentence structure: 48 out of 100
- Diary prose in short dated entries, plain and quick, with the appended clinical documents in a flatter register still.
- Abstraction: 54 out of 100
- Ferociously concrete about bodies and money, though the last third builds an argument about eroticism, art and death out of a plan for a gravestone.
- Information density: 52 out of 100
- Blood-pressure readings, drug names, prices, Buddhist iconography and the geography of postwar Tokyo accumulate quickly in a short book.
- Narrative indirection: 70 out of 100
- A diarist who describes himself as clear-eyed while documenting his own destruction, followed by three other documents — nurse's chart, doctor's report, daughter's account — that reframe everything he wrote.
- Symbolic density: 68 out of 100
- The Buddha's footprint, the cat's-eye emerald, the rubbings taken in ink, and the recurring image of the old man lying under a woman's feet for eternity carry the book's whole argument.
- Ironic distance: 82 out of 100
- A dying man cheerfully bankrupting his family for the right to kiss an ankle, recording his own blood pressure as the price. Tanizaki makes the reader laugh at what is, medically, a man killing himself.
- Resolution withholding: 68 out of 100
- The old man's diary breaks off, his death is neither shown nor confirmed, and the closing documents leave the gravestone unbuilt and Satsuko's intentions unexplained.
- Structural complexity: 58 out of 100
- A dated diary followed by three appended documents in different voices and registers, each shifting the authority of what came before.
How Diary of a Mad Old Man is regarded
Diary of a Mad Old Man holds a literary regard score of 71 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.