The structure is only apparently whole and homogenous-yet on a closer look it comprises two buildings made of huge fin walls whose cantilevering floor slabs slide into the other’s like the pages of two books. We learn all sorts of things, but at the same time, we don’t know what’s really happening. We go back and forth between two spaces that are as intersected and connected as they are distant and irreconcilable, caught in between, never fully engaged in either. The reader has access only to the diaries-everything is presented to us clearly and chronologically, starting with the entry in which, on New Year’s Day, the husband writes: “This year I intend to begin writing freely about a topic which, in the past, I have hesitated even to mention here.” The diaries are only apparently filled with secrets and truths, as each word is carefully chosen, keeping in mind the spying partner. The two spouses’ souls, sharing both a space and a life, never meet nor try to know each other. Knowing that he, too, will read it, she writes to deliberately mislead him, claiming that she hasn’t read-will never read-his diary. As soon as his wife sees the key, she understands her husband’s intentions and begins, in turn, to keep her own diary.

Hoping she’ll read it, he locks it in a drawer and leaves the key on the floor. In Jun’ichiro Tanizaki’s The Key, a man writes in his diary about the sexual fantasies he has been having about his wife. In this series, he shares some of his designs and what they reveal about the stories they’re modeled on. Matteo Pericoli is the founder of the Laboratory of Literary Architecture, an interdisciplinary project that looks at fiction through the lens of architecture, designing and building stories as architectural projects.

Tanizaki the key analysis