A Cat, a Man, and Two Women

About

Shozo is an amiable, passive young man whose mother arranges his divorce from Shinako so he can marry the wealthier Fukuko. The divorce goes smoothly enough — until Shinako demands custody of Lily, the cat. What follows is a comic custody battle in which the real emotional allegiances of all three humans are laid bare through their relationship to a single, indifferent animal. Tanizaki, master of dark eroticism in works like The Key and Quicksand, is here at his most gently funny — a perfectly formed domestic comedy where the power struggles are real but the stakes are, technically, feline. Lily, for her part, wants nothing from any of them. That’s the joke, and also the point.