The characters in Tanizaki's Naomi: They each deserve better

Of course what eludes the narrator is painfully obvious to all readers, as we can see what he blinds himself to: His much-younger wife is carrying on an affair, in fact several affairs, w/ the young men (her age) who hang around w/ her during the many hours her husband is at work and she's kept at home like the proverbial bird-in-cage. Unwilling to face the truth, the narrator (in Junichiro Tanizaki's Naomi, 1925), Joji, keeps believing that his wife, Naomi, is like a child, a toy, a Pygmalion whom he has rescued from a life that would have led her into prostitution, who will continue to perfect her social skills as she studies English and the piano and that she will be content to sit home all day and wait upon him when he returns from work: Prostitution by another name. In fact, she's spirited and lively and, as it turns out, a terrible housekeeper and spendthrift. But he still won't believe or perceive the worst about her until he catches her in the act of deceiving him - and even then it takes him a few episodes (he catches her drunk in the street w/ her friends when he'd thought she was at home waiting for him; he comes home unexpectedly one day and finds one of her "friends" lying on their futon) before he realizes that she has no respect for him, that she stays w/ him only because she is financially depending on him, that their marriage is a sham that will never work, and they get in a fight and she leaves. And then her pursues her once again! Tanizaki does a great job in a creating a narrative in which our emotions and sympathies are always mixed: On that one hand we hate the narrator because of his controlling nature, his smugness, and low attitude toward women in general and Naomi in particular, his oblivion, his perverse view of marriage. And yet: While we sympathize w/ Naomi the captive, married to a much older man, product of a terrible family, facing few choices in life beyond prostitution and poverty, iot's hard to excuse her willful extravagance, her slovenly behavior, and most of all her brazen infidelity. In a way, they deserve each other - but more to the point they each deserve a better life and a suitable partner. They each deserve better, but then there would be no story.