In Praise of Shadows

(by Jun’ichirō Tanizaki, translated by Thomas J. Harper and Edward G. Seidensticker)

Some parts of this 1933 essay on Japanese aesthetics have definitely not aged well (the parts about race and skin color, the parts about women’s bodies) and some parts are about things that I don’t know enough about to have opinions on (costumes and lighting in Noh and kabuki theater). But I like the parts that are more literally about light and shadow and everyday objects, the parts about the appeal of “things that bear the marks of grime, soot, and weather” or that have “a polish that comes of being touched over and over again,” things whose appearances “call to mind the past that made them.” I like Tanizaki’s description of the beauty of Japanese lacquerware in “dim half-light,” how it has “a depth and richness like that of a still, dark pond.” I like how he writes about lacquerware with gold or silver accents in a candlelit room, how “the thin, impalpable faltering light, picked up as though little rivers were running through the room, collecting little pools here and there, lacquers a pattern on the surface of the night itself.” Also interesting is the way he contrasts Japanese houses with wide eaves and the amount of light that they get to Western houses “built to create as few shadows as possible and to expose the interior to as much light as possible.” I am definitely a fan of a sunlit room but as winter approaches I liked reading about rooms where beauty comes from “a variation of shadows, heavy shadows against light shadows.” I like what Tanizaki says about embracing a lack of light: “If light is scarce then light is scarce; we will immerse ourselves in the darkness and there discover its own particular beauty.”