IN PRAISE OF SHADOWS - JUN’ICHIRŌ TANIZAKI (trans. THOMAS HARPER & EDWARD SEIDENSTICKER)

Breaking my rule a bit here, this book was quite short, about 80 pages that I breezed through in an afternoon. I got this physical copy at a bookstore/British pub here in Shimokitazawa, which was quite a boon, and it allowed me to learn some more about Japanese aesthetics. Tanizaki frames the book, in classic old-guy fashion, by complaining about the way things are today and lamenting the passage of the old ways. Written in ‘33, this book looks at the ways Japan is changing and becoming more Westernized, especially in its designs and aesthetics and registers some complaints. Tanizaki’s major complaint seems to be the Western drive for clarity and progress and light and ostentation while Japan used to value darkness and subtlety and slowness. He ranges over a dozen or so subjects in a brief span of pages. He complains that Western style toilets are too bright and white. Actually, he complains that everything is too bright, that Japanese food and temples and traditional clothing are all best seen in mutated natural light and that Japanese design is traditionally centered around these dark, mysterious places while Westernism focuses on brightness and clarity. He goes far enough to extend this argument to women. “Our ancestors made of woman an object inseparable from darkness, like lacquerware decorated in gold or mother-of-pearl.” Arguing that even Japanese women look better cloaked in darkness with only their face showing. He engages in some interesting speculation about the skintone of the Japanese looking best in low light and complains about moon-watching parties and a Kabuki plays now featuring electric lights. It’s a pretty compelling and interesting argument, he is worried that Japan is too focused on modernizing and trying to be like Westerners instead of sticking to Japanese ideals and ideas. It’s fascinating to think about how he wrote this during Japan’s imperial expansion and right before WWII, one wonders what he would think about Japan now. I know there is constant ongoing debate here, I see it on TV, about how to preserve “Japanese-ness” but still be a modern, globally relevant country. In many ways Japan, in my experience, is doing better than a lot of places in preserving distinctively Japanese things, given the Americanizing globalization that everywhere, even the USA itself, is subjected to. But Tanizaki was born not long after Japan was visited by the Perry’s Black Ships and were forced to open up to the rest of the world. He would have grown up around people who lived their whole lives in that other world and would have been astounded by the change. It’s not hard to understand why that experience would lead one to lament the loss of the old ways. I’ll remember this book the next time I eat a fancy old Japanese meal; I'll ask them to lower the lights down.