In Praise of Shadows [Paperback]

Jun'ichiro Tanizaki (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 2006

This is an essay on aesthetics by one of the greatest Japanese novelists. The text ranges over architecture, jade, food, toilets, and combines an acute sense of the use of space in buildings, as well as perfect descriptions of lacquerware under candlelight and women in the darkness of the house of pleasure. The essay forms a classic description of the collision between the shadows of traditional Japanese interiors and the dazzling light of the modern age.

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Junichiro Tanizaki was a major writer of modern Japanese literature who wrote numerous books, including The Makioka Sisters and Naomi: A Novel.

--This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.

Product Details

• Paperback: 80 pages
• Publisher: Vintage Books (September 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0099283573
• ISBN-13: 978-0099283577
• Product Dimensions: 5.2 x 0.2 x 7.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.9 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (25 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,134,370 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

77 of 82 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Wabi Sabi - not to be confused with "wasabi", April 4, 2005

By 

Boris Bangemann "boyse" (Singapore) - See all my reviews

This review is from: In Praise of Shadows (Paperback)

The Japanese have an aesthetic concept called "Wabi Sabi." This term consists of two words. "Wabi" literally means "poverty," but in the aesthetic context it stands for simplicity; "Sabi" is literally "solitude, loneliness," and for aesthetic purposes it means something like natural impermanence. Wabi Sabi encourages, as one observer put it, a profound feeling of inner melancholy, and an appreciation of quietly clear and calm, well-seasoned and refined simplicity.

Andrew Juniper's "Wabi Sabi: The Japanese Art of Impermanence" summarizes the concept by saying that "the term wabi-sabi suggests such qualities as impermanence, humility, asymmetry, and imperfection. These underlying principles are diametrically opposed to those of their Western counterparts, whose values are rooted in the Hellenic worldview that values permanence, grandeur, symmetry, and perfection. ... Wabi-sabi is an intuitive appreciation of a transient beauty in the physical world that reflects the irreversible flow of life in the spiritual world. It is an understated beauty that exists in the modest, rustic, imperfect, or even decayed, an aesthetic sensibility that finds a melancholic beauty in the impermanence of all things." (pages 2 and 51)

In order to appreciate Junichiro Tanizaki's 50-page pamphlet "In Praise of Shadows" it helps to keep the concept of Wabi Sabi in mind. While many people would object to Tanizaki's anti-modernist view of art (and call it "reactionary" or "nationalist"), it is in fact a contemporary take on an ancient aesthetic concept that favors obliqueness (shadows) over brightness, weathered naturalness over functional novelty, the crude over the polished, and - ultimately - irrationality over rationality.

Tanizaki's essay contains good examples of Wabi Sabi, and a few peculiarly funny ones that reek of Zen humor: "one could with some justice claim that of all the elements of Japanese architecture, the toilet is the most aesthetic. Our forebears, making poetry of everything in their lives, transformed what by rights should be the most unsanitary room in the house into a place of unsurpassed elegance, replete with fond associations with the beauties of nature." (page 4) To a Western reader this sounds like unmitigated satire. But it is not. Tanizaki is serious about this stuff.

In sum, I find "In Praise of Shadows" a very entertaining illustration of an important Japanese aesthetic concept, written by one of the most important Japanese authors of the 20th century. I bought the Leete's Island Books edition of the text, which I review here. Later I found that exactly the same translation is contained in Phillip Lopate's collection "The Art of the Personal Essay." It may be better value for money.

Of course, aesthetics are always a matter of taste. Speaking of which, "wasabi" - if you recall the title of this review - is Japanese horseradish.

39 of 45 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars The subtle beauty of the shadows, December 10, 2002

By 

Charles E. Stevens - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: In Praise of Shadows (Paperback)

The ideas in Tanizaki's essay on the Japanese appreciation for shadows and nature-based arts and architecture should come as little surprise for those familiar with the Japanese culture and tradition. Tanizaki's suggestion that these inclinations came from practical origins made sense (a lot better than the still-common theory that the Japanese idea of aesthetics is a result of different, Japanese genes). It also seemed to me that the Japanese were more inclined to resign themselves to fate and find beauty in what was at hand (like the shadows) than to fight nature and create light at the expense of beauty.

What interested me most was the fact that Tanizaki has a "us versus them" mentality, not so much that Japan or the West is better than the other, just different. However, it seems that if a young Japanese person were to read this essay today, it would seem just as "foreign" as it does to an American.

Nevertheless, it was interesting to read Tanizaki's essay, which discusses everything from the theatre to the bathroom, gold and lacquer, women and race. One cannot help but read Tanizaki's essay without feeling his loss at the erosion of traditional society and the innate beauty within it. At the same time, it makes you look around and notice the lack of beauty in our everyday lives (in terms of art and architecture). America, too, was once a land of shadows and a people who we probably able to appreciate their beauty. Tanizaki probably never considered the fact that his culture and ours are really not so fundamentally different.

If you read this essay, don't get caught up in Tanizaki's occasional bad-mouthing of Western culture (remember that he probably would have never dreamed that this short essay would be translated and read in the West!) Instead, treat this as a rare look into a common Japanese mindset and an opportunity to see for yourself whether Tanizaki's praise of shadows is a worthy one or not.

30 of 36 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars The beauty of half-light, October 8, 2000

By 

"rainbowcrow" - See all my reviews

This review is from: In Praise of Shadows (Paperback)

"And I realized then that only in dim half-light is the true beauty of Japanese lacquerware revealed....But in the the still dimmer light of the candlestand, as I gazed at the trays and bowls standing in the shadows cast by that flickering point of flame, I discovered in the gloss of this lacquerware a depth and richness like that of a still, dark pond, a beauty that I had not before seen. It had not been mere chance, I realized, that our ancestors, having discovered lacquer, had conceived such a fondness for objects finished in it."

In 1993, Japanese novelist Jun'ichiro Tanizaki laid out his views on the Japanese aesthetic sense, in a short essay entitled "In Praise of Shadows". Though by no means an encompassing exploration of the subject, and at times decidedly idiosyncratic, Tanizaki's views shed a new light - if I may use that ironic metaphor - on the art and in particular the architecture of Japan, by revealing the way in which the concept of beauty evolved in concert with the darkness or semi-darkness in which life was lived. In this respect, the essay is brilliant, and capable of radically changing one's perspective on light and shadow, form and color.

Yet certain ideas of Tanizaki's can be disturbing. For example, on race and the paleness of skin, he writes "Thus it is that when one of us goes among a group of Westerners it is like a grimy stain on a sheet of white paper. The sight offends even our own eyes and leaves none to pleasent a feeling. We can appreciate, then, the psychology that in the past caused the white races to reject the colored races. A sensitive white person could not but be upset by the shadow that even one or two colored persons cast over a social gathering." Is this view the perverse opinion of one man, or the pervasive thought of a generation? I don't know the answer. Perhaps it is best to simply let time obscure these malformed passages into the shadows of his text, and to let the deeper insights - on art, food, and architecture - catch the eye and hold the attention.

The essence of Tanizaki's perspective is perhaps best captured in discussion of lacquerware; his words on this subject form the heart of his essay:

"Sometimes a superb piece of black lacquerware, decorated perhaps with flects of silver and gold - a box or a desk or a set of shelves - will seem to me unsettlingly garish and altogether vulgar. But render pitch black the void in which they stand, and light them not with the rays of the sun or electricity but rather a single lantern or candle: suddenly those garish objects turn somber, refined, dignified. Artisans of old, when they finished their works in lacuqer and decorated them in sparkling patterns, must surely have had in mind dark rooms and sought to turn to good effect what feeble light there was. Their extravagent use of gold too, I should imagine, came of undertanding how it gleams forth from out of the darkness and reflects the lamplight.

"Lacquerware decorated in gold is not something to be seen in brillaint light, to be taken in at a single glance; it should be left in the dark, a part here and a part there picked up by a faint light. Its florid patterns recede into the darkness, conjuring in their stead an inexpressible aura of depth and mystery, of overtones but partly suggested. The sheen of the lacquer, set out in the night, reflects the wavering candlelight, announcing the drafts that find their way from time to time into the quiet room, luring one into a state of reverie. If the lacquer is taken away, much of the spell disappears from the dream world built by that strange light of candle and lamp, that wavering light beating the pulse of the night. Indeed, the thin, impalpable, faltering light, picked up as thought little rivers were running through the room, collecting little pools here and there, lacquers a pattern on the surface of the night itself."