Arts & Letters
Which novel by Junichiro Tanizaki praises Japanese aesthetics of shadow?
- In Praise of Shadows
- The Makioka Sisters
- Some Prefer Nettles
The answer is In Praise of Shadows. His 1933 essay.
In Praise of Shadows, from 1933, and it is an essay rather than a novel - a short book arguing that Japanese beauty was built for dim light and is destroyed by electricity.
The argument is specific and slightly perverse. Lacquerware looks muddy under a bulb and comes alive by candlelight, where the gold flecks surface one at a time; gold leaf on temple screens exists to gather what little light reaches the back of a dark hall; miso soup is the colour it is because it was meant to be eaten in shadow. He extends this, at length and with a straight face, to a comparison of Japanese and Western lavatories, and concludes that the old ones were better because they were dark and gave you somewhere to think.
He was writing against his own earlier self. Tanizaki spent the 1920s enthusiastically Westernised - jazz, film, a house in the foreign style - and turned sharply back after the 1923 earthquake destroyed Tokyo and he moved to the older Kansai region. The essay is often read now as design theory, and is a set text in architecture schools, which would probably have amused a man whose novels are mostly about obsession and sexual humiliation.