In Praise of Shadows

by Jun'ichirō Tanizaki

“The sun never knew how wonderful it was,” the architect Louis Kahn said, “until it fell on the wall of a building,”

The parlor may have its charms, but the Japanese toilet truly is a place of spiritual repose.

Indeed one could with some justice claim that of all the elements of Japanese architecture, the toilet is the most aesthetic.

The Westerner has been able to move forward in ordered steps, while we have met superior civilization and have had to surrender to it, and we have had to leave a road we have followed for thousands of years.

The Westerner uses silver and steel and nickel tableware, and polishes it to a fine brilliance, but we object to the practice. While we do sometimes indeed use silver for teakettles, decanters, or saké cups, we prefer not to polish it. On the contrary, we begin to enjoy it only when the luster has worn off, when it has begun to take on a dark, smoky patina.

but had modern medicine been developed in Japan we probably would have devised facilities and equipment for the treatment of the sick that would somehow harmonize with Japanese architecture.

lacquerware

lacquer soup bowl

With lacquerware there is a beauty in that moment between removing the lid and lifting the bowl to the mouth when one gazes at the still, silent liquid in the dark depths of the bowl, its color hardly differing from that of the bowl itself.

Pillow of Grass,

The quality that we call beauty, however, must always grow from the realities of life, and our ancestors, forced to live in dark rooms, presently came to discover beauty in shadows, ultimately to guide shadows towards beauty’s ends.

Modem man, in his well-lit house, knows nothing of the beauty of gold; but those who lived in the dark houses of the past were not merely captivated by its beauty, they also knew its practical value; for gold, in these dim rooms, must have served the function of a reflector.

Nō theatre.

Their clothing was in effect no more than a part of the darkness, the transition between darkness and face.

Such is our way of thinking—we find beauty not in the thing itself but in the patterns of shadows, the light and the darkness, that one thing against another creates.

But our thoughts do not travel to what we cannot see. The unseen for us does not exist. The person who insists upon seeing her ugliness, like the person who would shine a hundred-candlepower light upon the picture alcove, drives away whatever beauty may reside there.

But the truth of the matter is that Japan wastes more electric light than any Western country except America.

But people will light the lights, then switch on an electric fan to combat the heat. The very thought annoys me.

Yoshino

“The quality that we call beauty … must always grow from the realities of life.”