In his essay In Praise of Shadows, published in 1933, the novelist Jun'ichiro Tanizaki described and defended an aesthetic which, he said, suffused the traditions of daily life, design, theatre and architecture in his native Japan. This was an aesthetic that revelled in shadow: the customary darkness of the No theatre, the meditative joy of a chilly outside toilet on a dusky evening, the traditional dark colours worn by middle and upper-class women who rarely left the gloom of their deep-eaved houses. Tanizaki had an abhorrence of the well-lit toilet, the distant nocturnal view ruined by urban electric lighting, the white ceramic tableware which took away the mystery from a bowl of soup. Overdecoration was similarly offensive to him: the pictures, ornaments and other bits and pieces with which Westerners filled their houses ruined the calm of an unadorned Japanese interior, decorated only by the flickering shadows cast on its walls.

LRB 15 April 2004 | PDF Download