Shadows, Objects, and Life Arguments – Tanizaki’s In Praise of Shadows

In many ways, the Japanese novelist Junichiro Tanizaki’s essay In Praise of Shadows can be read as a companion to Kakuzo Okakura’s The Book of Tea, which I read this summer. Where Okakura’s book is ostensibly about tea, Tanizaki’s essay is ostensibly about aesthetics – but actually, both are really about the differences between certain ideas of Western and Japanese culture, and more broadly about separate ways of life. In Praise of Shadows is a flowing work, one as hard to pin down as the shadows themselves. It ranges in subject from traditional Japanese theatre to Japanese architecture, from food to lacquerware. Yet certain repeated ideas make for an argument, at least for an implicit one, on a few key topics – the passage of time, the development of Japanese culture, and finally about objects themselves.

Time, Pessimism, Development

In Praise of Shadows is steeped in pessimism – Tanizaki is writing as a culture he loves is ebbing away – but he is not writing as a force of reaction. One tension of the essay lies between his desire to preserve the past and his unwillingness to completely disregard the present. Early on he describes the building of a house and the ingenuity one might employ to maintain the traditional shapes and forms of old Japanese homes while incorporating wires and electric lights, only to remark that an ideal of simplicity now can be a lightbulb hanging alone and unadorned – what previously might seem sacrilegious to a world used to candles.

Tanizaki is no fan of much that the West had brought Japan, however. He directs particular ire towards the electric fan. But still he notes that our opposition must be limited by each specific context. We can leave such things out of our own homes, but if we have a business operating in the summer heat we must also defer to the customer. This idea that we have to adapt and make compromises to the reality we face is a key idea within the text. He does not dismiss Western medicine or science or inventions out of hand, but rather notes that they bear with themselves an adaption to Western modes, and not his own in Japan. Hospitals, for example, need not be built according to Western models, but instead could use more bamboo and wood. The problem with all of this is that perhaps things would have been better if Japan had been left to itself. “We would have gone only in a direction that suited us.” Like Herder in the German lands, Tanizaki views each nation or grouping as having their own distinguishing characteristics which better internally developed than copied from others.

Western things bring western thinking. The fountain pen brings with it a different way of writing, and an implicit exhortation to copy Western literary modes. At times Tanizaki seems to go too far in these arguments, such as when he finds even paper bearing distinctive signs of whether it was produced in the West or Japan. Now, fountain pen users will know that Japan’s paper is extraordinary, such as that produced by Tomoe River. Indeed, Japan’s fountain pens and inks are also rather amazing – those of Sailor and Pilot are particularly lovely, and some of their pens have the most brilliant lacquer work designs. This is adaption in practice, taking a thing of the West and transforming it using Japan’s particular characteristics and modes. I imagine Tanizaki might have approved.

Still, In Praise of Shadows is a work where we are witnesses to something slipping away. Ways of eating, theatre shows, even the role of women, are being changed in ways that leave tradition in the dust. The essay ends with a hope that “perhaps we may be allowed at least one mansion where we can turn off the electric lights and see what it is like without them”. The mansion he refers to us that of artistic and literary culture, the area where he hopes resistance to Western influences may be most effectively pursued. It now makes sense to turn to that sphere and see what the fuss with shadows is all about.

Shadows, Objects and Life Arguments

Tanizaki defines Japanese culture as being one of shadows; the West as one of light. This seems slightly ridiculous at first glance, but worth taking seriously as out of this dichotomy Tanizaki draws all of his arguments about ways of living in the world. And is he not right, anyway? Our rooms are very bright – we certainly do not like the dark. We prefer spotless, shining cleanliness to the dirt that accumulates with age and contains within itself something akin to a history. (Think only about the hordes of servants who once went around polishing the silverware.) We are served food on white bowls, white plates; our bathrooms are tiled. We purchase great cleanliness with a great emptiness of character in many of our surroundings.

For light is a thing that reveals, whereas dark and shadows do more than that – they contain the space where the imagination plays. Puppets, Tanizaki notes, seem more real in the dark. They movements gain a certain magic. And puppets are not alone. Food can be supremely enhanced by the atmosphere of its serving. A dark lacquer bowl works better than a plain white bowl because in that darkness a soup’s contents are not on display as at market. Instead, there is an air of mystery – a taste of mystery, in fact:

“Lacquerware decorated in gold is not something to be seen in a brilliant 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, or overtones but partly suggested.”

This imagination from darkness is connected very much to the arguments about simplicity that Okakura makes in The Book of Tea. There, one of the most memorable chapters concerned the decoration of tea rooms. To us Westerners, a room with only a single painting would strike us as sparsely adorned. But for Okakura, a single object focuses our attention on a single thing. It creates a much purer and more effective atmosphere – and thus a more pleasant tea-drinking experience. If adorning a room sparsely creates a stronger effect then why would we do anything otherwise? (The argument does not suggest that lush decoration is wrong, but rather than clutter is wrong – harmony is the lesson to be learned from this, and harmony is easier to achieve using simplicity).

But there is something else at play here, lying behind this argument about simplicity, something connected to Tanizaki’s pessimism earlier. What makes us value light, and the Japanese dark? In Tanizaki’s view, it’s a kind of stoicism:

“We Orientals tend to seek our satisfactions in whatever surroundings we happen to find ourselves, to content ourselves with things as they are; and so darkness causes us no discontent, we resign ourselves to it as inevitable. If light is scarce then light is scarce; we will immerse ourselves in the darkness and there discover its own particular beauty. But the progressive Westerner is determined always to better his lot. From candle to oil lamp, oil lamp to gaslight, gaslight to electric light – his quest for a brighter light never ceases, he spares no pains to eradicate even the minutest shadow.”

We may disagree with this characterisation of the West – and people familiar with Japan may well disagree with Tanizaki’s view of his own culture. But once again we encounter an argument for making the most not just of fewer things, but also of present things instead of what we lack. Just as he regrets that Japan’s development has been so influenced by the West instead of Japan developing independently, we can see a corresponding idea in why we might choose to value shadows:

“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.”

If we find beauty and value in what we have, we will have no need of anything more.

Conclusion

Tanizaki’s characterisation of the West as a collective block is at times tedious, but unlike Okakura he was writing for a domestic audience in his own language and we must forgive him that. What he says is interesting and worth reading because although we may have heard the ideas before – simplicity good, unthinking acceptance of foreign technology and influence is not always a great plan – by focusing on shadows he adds further depth to these arguments and makes them still more attractive to us. We may already know that objects can be better appreciated in isolation, but in In Praise of Shadows we learn about how shadows work to help objects make that better impression. In our quest to make a beautiful world, after reading this short essay we have another tool in our toolbox for making that happen.

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