In Praise of Shadows

Tanizaki’s “In Praise of Shadows” is not necessarily written as an argumentative essay. Instead, it provides a weaving narrative structure, jumping across different examples, time periods, and cultural forms to demonstrate his perspective on aesthetics. In particular, it shows that understandings of beauty are culturally situated and can even possess deep social and political meaning. For this reason, it is important for him to craft the essay so that it is effective at both an academic level that provides well-supported arguments and relevant historical examples and at a creative level that engages the reader through imagistic writing anchored in emotion and spirituality.

In terms of his intended audience, Tanizaki wrote this essay primarily for the Japanese public; it was published in English in the January 1955 issue of The Atlantic. In particular, he seeks to draw attention to aspects of traditional Japanese culture that may be taken for granted, especially when Japan is rapidly changing due to Western modernization. Rather than merely making his claim as a matter of aesthetic preference, however, he wants his readers to be aware of the long history of Japanese cultural expressions and ways of living that are tied to these seemingly small matters of aesthetics. To lose these aspects of society is to lose much of the national character of Japan, and the country’s unique cultural qualities are at risk of vanishing if it continues to conform to Western standards of aesthetics.

Indeed, Tanizaki’s ability to use literary devices to impart the seriousness of the matter to his audience is key to his argumentation. His use of contrast not only shows that there are clear differences between Japanese and Western aesthetics, but it also moves through various layers of examples and analysis to demonstrate that there is a serious political battle at stake in these matters. He ultimately argues that the West, in contrast to Japan, has an affinity for light because it wants to reject its surroundings and build new forms of beauty by eradicating past forms. The political issue that arises here, however, is the expansion of Western modernization outside the West; thus, Western preferences are leading to this same eradication of past forms of living in Japan.

Tanizaki’s work, therefore, stands in conversation with that of many non-Western authors who critique Western interventions in other countries around the globe. This history links to early forms of colonial expansion in the late 15th century. In this way, the stakes of Tanizaki’s claims can be pushed even further by considering their resonance with other discourse that is critical of Western modernization.

For instance, Edward Said’s Orientalism (1978) offers a fuller critique of the West as deliberately promoting negative depictions of non-Western cultures as savage and underdeveloped to serve its own political aims of cultural superiority and global domination. The term Orientalism specifically refers to the creation of a discourse on “the Orient” that reduces diverse nations and cultures into a purely Western imaginary that is not reflective of the social realities existing in that part of the world. For example, Arab people may be depicted as violent and “uncivilized” to justify the West’s intervention into their countries as efforts to “civilize”—meaning Westernize—them.

This perspective provides deeper context for Tanizaki’s note that the West describes the area once known as “the Orient” as “mysterious.” Rather than attempting to understand why Japanese people have a productive relationship with darkness, the West chooses to label them in a way that exoticizes them and frames them as potentially dangerous or lacking a clear, “rational” reason for their preferences. Their preferences are different from those held by the West, which frames itself as normative so that the East may be viewed as an aberration. The conformity to Western aesthetics that Tanizaki attempts to steer his readers away from, then, is not only a matter of differing standards of beauty or lifestyle preferences but is also politically significant.

This context raises the stakes of Tanizaki’s argument, both in terms of his critiques of the West and with regard to what he feels is vital to save. For readers to fully understand the significance of Japanese aesthetics, they must deeply engage with the imagery that Tanizaki employs to impart this significance. In other words, these images are at the heart of his arguments on the necessity of preserving Japanese cultural traditions. In long passages in which he describes minute details of the ways in which light is dispersed through shoji paper windows, Tanizaki attempts to convey a sense of tranquility and a unique relationship to time that can be accessed only through this particular architectural form. If his readers linger with and visualize these images, they can place themselves in the space he attempts to evoke; through this process, Tanizaki aims to translate a state of consciousness and a sense of emotionality that he claims cannot be replicated elsewhere.

Tanizaki follows his efforts to evoke sensual experiences that are rooted in quiet, the interplay of light and shadows, and an altered sense of time with a plea to his audience to save these aesthetic experiences from the oncoming Western modernization. The West’s philosophy will never be able to achieve the spiritual qualities of Japanese aesthetics because it is so opposed to their foundational element: darkness. This will leave Japan with huge social and cultural losses, which Tanizaki begins to document in this essay but believes are likely to extend much further as time goes on.

Ultimately, Tanizaki acknowledges that the spread of Western modernization is almost unstoppable, and he does not argue for a complete return of Japan’s social system to traditional forms, though this may be his ideal vision for the country. Instead, he recognizes how greatly affected industries such as architecture, media, and manufacturing already are by modernization, and he acknowledges that this will be hard to change. He argues for the beauty of darkness to be preserved in literature instead. He sees this as a more suitable and realistic goal, and he believes there is a power in literature to preserve Japanese aesthetics and ensure that their social and cultural significance endures.