Tanizaki's In Praise of Shadows

In Praise of Shadows is billed as an essay on aesthetics, but is really a conservative essay mourning the changes wrought by Westernisation/modernisation in Japan. It’s fascinating as a historical document, in that it is the pessimistic reaction of its author to technological and social change. I’ve read the excellent vintage books design edition, which comes with many pieces of art, and a foreword and afterword, all of which added to the reading experience.

There are three things that I particularly enjoyed. First is the way in which Tanizaki explicitly links the traditional Japanese aesthetic not to national character but to material circumstances. The Japanese climate and (non) availability of certain building materials leads to a certain style of building which results in shadows. Lacquerware, gilding, and Nō theatre alike were all designed with these shadows in mind. Electric light is for Tanizaki the great aesthetic enemy which has undermined the conditions in which these things are, or can be, beautiful. In this regard he has certainly opened my eyes to how different the world would have looked in the past.

Second is Tanizaki’s willingness to ground some of his thought in everyday life. He spends a lot of time, for instance, talking about toilets. I wish more writers and philosophers spent their time on such topics. Toilets, after all, form a part of our daily life. As a choice of topic it felt almost Montaignian. Third, as the afterword notes, the essay has an enjoyable digressing style, bouncing from topic go topic, following a line of thought rather than packaging and presenting a conclusion. For all three of these qualities alongside its historical interest the essay is an enjoyable read.

But where the essay suffers is that like all traditionalists, Tanizaki fails to fully confront why Westernisation/modernisation has proceeded apace. After spending several pages extolling the virtues of the traditional Japanese toilet, he concedes that cleaning a bathroom with a flush toilet is easier for a family. Like all traditionalists, he isn’t particularly interested in the question of who pays the costs of tradition, and whether those costs are paid proportionate to who benefits. Consider for instance the blackening of women’s teeth or their forced seclusion. At no point does he seem to see a downside to these things.

In by far the worst part of the essay, he admits understanding for the anti-black racism of Westerners because he claims that many aesthetic choices reflect skin colour. Here’s a direct quote: “We can appreciate, then, the psychology that in the past caused the white races to reject the coloured races. A sensitive white person could not but be upset by the shadow that even one or two coloured persons cast over a social gathering”. It is fine to say that the author’s sensibility was one that was more acceptable in its time and context. But I confess that I find anyone giving a book with a quote like that—as brief and unimportant to the whole essay as it is—a five-star rating to be sort of suspect.

He admits that every old generation thinks that the new is terrible, but claims that the new Japan really is hostile to the old. At my most generous, I am reminded of Amin Maalouf’s argument in “On Identity”, wherein Maalouf rightly says that modernisation and Westernisation must be decoupled if the former is to be accepted. Tanizaki’s reaction is the consequence of this failing to occur. Who can doubt that he is right that, for the elderly, a Westernised Japan felt genuinely alien? That traffic lights really were confusing to him, that electric light really did make things that he spent most of his life appreciating in candlelight suddenly appear garish?

Yet, at my least generous I am reminded of C.P. Snow’s two cultures formulation, of Snow’s argument that those of a literary sensibility do not understand science, that the literary sensibility is intrinsically conservative. Snow’s argument was about British authors and demonstrably wrong even in its own day, but the formulation survives because it got at something true. Only a novelist ignorant of science (as Tanizaki admits to being) could claim that physics would be very different if discovered in Japan rather than elsewhere. And I think the ultimate punchline in the afterword is this: when Tanizaki met an architect who proudly told him he had read his work and knew the sort of house he wanted, Tanizaki told him “I could never live in a house like that”. There is, it seems, something to be said for electric light and flushing toilets after all.