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In Praise of Shadows
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List Price:
$9.95
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Manufacturer: Leete'S Island Books
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Binding: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 111
EAN: 9780918172020
ISBN: 0918172020
Label: Leete'S Island Books
Manufacturer: Leete'S Island Books
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 56
Publication Date: 1977-12-01
Publisher: Leete'S Island Books
Studio: Leete'S Island Books
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Editorial Reviews:
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An essay on aesthetics by the Japanese novelist, this book explores architecture, jade, food, and even toilets, combining an acute sense of the use of space in buildings. The book also includes descriptions of laquerware under candlelight and women in the darkness of the house of pleasure.
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Spotlight customer reviews:
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Customer Rating:
Summary: Good perspective on Tanizaki, ultimately not very informative about Japan
Comment: In Praise of Shadows is a very readable and succinct essay regarding Japanese aesthetics and their gradual Westernization around the turn of the twentieth century. While it provides a good glimpse of what Tanizaki felt about his country, and gives good perspective to better understanding his other works, ultimately its not very informative about Japan. Many of the conclusions about westernization tend to be largley exaggerated. In addition, the picture he paints of Japanese aesthetics is overly romanticisized as well. While it is very readable, and at times interesting, if you read it, use it as a character study of Tanizaki, but if your looking for a good introduction to Japanese aesthetics take this one with several metric tons of salt.
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Summary: The Complaints of a Crotchety Old Man
Comment: I took a class on Japanese culture last semester, and this was one of our texts. While Tanizaki's views provide an interesting perspective, this whole essay is really just an old man talking about how traditional Japanese aesthetics are good and Western-influenced aesthetics are not. He repeatedly insults and dismisses Western ideas of beauty simply because they are Western. He may well be right, at the very least in certain aspects, by saying that the Japanese ideals of beauty are best, but his refusal to give a second thought to Western ideals makes his point moot. It's the basic fallacy of origin.
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Summary: "The quality that we call beauty ... must always grow from the realities of life."
Comment: In this classic 1933 essay, novelist Jun'ichiro Tanizaki explores the idea of shadows as a key note of Japanese aesthetics. Shadows are a natural function of traditional Japanese architecture - large rooms with broad eaves to keep rain and snow away from paper walls naturally create richly dark and quiet interiors, where shadows seem to have a presence all of their own. Tanizaki extends this idea, following the shadows from temple toilets to the darkness of lacquered tableware, into the folds of women's traditional clothing, and onto the Japanese stage. Some of his notions are purely fanciful - that gold was only valued by the ancients for the way it reflected candlelight; that the Japanese have an implicit distaste for their own skin given the way the light reveals its imperfect whiteness - while he is spot-on when it comes to articulating the beauty of No actors, and the way candlelight changes the quality of a restaurant meal. The essay's meandering structure might surprise those more accustomed to a rigorous argument, but as Thomas J. Harper notes in his insightful afterword, it invokes the Japanese artistic tradition of following the line wherever it leads. Along the way, Tanizaki makes a none too subtle critique of Western incursion into Japanese life. He mourns the displacement of candlelight by neon, the patina of a well-used bowl being reinterpreted as 'filth', and the white faces of Kabuki made monstrous by American spotlights. Tanizaki's essential contribution with this enduring piece is to remind us of something which, in the West, is so often forgotten: the quality of the materials and light from which a space is constructed - for light really is a tangible architectural element - will dictate on the subtle level the quality of human experience possible in that space. Modern life is too brilliantly lit, which might be why it so often lacks reverence and solemnity.
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Summary: Wabi Sabi - not to be confused with "wasabi"
Comment: The Japanese have an aesthetic concept called "Wabi Sabi." This term consists of two words. "Wabi" literally means "poverty," but in the aesthetic context it stands for simplicity; "Sabi" is literally "solitude, loneliness," and for aesthetic purposes it means something like natural impermanence. Wabi Sabi encourages, as one observer put it, a profound feeling of inner melancholy, and an appreciation of quietly clear and calm, well-seasoned and refined simplicity.
Andrew Juniper's "Wabi Sabi: The Japanese Art of Impermanence" summarizes the concept by saying that "the term wabi-sabi suggests such qualities as impermanence, humility, asymmetry, and imperfection. These underlying principles are diametrically opposed to those of their Western counterparts, whose values are rooted in the Hellenic worldview that values permanence, grandeur, symmetry, and perfection. ... Wabi-sabi is an intuitive appreciation of a transient beauty in the physical world that reflects the irreversible flow of life in the spiritual world. It is an understated beauty that exists in the modest, rustic, imperfect, or even decayed, an aesthetic sensibility that finds a melancholic beauty in the impermanence of all things." (pages 2 and 51)
In order to appreciate Junichiro Tanizaki's 50-page pamphlet "In Praise of Shadows" it helps to keep the concept of Wabi Sabi in mind. While many people would object to Tanizaki's anti-modernist view of art (and call it "reactionary" or "nationalist"), it is in fact a contemporary take on an ancient aesthetic concept that favors obliqueness (shadows) over brightness, weathered naturalness over functional novelty, the crude over the polished, and - ultimately - irrationality over rationality.
Tanizaki's essay contains good examples of Wabi Sabi, and a few peculiarly funny ones that reek of Zen humor: "one could with some justice claim that of all the elements of Japanese architecture, the toilet is the most aesthetic. Our forebears, making poetry of everything in their lives, transformed what by rights should be the most unsanitary room in the house into a place of unsurpassed elegance, replete with fond associations with the beauties of nature." (page 4) To a Western reader this sounds like unmitigated satire. But it is not. Tanizaki is serious about this stuff.
In sum, I find "In Praise of Shadows" a very entertaining illustration of an important Japanese aesthetic concept, written by one of the most important Japanese authors of the 20th century. I bought the Leete's Island Books edition of the text, which I review here. Later I found that exactly the same translation is contained in Phillip Lopate's collection "The Art of the Personal Essay." It may be better value for money.
Of course, aesthetics are always a matter of taste. Speaking of which, "wasabi" - if you recall the title of this review - is Japanese horseradish.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Had Japan developed its own science in harmony withDDD
Comment: Writing almost 70 years ago, Tanizaki put great value on an unique sense of beauty in Japan and regretted that it was disappearing as poeple were trying to follow the Western way of life. Tanizaki unhesitatingly admitted that the Western culture was in many respects superior to that of Japan, and that it was in a sense inevatble that Japan should imitate the Western lifestyle for the improvement of its living standard,and that in the process Japanese traditional lifestyle should be to some extent abandoned. But, he emphasized with deep emotion how different the things would have been had Japan developed its own science and technology consistent with its unique sense of beauty, and had it not been compelled to abandone some of its own traditions in favor of the Western lifestyle.
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