
In Praise of Shadows
Were it not for shadows there would be no beauty.
Nothing evokes the calm and nuance of the traditional Japanese aesthetic more profoundly than this book. Tanizaki’s eye ranges over architecture, jade, food, even toilets, examining the design and feel of the intimate places we inhabit. His acute sense of the use of space in buildings, his poetic descriptions of lacquerware under candlelight and his...
Were it not for shadows there would be no beauty.
Nothing evokes the calm and nuance of the traditional Japanese aesthetic more profoundly than this book. Tanizaki’s eye ranges over architecture, jade, food, even toilets, examining the design and feel of the intimate places we inhabit. His acute sense of the use of space in buildings, his poetic descriptions of lacquerware under candlelight and his...