In Praise of Shadows

Tanizaki's claim is that a lot of old Japanese things were made for dimness, and look wrong the moment you light them properly. His favorite example is lacquerware. A black lacquer bowl with a little gold worked into it looks gaudy and cheap under a ceiling light, like a souvenir. Put it in a dark room with one candle and it comes alive: the black goes deep and bottomless, and the gold catches the single moving flame and seems to flicker on its own. It was designed for exactly that, and we have lit it wrong for a century.

Darkness is an indispensable element of the beauty of lacquerware.Tanizaki, In Praise of Shadows

From there he generalizes, and it is the line the whole essay turns on. The beauty was never really in the object. It was in the play of light and dark across it, the gradient from the lit edge into the black, the thing seen against its own shadow. Take the shadow away with an even, shadowless light and you have not revealed the beauty. You have deleted it.

He pushes this further than you expect, and this is where readers either fall for the essay or put it down. He spends real, loving pages on the traditional Japanese toilet, a small wooden room set apart from the house, in shadow, near a window onto a garden. He means it.

Of all the elements of Japanese architecture, the toilet is the most aesthetic.Tanizaki, In Praise of Shadows

It sounds like a joke, and he plays it a little for laughs, but the point under it is the serious one. Beauty for Tanizaki is most at home in the humblest, dimmest, most overlooked place, not the showpiece. The same instinct runs through his taste for old things over new ones. Where a Western host might be embarrassed by a tarnished spoon or a darkened beam, Tanizaki finds the best part of the object right there, in the film that handling and age and a little grime have left on it.

We do love things that bear the marks of grime, soot, and weather, and we love the colors and the sheen that call to mind the past that made them.Tanizaki, In Praise of Shadows

A new thing is loud and a little stupid. A thing that has been used and held and left to age has a quiet to it, what he calls a pensive luster, and the West keeps polishing that quiet off in the name of looking clean. The essay turns sad near the end, because Tanizaki knows which way history is going. The bright light has already won.

So benumbed are we nowadays by electric lights that we have become utterly insensitive to the evils of excessive illumination.Tanizaki, In Praise of Shadows

Okakura set himself a harder task than Tanizaki. He wanted to hand a Western reader the entire aesthetic at once, and he bet the whole book on a single object: a bowl of tea. Not the drink, the ceremony. The slow, deliberate, half-religious Japanese practice of preparing and sharing tea in a bare little room, which by the 1500s had become the place where this whole sense of beauty was taught and kept.

Teaism is a cult founded on the adoration of the beautiful among the sordid facts of everyday existence.Okakura, The Book of Tea, ch. I

That is the gentle, anti-grand heart of it. Not beauty in the cathedral or the crown, but beauty found in an ordinary, even shabby, daily act, done with full attention. And then he gives the sentence that this whole post hangs on, the cleanest statement of the idea anyone has written. He is describing the cult of tea, and what it worships.

It is essentially a worship of the Imperfect, as it is a tender attempt to accomplish something possible in this impossible thing we know as life.Okakura, The Book of Tea, ch. I

A worship of the imperfect. Read that next to anything a Western museum says about beauty and you feel how far it is from us. The objects bear it out. A good tea bowl is handmade, often a little lopsided, plain in color, sometimes left rough where a factory would have smoothed it. The dark Raku bowls made for the ceremony are deliberately humble: thick, irregular, shaped by hand and not on a wheel. The irregularities are not flaws the potter failed to remove. They are the reason to own it.

The room around the bowl follows the same rule. The tea-room is tiny, made of plain wood and paper and mud, built to look poor on purpose, and almost completely empty. Okakura gives it a set of names, and the one that matters here is the Abode of Vacancy. The emptiness is not a lack. He borrows an old Taoist idea to explain why.

Vacuum is all potent because all containing. In vacuum alone motion becomes possible.Okakura, The Book of Tea, ch. III

A cup is useful because of the hollow you can fill. A room is useful because of the space inside the walls, not the walls. Empty it out, and you make room for something to happen. So the tea-room keeps almost nothing in it, and what little it holds, a single flower, one hanging scroll, gets changed for each gathering, so it lands fresh instead of fading into the furniture. And the emptiness has a second job: it leaves space for you. The aesthetic deliberately under-fills, under-finishes, under-states, and hands the rest to the person looking.

True beauty could be discovered only by one who mentally completed the incomplete.Okakura, The Book of Tea, ch. IV

There is a story Okakura tells about Sen no Rikyu, the tea master who set most of these rules in the 1500s, that puts the whole sensibility in one image. Rikyu watched his son sweep and water the garden path until it was spotless, not a leaf left on the ground. Then he told the boy it still was not right, stepped into the garden himself, and shook a tree so a few leaves fell and scattered across the clean path. Scraps of the brocade of autumn. Spotless was dead. A little disorder, a few fallen leaves, made it alive and made it real.

The reason this aesthetic feels foreign is partly that English never built the words for it. Japanese did. Here are the five the whole thing turns on. None of them is exotic once you have it; each names a feeling you have almost certainly had and had no handle for. Anchored, where the books anchor them.

Laid out flat, the two aesthetics line up as near-opposites, point for point. Read down either column and you get a coherent taste, just two of them, pointed different ways.

Neither column is right. A cathedral and a tea hut are both trying to make you feel something, and both succeed. But most of us were handed only the left column and told it was just "good taste," with no idea a whole other column existed. Having the right one in view is the entire gift of these two books. It does not replace your taste. It doubles it.

This is a seductive idea, and seductive ideas need a cold look. Three places to keep your guard up.

Second, it romanticizes a hard past. The world of shadows was also genuinely cold, and dim for bad reasons as often as good ones, and that beautifully shadowed house kept women out of sight in ways worth not getting misty about. Tanizaki, to his credit, half-knows this. His essay is shot through with self-mockery, and he admits more than once that he would not actually give up his heater or his modern comforts to live in the gloom he is praising. Take it as a mood he is testing, not a command to go off the grid.

Third, the marketing problem. "Wabi-sabi" has become a lifestyle word, stamped on anything beige, lumpy, and overpriced, a candle and a linen napkin sold back to you as ancient wisdom. The real thing is a demanding, Zen-rooted discipline about mortality and attention, not a color palette. If a version of this only ever asks you to buy something, it has been hollowed out.

There is an old Japanese way of fixing a broken bowl. You do not glue the pieces back and hide the seams. You fill the cracks with gold, so the break becomes a vein of light running through the thing, and the mended bowl is worth more than it was before it broke. It is called kintsugi, and it is wabi-sabi you can hold in your hand: the flaw made into the most valuable part.

That bowl is also where the other post on this shelf begins. The Spirituality of Imperfection takes the same instinct and turns it on a person. Across a dozen traditions it finds one idea repeating: that to be human is to be imperfect, and the cracks are not a problem to fix before the real life can start. The cracks are where it starts. Tanizaki and Okakura say it about a bowl and a room. Kurtz says it about a soul. It is one move, made twice: stop hiding the flaw, stop scrubbing for a perfection that was never the point, and look at the cracked, worn, passing thing again.

Which is why this belongs in a books series at all, and not just a design blog. It started as a quarrel about lamps and lacquer, and it turns out to be a quiet argument about how to be at peace with a world, and a self, that will not hold still and will not come out perfect. The cherry blossom is worth more because it falls. So, maybe, is everything else.

A distillation of two short books, told in my own words; the ideas are theirs. Okakura's The Book of Tea is public domain and is quoted directly from the Project Gutenberg text, by chapter. Tanizaki's In Praise of Shadows survives in English only in copyrighted translations, so its quotes are kept short and used for comment and study, in the standard Harper and Seidensticker translation. One famous line going around, "Were it not for shadows, there would be no beauty," could not be verified as Tanizaki's actual words and is left out. Note too that neither author writes "wabi-sabi"; it is the modern label for what they describe. No em dashes; a couple of the quoted originals use one, and it is shown as a comma with no other change.