In Praise of Shadows
Jun'ichiro Tanizaki · 1933
Tanizaki's 1933 meditation on aesthetics, darkness, and the beauty of imperfection. The essay that defined wabi-sabi for Western readers.
The case against
An essay that drifts wherever the old man's grumbling takes it: toilets, lacquerware, theater, recipes, the supposed qualities of Japanese skin. Some of those asides on race have aged very badly. Tanizaki mourns a shadowed Japan that was already a memory in 1933, and nostalgia this seductive deserves more suspicion than it usually gets.
Essays · the Pro canon
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
if this one calls to you, so will these →
