In Praise oJ Shadows

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meditation on the Japanese house bas broadened to uncouer tbe most sensitiue connections betueen interiority, space, culture, etbnicity, body, eroticism, shadou, and human personality.

In

Praise

of Shadows

JUNICHIRO TANIZAKI lunicbiro Tanizaki (155G196, is one of tbe giants of modern Japanese 'Vestfi.ction. Born and raised in Tokyo, be fell early under tbe influence of 'Vilde and tried to ern "decadent" writers sach as Baudelaire, Poe, and reconcile bis young man's taste for tbe macabre and modern uitb an nttraction to lapanese tradition, ubicb deepened as be greu oldet. In 1923, ubile in his mid-tbirties, be moued witb his family to Osaka, thus distancing bimself from tbe capital and his past as a "son of Tokyo." Taniwki's work bas a delightful spiq quality and is filled witb brio, b* mor, and robust spirits-especially compared to bis great, dour contempol
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rary, Yasanari Kautabata. Tbere is frequently also a toucb of tbe peruerse and a fascination witb ctuelty in Tanizaki, thougb somebou (as in tbe work of tbe flmmaker Luis Bufruel) tbe results manage to be liberating and pleasurable. His najor works include Naomi, Some Prefer Nettles, Seven Tales,

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The Key, Diary of a Mad Old Man, and uhat is arguably tbe greatest passionate Japanese noael of tbe tuentietb century, The Makioka Sisters. A Tanizaki also adapted the great eleuentb-century classic The antiquarian, Tale of Genji into modern lapanese-a labor of loae and ancestral respect. Tanizaki's magnificent personal essay "In Praise of Shadous" demonstrates all bis cbaracteristic traits: urbanity, wryness, learning pentersity, humanity, respect for tradition, innoaatiue fresbness, and a stimulating uide-ranging mind. Tbe essay's structure keeps opening out like a series of roons; indeed, reading it is like experiencing a piece of wonderfully complcx doruestic arcbitecture. Perbaps its metbod of linkcd images alsrt deriucs fntrn renga, tbe long Japanesc poern-t'bains composc(l ol linkctl haiktr or trrnka. Jusl utht'n you think lht trr,ry ir ttrning kt u tlttntltlill, it l.xxtlcr ttn kt anttlhcr nclupLrt, uttttlltt'r r.'t(,tttttt&' lly tltt tnl, tt'l,tl l,r'1itn at d il.tr(,!t'

the fancier of traditional architecture must take when he sets out to build a house in pure Japanese style, striving somehow to make electric wires, gas pipes, and water lines harmonize with the austerity of Japanese rooms-even someone who has never built a house for himself must sense this when he visits a teahouse, a restaurant, or an inn. For the solitary eccentric it is another matter, he can ignore the blessings of scientific civilization and retreat to some forsaken corner of the countryside; but a man who has a family and lives in the city cannot turn his back on the necessities of modern lifeheating, electric lights, sanitary facilities-merely for the sake of doing things the Japanese way. The purist may rack his brain over the placement of a single telephone, hiding it behind the staircase or in a corner of the hallway, wherever he thinks it will least offend the eye. He may bury the wires rather than hang them in the garden, hide the switches in a closet or cupboard, run the cords behind a folding screen. Yet for all his ingenuity, his efforts often impress us as nervous, fussy, excessively contrived. For so accustomed are we to electric lights that the sight of a naked bulb beneath an ordinary milk glass shade seems simpler and more natural than any gratuitous attempt to hide it. Seen at dusk as one gazes out upon the countryside from the window of a train, the lonely light of a bulb under an old-fashioned shade, shining dimly from behind the white paper shoji of a thatch-roofed farmhouse, can seem positively elegant. lJrrt thc snarl and the bulk of an electric fan remain a bit out of place in ir .fapancsc room. Thc ordinary householder, if he dislikes electric fans, t'irn sinrply tlo without thcm. Btrt i[ rhe family business involves the enterl:rirrrrrt'rrl ol crrstorncrs in sumnrc.r'tirrrc, thc gcntlcman of the house cannot rrlloltl to irrtlrrlgt' lris owrr lrtst(.s itt tlr.'t.x1rt.nst.oI othcrs. A lricnd of mine, llrt' ;rtoptit'lot ol it (,lritrt'sc t('stiurrnt t'rrllctl tlrt'Krririrkrrcrr, is ir tholorrgh-

HAT INCREDTBLE pArNs

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uricbiro Tanizaki

In Praise oJ Sbadows

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going purist in matters architectural. He deplores electric fans and long refused to have them in his restaurant, but the complaints from customers with which he was faced every summer ultimately forced him to give in. I myself have had similar experiences. A few years ago I spent a gre t deal more money than I could afford to build a house. I fussed over every last fitting and fixture, and in every case encountered difficulty. There was the shoji: for aesthetic reasons I did not want to use glass, and yet paper alone would have posed problems of illumination and security. Much against my will, I decided to cover the inside with paper and the outside with glass. This required a double frame, thus raising the cost. Yet having gone to all this trouble, the effect was far from pleasing. The outside remained no more than a glass door; while within, the mellow softness of the paper was destroyed by the glass that lay behind it. At that point I was sorry I had not just setded for glass to begin with. Yet laugh though we may when the house is someone else's, we ourselves accept defeat only after having try such schemes. Then there^ was ^t problem of lighting. In recent years several fixtures the designed for Japanese houses have come on the market, fixtures patterned after old floor lamps, ceiling lights, candle stands, and the like. But I simply do not care for them, and instead searched in curio shops for old lamps, which I fitted urith electric light bulbs. rVhat most taxed my ingenuity was the heating system. No stove worthy of the name will ever look right in a Japanese room. Gas stoves burn with a terrific roar, and unless provided with a chimney, quickly bring headaches. Electric stoves, though at least free from these defects, are every bit as ugly as the rest. One solution would be to outfit the cupboards with heaters of the sort used in streetcars. Yet without the red glow of the coals, the whole mood of winter is lost and with it the pleasure of family gatherings round the fire. The best plan I could devise was to build a large sunken hearth, as in an old farmhouse. In this I installed an electric brazier, which worked well both for boiling tea water and for heating the room. Expensive it was, but at least so far as looks were concemed I counted it one of my successes. Having done passably well with the heating system, I was then faced with the problem of bath and toilet. My Kairakuen friend could not bear to tile the tub and bathing area, and so built his guest bath entirely of wood. Tile, of course, is infinitely more practical and economical. But when ceiling, pillars, and panelling are of fine Japanese stock, the beauty of the room is utterly destroyed when the rest is done in sparkling tile. The effect may not seem so very displeasing while evcrything is still new, but as the years pass, and thc bcarrty o[ the grain bcgins to cmcrgc on thc planks ancl prillars, thrrt glittt'r'ing ('xl)llnsc o1'wlrilt'tilc t'rltnt:s l() sccrlr rrs itrrrrngrrrorrs rls th('l)r'()vcllrinl lrrrtrrlxlo glrrltctl to woorl, Srill, ilr tlrc lrrrth

utility can to some extent be sacrificed to good taste. In the toilet somewhat more vexatious problems arise.
Every time I am shown to an old, dimly lit, and, I would add, impeccably clean toilet in a Nara or Kyoto temple, I am impressed with the singular virtues of Japanese architecture. The pador may have its charms, but the Japanese toilet truly is a place of spiritual repose. It always stands apart from the main building, at the end of a corridor, in a grove fragrant with leaves and moss. No words can describe that sensation as one sits in the dim light, basking in the faint glow reflected from the shoji,lost in meditation or gaztng out at the garden. The novelist Natsume Soseki counted his morning trips to the toilet a gre t pleasure, "a physiological delight" he called it. And surely there could be no better place to savor this pleasure than a Japanese toilet where, surrounded by tranquil walls and finely grained wood, one looks out upon blue skies and green leaves. As I have said there are certain prerequisites: a degree of dimness, absolute cleanliness, and quiet so complete one can hear the hum of a mosquito. I love to listen from such a toilet to the sound of softly falling rain, especially if it is a toilet of the Kanto region, with its long, narrow windows at floor level; there one can listen with such a sense of intimacy to the raindrops falling from the eaves and the trees, seeping into the earth as they wash over the base of a stone lantem and freshen the moss about the stepping stones. And the toilet is the perfect place to listen to the chirping of insects or the song of the birds, to view the moon, or to enjoy any of those poignant moments that mark the change of the seasons. Here, I suspect, is where haiku poets over the ages have come by a gte^t many of their ideas. Indeed 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. Compared to \(/esterners, who regard the toilet as utterly unclean and avoid even the mention of it in polite conversation, we are far more sensible and certainly in better taste. The Japanese toilet is, I must admit, a bit inconvenient to get to in the middle of the night, set apart from the main building as it is; and in winter there is always a danger that one

might catch cold. But as the poet Saito Ryok[ has said, "elegance is frigid." Better that the place be as chilly as the out-of-doors; the steamy hcat of a \Tcstern-style toilet in a hotel is most unpleasant. Anyonc with a taste for trarlitional architecture must agree that the .frrprrncsc toilct is pcrlt'ction. Yt't whatcver its virtues in a place like a tcnrlrlc, wlr.'t'c tltc rlwcllinp is lrtt'gc, the irrhallitttnts fcw, ancl cveryone

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Iunicbiro Tanizaki

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ln Praise oJ Sbadows in a sunken hearth,

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easy task to keep helps with the cleaning, in an ordinary household it is no i; ;i.-. No matter holw fastidious one may be or how diligendy one may matting, ..[t dt" will show, particularly on a floor of wood or tatami to instdl to t. ,oor. hygienic and efficient And so here too it trrri* out ,.nirry f"ciliii.s-tile and a flush ioilet-though at the price of ;;;

destroying all affinitY with

burst of light from those relish Soseki's "PhYsiologi every nook and corner is pure white- 1no matter ,o for..n [y of the issue ol o,rr own bodies. A beautif.l woman' her lo* iou.ty Iter skin, would be considered indecent were she to show and f^.. U,rtto.ks or feet in the Presence of others; and how very crude i^i.r.*,. expose the toilet to such excessive illumination. The cleanliness of.wlat cannot of what can be seen only calls up the more clearly thoughts clean and the unclean ;; ,.;;. In such places the distlinction between the is best left obscuie, shrouded in a dusky haze' - Th;"gh I did install modern sanitary facilities when I built my own in camphor wood' house, I"at least a.,oiJed tiles, and had the floor done strated a Japanes ioit €xtent I tried to create toilets ^,Uy the toilet fixtures themselves' n"ny metal' pure *hi. po...lain and

"..-i"a. \(/.r. I able tL have things my own way, I would much prefer fixturesglistening both men's and womeni--"d. of wood. Vood finished in fl^& l".qrr.r is the very best; but even the grain grows more subtle with the years'

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ns antl unfin powcr a glory" ,ooth.. The ultimate, of cot'rse, to cim allows "id .rrirrd nft.a with boughs of cedar; this is a such extravrr not the slightest ,o,rtid. I coul ade to suit mv ;;;. I hlped I might at least anism' But thc l*rr,"r,., *d rh.r, id"pt th.r. e but to abarr ;;- h'bor would haue cost so m of motlcttt don the idea. It was not that I objected to the conveniences

seems to me ideal; yet no one ventures to produce even so simple a device as this (there are, of course, those feeble electric hibachi, but they provide no more heat than an ordinary charcoal hibachi); all that can be had ready-made are those ugly \Western stoves. There are those who hold that to quibble over matters of taste in the basic necessities of life is an extravagance, that as long as a house keeps out the cold and as long as food keeps off starvation, it matters little what they look like. And indeed for even the sternest ascetic the fact remains that a snowy day is cold, and there is no denying the impulse to accept the services of a heater if it happens to be there in front of one, no matter how cruelly its inelegance may shatter the spell of the day. But it is on occasions like this that I always think how different everything would be if we in the Orient had developed our own science. Suppose for instance that we had developed our own physics and chemistry: would not the techniques and industries based on them have taken a different form, would not our myriads of everyday gadgets, our medicines, the products of our industrial art-would they not have suited our national temper better than they do? In fact our conception of physics itself, and even the principles of chemistry, would probably differ from that of Westerners; and the facts we are now taught concerning the nature and function of light, electricity, and atoms might well have presented themselves in different form. Of course I am only indulging in idle speculation; of scientific matters I know nothing. But had we devised independently at least the more practical sorts of inventions, this could not but have had profound influence upon the conduct of our everyday lives, and even upon government, religion, art, and business. The Orient quite conceivably could have opened up a world of technology entirely its own.

whether electric lights or heating or toilets' but I did won'lt't more considerirti.rr "i*rilirutiorr, at the time'why they corrld noibe designed with a bit for our own habits and tastes'

stantling lrrrr The recent vogue for electric lamps in the style of the old and wartlrtlr .'l *i, "o-.r, t"think, from a new awareness of the softness as cvitlctrt c ('l p"p.t, q".ffti., *hi.h for a time we had forgotten; it stands gl:rss l. llrr' i"r r.."grition that this rnatcrill is far b.ttcr stritctl rhrrrl trtstt'lrrl lrrrvr' ()r drc itt rrll J"prn.r.iouse. Bttt tro lttilcl lixtrrrt's sl()vcs thrll lrqrtitlg syslcttt likc rlly ()wll, rlll elet'lrit'lrrrtzrcr V..i..r.. ()lr tlrc rnrtrkcl . A

To take a trivial example ne^r hand: I wrote a magazine article re^t ccntly comparing the writing brush with the fountain pen, and in the course of it I remarked that if the device had been invented by the ancient (lhinese or Japanese it would surely have had a tufted end like our writing brush. The ink would not have been this bluish color but rather black, somcthing like India ink, and it would have been made to seep down from thc handle into the brush. And since we would have then found it inconvcrricnt to write on \flestern paper, something near Japanese paper