An essay from 1933 about what electric light did to Japanese aesthetics. Tanizaki argues that Japanese beauty was built for dimness — lacquerware designed to catch a single flame, gold leaf that only works in a dark room, the recess of an alcove, the tarnish on silver that Westerners polish off and Japanese prize. He spends several pages on the traditional toilet, seriously, as an argument about atmosphere. The whole thing is about what gets lost when a culture adopts another culture’s technology wholesale, and he’s wry about his own crankiness. It’s about forty pages and designers have been quoting it for ninety years.
In Praise of Shadows