In Praise of Shadows
After the second or third online reference to it I'd come across in a few days, I sought out Junichiro Tanizaki's In Praise of Shadows, and managed to get my hands on a copy through the magic of interlibrary loan. I'll have to track down one of his novels at some point.
It's an essay on architecture, housewares, traditional Japanese No and Kabuki, bathrooms, ideas of beauty, dentistry, food... Tanizaki makes some perceptive connections between aesthetics and the conditions of daily life.
And there are some great descriptive passages, like:
On the far side of the screen, at the edge of the little circle of light, the darkness seemed to fall from the ceiling, lofty, intense, monolithic, the fragile light of the candle unable to pierce its thickness, turned back as if from a black wall. I wonder if my readers know the color of that "darkness seen by candlelight." It was different in quality from darkness on the road at night. It was a repletion, a pregnancy of tiny particles like fine ashes, each particle luminous as a rainbow. I blinked in spite of myself, as though to keep it out of my eyes.
(Translated by Thomas J. Harper and Edward G. Seidensticker.)
It's an essay on architecture, housewares, traditional Japanese No and Kabuki, bathrooms, ideas of beauty, dentistry, food... Tanizaki makes some perceptive connections between aesthetics and the conditions of daily life.
And there are some great descriptive passages, like:
On the far side of the screen, at the edge of the little circle of light, the darkness seemed to fall from the ceiling, lofty, intense, monolithic, the fragile light of the candle unable to pierce its thickness, turned back as if from a black wall. I wonder if my readers know the color of that "darkness seen by candlelight." It was different in quality from darkness on the road at night. It was a repletion, a pregnancy of tiny particles like fine ashes, each particle luminous as a rainbow. I blinked in spite of myself, as though to keep it out of my eyes.
(Translated by Thomas J. Harper and Edward G. Seidensticker.)