In Praise of Shadows

2025 Side Readings ~ 01

While visiting various bookstores in Japan with my girlfriend during our January vacation, I fell into a familiar pattern. As it usually happens whenever I'm there, I got caught up in the Japanese passion for detail and their obsessive interest in specific topics. I ended up buying everything in sight, caught up in the fantasy that I could somehow take a slice of these characteristics—these ideas and ways of seeing the world—back home with me in book form. One of these purchases was “In Praise of Shadows,” picked with some help from Mr. GPT and intended as a brief introduction to Japanese ways of thinking.

What I found was unexpected. Curious. I don't have much else to say about it. The text is a remarkably varied and restless essay where Tanizaki bounces between different ideas with considerable agility and grace. Some points are more engaging than others—the section about the West's obsession with absolute cleanliness or the part examining the role of materials in traditional cooking implements, for instance—but the text's overall brevity makes everything digestible.

I have no idea what relevance this reading will have for me later on. If you ask me now, probably not much.
Still, the book made for good company during a couple of days traveling through Fujikawaguchiko, Osaka, and Kyoto, and that's enough for me.