Junichiro Tanizaki
Junichiro Tanizaki
Jun'ichirō Tanizakiwas one of the major writers of modern Japanese literature, and perhaps the most popular Japanese novelist after Natsume Sōseki. Some of his works present a shocking world of sexuality and destructive erotic obsessions. Others, less sensational, subtly portray the dynamics of family life in the context of the rapid changes in 20th-century Japanese society. Frequently his stories are narrated in the context of a search for cultural identity in which constructions of "the West" and "Japanese tradition" are...
NationalityJapanese
ProfessionAuthor
Date of Birth24 July 1886
CountryJapan
Find beauty not only in the thing itself but in the pattern of the shadows, the light and dark which that thing provides.
I would call back at least for literature this world of shadows we are losing. In the mansion called literature I would have the eaves deep and the walls dark, I would push back into the shadows the things that come forward too clearly, I would strip away the useless decoration. I do not ask that this be done everywhere, but perhaps we may be allowed at least one mansion where we can turn off the electric lights and see what it is like without them.
Each worm to his taste; some prefer to eat nettles.
We delight in the mere sight of the delicate glow of fading rays clinging to the surface of a dusky wall, there to live out what little life remains to them.
For a woman who lived in the dark it was enough if she had a faint, white face -a full body was unnecessary.
Were it not for shadows, there would be no beauty.
There are those who say that when civilization progresses a bit further transportation facilities will move into the skies and under the ground, and that our streets will again be quiet, but I know perfectly well that when that day comes some new device for torturing the old will be invented.
Whenever I sit with a bowl of soup before me, listening to the murmur that penetrates like the distant song of an insect, lost in contemplation of the flavours to come, I feel as if I were being drawn into a trance
We Orientals find beauty not only in the thing itself but in the pattern of the shadows, the light and darkness which that thing provides.