In Praise of Shadows

In Praise of Shadows is an essay on aesthetics by a Japanese writer called Junichiro Tanizaki, it was originally published in 1933, with the English translation coming out in 1977. It’s a very slim and short book. The words in the book, although translated from their original Japanese are so beautiful and almost feel mystic when reading, well that’s my opinion and the book has a very personal special place in my heart, last year (2016) I spent some days and nights with my elderly Mother in her care home room, she was unconscious during this time, as I awaited her passing I held her hand and said so many things. During the quietness of the evenings into early mornings the silence scared me, I read this book from cover to cover in a low voice to her 4 or 5 times, savouring the words and not missing the irony how many years ago it was my mum who read to me when I once was an eager bright eyed kid demanding a bedtime story. I just needed a voice in the room, I needed my mind to concentrate on something other than the laboured breaths of a lady who gave me life and a wonderful childhood, this book provided that respite during these sad times, if my mum heard me read or not, I will never know but in a way I can’t describe, I felt a comfort reading to her these evenings. It also felt fitting as it was under just a reading lamp as the lights were dimmed, the shadows crowded around her bed and my chair pulled up at an awkward angle side onto to her bed so I could hold her hand the balance the book of my knee as I read from it, a strange irrational need I felt to be holding her hand when she passed from this world. There is still something about shadows when we fear, the imagination is powerfully drawn to these things that the eyes cannot see. I felt this these evenings in the dusky regions of that room where the light could not penetrate. Have you ever hear of a painting called The Night Watch by Rembrandt? It looked a very dark painting but one day it was restored and cleaned, the “night” was found in reality was actually dirt and the painting was actually set in broad day light. With the grease and dirt gone the magic of the canvas was lost and tourists passed it by in the galleries and the post cards for sale of the painting remained on their racks, this is the appeal of the dark shadows. I have deviated from this post which I intended as a book review but when into a big of a personal gush, I have covered the circumstances in which I read this book as to describe why I have a certain personality affinity with this little essay book. I can only recommend you to read this little book, it’s an eloquently strange book on the Japanese sense of beauty but it also feels like an act of meditation to read, a poetry of words which you almost taste as they drip from your tongue, it’s also an elegy to a culture perceived to be receiving it's last rites, making it part clarion call, part last post…a swansong as the cancer of the modern world overwrites the beauty of the past. “We find beauty not in the thing itself but in the patterns of shadows, the light and the darkness, that one thing against another creates.”