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VINTAGE CLASSICS
JUN’ICHIRŌ TANIZAKI
Jun’ichirō Tanizaki was one of Japan’s greatest twentieth century novelists. Born in 1886 in Tokyo, his first published work – a one-act play –appeared in 1910 in a literary magazine he helped to found. Tanizaki lived in the cosmopolitan Tokyo area until the earthquake of 1923, when he moved to the Kyoto-Osaka region and became absorbed in Japan’s past.
All his most important works were written after 1923, among them Some Prefer Nettles (1929), The Secret History of the Lord of Musashi (1935), several modern versions of The Tale of Genji (1941, 1954 and 1965), The Makioka Sisters, The Key (1956) and Diary of a Mad Old Man (1961). He was awarded an Imperial Award for Cultural Merit in 1949 and in 1965 he was elected an honorary member of the American Academy and the National Institute of Arts and Letters, the first Japanese writer to receive this honour. Tanizaki died later that same year.
ALSO BY JUN’ICHIRŌ TANIZAKI
Naomi Quicksand
Some Prefer Nettles
Arrowroot
Ashikari (The Reed Cutter)
A Portrait of Shunkin
The Secret History of the Lord of Musashi
The Tale of Genji
The Makioka Sisters
Captain Shigemoto’s Mother
The Key
Diary of a Mad Old Man
JUN’ICHIRŌ TANIZAKI IN PRAISE OF SHADOWS
TRANSLATED FROM THE JAPANESE BY Thomas J. Harper and Edward G. Seidensticker
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English translation, foreword and afterword copyright © 1977 Leete’s Island Books, Inc
The moral right of the author has been asserted
First published in Great Britain by Jonathan Cape in 1991 This paperback first published in Vintage Classics in 2025
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FOREWORD
One of the basic human requirements is the need to dwell, and one of the central human acts is the act of inhabiting, of connecting ourselves, however temporarily, with a place on the planet which belongs to us and to which we belong. This is not, especially in the tumultuous present, an easy act (as is attested by the uninhabited and uninhabitable no-places in citieseverywhere), and it requires help: we need allies in inhabitation. Fortunately, we have at hand many allies, if only we call on them; other upright objects, from towers to chimneys to columns, stand in for us in sympathetic imitation of our ownupright stance. Flowers and gardens serve as testimonials to our own care, and breezes loosely captured can connect us with the very edge of the infinite. But in the West our most powerful ally is light. ‘The sun never knew how wonderful it was,’ the architect Louis Kahn said, ‘until it fell on the wall of a building.’ And for us the act of inhabitation is mostly performed in cahoots with the sun, our staunchest ally, bathing our world or flickering through it, helping give it light. It comes with the thrill of a slap for us then to