Tanizaki Jun’ichirō’s In Praise of Shadows and critical transparency

Abstract

ABSTRACT Mainstream reception of Tanizaki Jun’ichirō’s literary essay In’ei Raisan/ In Praise of Shadows (1933) has tended to swing between writing it off as a nostalgic nationalist exceptionalism and marketing it as a melancholic hymn to everyday beauty, although recently much more nuanced positions have emerged in terms of the text’s aesthetic ‘authenticity’. There is much more at stake in In’ei Raisan, however, including a perception of the evisceration of negativity and a surrender to a cybernetically foreclosed, capital-driven future, and this should be located relative to much older and much newer concerns. This themescape becomes more obvious when the essay’s driving image of the shadow is understood as part of a long negotiation to the total control of space by a property-owning subject, whose rise had been naturalised as progress during Japan’s unification and ‘modernisation’, primarily via a British empire which was morally sustained by a Scottish Enlightenment ‘empiricism of history’. This unification of, and dominion over, space gives In’ei Raisan such extraordinary similarities to the field recently identified as Critical Transparency Studies, similarities which are explored here.