The Aesthetics of Shadow: Lighting in Japanese Cinema

Abstract

This important and ambitious book sketches an alternative history of prewar and wartime Japanese cinema from the perspective of its use of lighting. In so doing, it furnishes the reader with an impressive wealth of factual information, crafts some thoughtful interpretations of individual films, and challenges some of the dominant narratives of Japanese film criticism. Daisuke Miyao takes his title directly from a phrase used in 1979 by Nobutaka Yoshino, a production designer at Shochiku, for whom the aesthetics of shadow are something ‘that Japanese people created over a long period of time’ and that remain ‘deep inside of ourselves’ (p. 1). As Miyao notes, the term recalls Junichiro Tanizaki's seminal account of Japanese aesthetics, the essay ‘In praise of shadows’ (1933–34), which similarly identifies shadow as a part of an inherited national tradition.1 For western viewers, a connection between Japanese cinema and shadow was cemented in the postwar era by the country's most internationally celebrated cinematographer, Kazuo Miyagawa, who associated his photographic style with the ‘quiet and dark’ colours of his native city, Kyoto, and with the ‘infinite levels of gray’ in traditional sumi-e ink painting (p. 257).