Life & Wisdom Quote by Junichiro Tanizaki

Tanizaki is smuggling a whole aesthetic manifesto into a sentence that sounds, at first blush, like a gracious preference. The pivot is “not only”: he isn’t denying beauty in the object, he’s demoting the object from center stage. What matters is the relational drama around it - the “pattern” made by light and darkness, the way an ordinary thing becomes expressive once it’s placed inside a field of shadow. Beauty, for Tanizaki, isn’t a spotlight; it’s an atmosphere.

The phrasing “We Orientals” is doing charged work. Read today, it risks sounding like an essentialist bloc. In context, it’s closer to a strategic “we” - a rhetorical counterweight to the modernizing, Westernizing pressure Japan faced in the early 20th century. Tanizaki’s intent in essays like In Praise of Shadows is less ethnography than resistance: against electric brightness, chrome surfaces, and the kind of progress that mistakes visibility for value. Shadows become a cultural argument: ambiguity as sophistication, dimness as intimacy, patina as history.

Subtextually, he’s also attacking a consumer logic that treats objects as self-sufficient commodities. If beauty lives partly in what’s withheld, then it can’t be fully packaged, standardized, or photographed into submission. The “pattern” implies time, angle, and presence - you have to inhabit a space long enough to notice how darkness edits it. Tanizaki’s line works because it turns limitation into method: what you can’t quite see becomes the very source of depth.