5 ⭐️

"The quality that we call beauty, however, must always grow from the realities of life,  and our ancestors, forced to live in dark rooms, presently came to discover beauty in shadows, ultimately to guide shadows towards beauty's end."

Darkness and shadows are evil, wrong, a thing of the past, something to chase away - or so we feel in the Western world. This essay from Tanizaki-sensei was an insight on the beauty of darkness, a plunge in Japanese culture, and how essential the plays of shadows and lights are to many aspects of Japan's history and aesthetics.

This essay is beautifully written and strangely heterogenous, but it drew me in and left me awestruck by the sheer love for Japanese culture we could sense through the translated words. It started as admiring a simple calligraphic kanji, and I landed in a pool of deep black ink where I found light and beauty.

This particular edition was particularly dreamy with all those selected images and carefully chosen designs of Japanese painting, and I am certain it played a role in how enchanting the experience was.