At the price of shadows

At the price of shadows is Junichiro Tanizaki's (1886-1965) immortal masterpiece from 1933. It is a poetic eulogy to Japanese aesthetics, where Tanizaki, in a freely fable, essayistic style, moves from space and architecture to No theater, from cooking to lighting, argues for – and guides his reader in the direction of – seeing the beauty in oxidized metal, the majestic and elevated in unglazed ceramics and the subtlety of organic material bearing witness to the daily touch of human hands. And then he speaks to resist the temptation to streamline, to overlight (read: be seduced by modernity), and remember the shadows (read: the traditions, the craft, the natural) because without shadows no beauty!

"I would like, if nothing else in literature, to try to recreate the shadow world we have lost. I want to deepen the eaves of the temple of literature, darken the walls and push what is seen too clearly into the shadows and rid its interior of unnecessary decorations. It doesn't have to be up and down the street, just a single building will be enough. And if you want to know what the result will be, turn off the lights.”

'We find beauty not in the thing itself but in the patterns of shadows, the light and the darkness, that one thing against another creates... Were it not for shadows, there would be no beauty.'
– Junichiro Tanizaki

We have chosen to add one of Tanizaki's first works of fiction, the short story The Tattoo, to the book. Although it is stylistically located elsewhere, here you also sense the author's preoccupation, and deep fascination, with beauty, with craftsmanship, with the aesthetic.

Junichiro Tanazaki (1886-1965) is considered one of the most important writers of the 20th century in Japan. His writing is varied and moves in different directions and through different genres, but a recurring theme is the search for, and uncovering of, cultural identity in the early 20th century's accelerating development, where the construction of the West is often pitted against Japanese traditions.
In 1964, Tanizaki was among the final candidates for the Nobel Prize, and he has published an impressive number of books.

The book is bound and coated with real gold leaf on the pages