Awakening the Japanese Identity with the Aesthetic of Shadow: Dialogue and Echoes in the Short Story of Tanizaki Jun'ichirō
L. T. Diem Hang (Vietnam)

This essay focuses on the impact of the aesthetic of shadow on visual metaphor in modern Japanese literature in the early 20th century. The aesthetic of shadow offers not simply the beauty of shadow itself but the ways a narrative emerges through shadow. This project aims to answer questions of how cultural subjects, cultural spaces and cultural times create dialogue and echoes in the vivid literary oeuvre of Tanizaki Jun'ichirō (谷崎 潤一郎 1886-1965), “one of the greatest modern Japanese writers” (Suzuki 1998, 41). By capturing the spatial shadow and the shadow metaphor in his time, he shows the power of art to shape the ways people view Japanese identity.

Tanizaki Jun'ichirō’s insightful essay “In Praise of Shadows” (In’ei Raisan) not only impressively introduces unique Japanese aesthetics to the world (Tanizaki 1977), but also leads readers to a deeper understanding of his stories. The aesthetic of shadow by itself is not a theory of literary studies, but would greatly benefit from its approaches. It not only offers opportunities to use the tools of aesthetic studies to investigate Japanese film studies (Lamarre 2005; Miyao 2013) but also to evaluate modern Japanese literature. Moreover, “the play of light and dark” (Hutchinson 2007, 253) associated with the aesthetic of shadow promotes a deepened and nuanced search for aesthetic experiences in relation to Japanese art and other cultural practices.

The power of art, for Tanizaki, is the power of storytelling. Tanizaki maintains that a literary work should first of all hold the reader’s interest throughout (Hijiya-Kirschnereit 1998, 101). Therefore, Tanizaki consciously organizes the text with “complex and delicate structure” through “repeated effect of shifting and breaking, especially the technique of preparing for the sudden, immediate, and delicious contact with life by evoking all sorts of traditional sources” (Pigeot 1998, 114). The traditional texts will “amplify its emotional power” (Pigeot 1998, 108) and create a “metadialogue” for the readers (Hijiya-Kirschnereit 1998, 101). Hence, Tanizaki’s work is often “fantastical and dreamlike, startling and seductive” (McCarthy 1995, 523).

Accordingly, one might consider Tanizaki’s “Fumiko’s Feet” (Fumiko no ashi) as a Japanese cultural practices in which space-time concept of ma (間) visualized metaphors related to shadow. Put another way, the visual elements of text engage the beauty of sights and nostalgia of forgotten stories. Our project therefore argues that visual images, Japanese sensibility and indigenous beliefs evoke Japanese identity in the context of the strong influence of Western culture on Japan in the early years of the twentieth century.

Tanizaki uses the visual metaphor accompanied by the aesthetic of shadow to shape the beauty of cultural spaces. While the beauty of objects illuminated usually is evoked under clear light, “Fumiko’s Feet” suggests that Japanese beauty lies in less well illuminated places places in which seeks “a blend of darkness and light, life and death, moment and eternity, beauty and pain” (Đậu & Lê 2023, 56).

Furthermore, the meaning of this text really lies not only in the spatial shadow but also in the shadow metaphor which seeks from the traces of Japanese classic works. The echoes of the Japanese identity quietly maintained in ukiyo-e painting by Utagawa Kunisada (歌川 国貞 1786 - 1865) and “Inaka Genji” by Ryūtei Tanehiko (柳亭種彦 1783-1842). Tanizaki does not weave a web of meanings that the reader merely has to follow, but he selects and orders values and presents “Inaka Genji” and Utagawa's ukiyo-e painting to the reader as texts. “Inaka Genji” with ukiyo-e illustrations shows the fact that “one picture can convey a thousand words” (Gerstle & Markus 1995, 84). Markus argues that when he read “Inaka Genji” aloud in the light, he felt exactly as if he was watching a live performance more than hundreds years ago. The feeling was so extraordinary that he wanted to convey this ancient style to the world (Markus 1992, 92–93). By following the shadow metaphor of ukiyo-e painting and theatrical language in “Inaka Genji”, the reader therefore reacts to “the offer and enters into a dialogue with the possibilities the texts offer him” (Wolde 1989, 47). Put another way, “Fumiko’s Feet” contains “in effect, always bearer of an authorial commentary either more or less legitimated by the author, constitutes, between the text and what lies outside it, a zone not just of transition, but of transaction of discourses (Genette & Maclean 1991, 261).

In this consideration, our research is based on Bakhtin’s principle of dialogue (1981) to investigate why and how Tanizaki evokes past texts in his short story with the visual metaphors. The essay argues that the co-existing of the ukiyo–e painting, “Inaka Genji” in this literary text creates “double text” or “dual figure”. This connection “awakens to values” (Kristeva 1980, 37) and creates new discourse (Bakhtin 1981). We show that this intertextual relationship based on “differential and historical, as traces and tracings of otherness, since they are shaped by the repetition and transformation of other textual structure” (Alfaro 1996, 268) that repetition ensures that negotiated discourses continue to circulate (Kristeva 1980, 52). The essay points out that the aesthetics of shadow awakens the echoes of Japanese identity and therefore sustains effective national character in the context of the strong influence of Western culture.

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(Department of Literature and Linguistics, Hue University of Education, Vietnam)