6 ideas
Tanizaki argues that traditional Japanese beauty depends on dimness and gradation, the glow of gold in gloom, lacquer catching low light. Western electric brightness, he contends, destroys the very effects such objects were made for.
He praises the sheen that hands and time deposit on wood, metal and paper, valuing the marks of age over the sterile gleam of the new. Cleanliness taken to sterility is treated as a loss of beauty.
Tanizaki shows how lacquerware, gold screens and cuisine were conceived for candlelight and shadow, so removing them to bright rooms strips their meaning. Beauty is relational to its lighting, not intrinsic.
He reads the divergence of Japanese and Western taste as a difference in relationship to progress and illumination, mourning how modernization imposes an alien brightness. Cultural aesthetics are tied to attitudes toward technology.
Tanizaki prizes what is veiled, implied or half-seen over what is fully revealed, finding richness in obscurity. The imagination completing a dim scene is central to the pleasure.
The essay is finally a lament for a mode of perception being erased by Western-style modernity. Tanizaki writes to preserve, at least in words, a way of seeing he expects to lose.