Did We Ever Actually Like Bright Lights? (Diarogue)

A Conversation About Tanizaki, Shadows, and the Aesthetics We Forgot We Had

Photo by Milan Trninic on Unsplash

This conversation grew out of a solo essay, “The Light We Forgot to Leave Out” published in Readers Club. The two pieces are independent — but they look at the same thing from different directions.

It was a Friday evening, early December. The kind of night in Osaka when the air has finally committed to being cold. We were at a small standing bar near Kitahama — the kind of place with no name sign outside, just a frosted glass door and a warm light leaking underneath it. Nicholas had found it, which surprised me. It didn’t seem like his kind of place.

He was already inside when Catherine and I arrived, nursing a glass of Yamazaki and looking mildly philosophical. That was also unusual.

“I’ve been thinking about your essay,” he said, before we’d even taken off our coats.

Nicholas: So I read it. The Tanizaki piece.

Takeshi: The essay, or the article?

Nicholas: Your article. Though I downloaded the essay too, which I haven’t finished. It’s slow going.

Catherine: I read both. I actually read the essay first because I wanted to come in with context. (She set her bag down and unwound her scarf.) Can I ask something before we start? Who was Tanizaki, as a person? The essay reads like someone with very strong opinions about toilets and electric lighting, but I don’t have a sense of who he actually was.

Takeshi: That’s a fair place to start. He’s hard to summarize. He was born in Tokyo in 1886, came from a merchant family — not aristocracy, not samurai class. He started writing in his twenties and almost immediately became controversial. His early work was very dark. Obsession, manipulation, beauty as something almost dangerous. Western critics sometimes compared him to Poe or Wilde.

Nicholas: Huh. I didn’t get that from the shadows essay at all.

Takeshi: Because In’ei Raisan is late Tanizaki. By 1933 he’d moved to the Kansai area — Kyoto, Osaka, around here — and something shifted. He became more interested in what Japan was losing than in transgression. More elegiac.

Catherine: There’s something interesting about that timing, isn’t there? 1933 in Japan — that’s a pretty charged moment politically.

Takeshi: It is. Though I’m careful about reading In’ei Raisan as political protest. I think he was genuinely just… sad about bad lighting. (A pause.) That sounds small when I say it like that. But it wasn’t small to him.

Nicholas: It doesn’t sound small. It actually sounds completely reasonable. (He refilled his glass.) Here’s the thing that got me. I kept thinking he was going to be wrong, and then he wasn’t. That thing about the lacquer bowl — I immediately thought of my grandmother’s apartment.

Catherine: Tell us.

Nicholas: She was Italian-American, grew up in Brooklyn. Her apartment was — it was dark. She had these heavy drapes she never opened, lamps with low-wattage bulbs, candles on the table at dinner even when it wasn’t a special occasion. And her kitchen had this old ceramic bowl she kept fruit in, dark green, and I never thought of it as beautiful when I was a kid. It was just her fruit bowl. But I went back there after she died, when we were clearing out the apartment, and I picked it up in that same low light, and — I don’t know. It looked completely different from how I’d seen it in photographs.

Catherine: That’s exactly what Tanizaki is describing.

Nicholas: I know. That’s why it got to me. It’s not a Japanese thing, is what I’m saying. My grandmother wasn’t practicing any kind of philosophy. She just had that apartment.

Takeshi: No, it’s not only Japanese. That’s something I think gets lost when Westerners encounter Japanese aesthetics — the assumption that you have to learn this sensitivity from Eastern thought. Most people have experienced it. They just haven’t had language for it, or they’ve been told the language is someone else’s.

Catherine: Wabi-sabi tourism. (She smiled.) “Discover the ancient Japanese secret of finding beauty in imperfection.” As if Europeans never noticed that old things are beautiful.

Nicholas: To be fair, Europeans spent a lot of the 20th century building things that were not beautiful in any light.

Takeshi: (laughing) That’s also true.

Catherine: Can I push on something? Because I think there’s a difference between having the sensitivity and building a world around the sensitivity. My grandmother — or your grandmother, Nicholas — might have had a dark apartment without necessarily thinking that the darkness was itself the point. Tanizaki is arguing that it was the point. That the aesthetic tradition was constructed around low light, that the objects were designed for it, the architecture was designed for it. That’s different from just happening to have curtains.

Takeshi: That’s a genuinely important distinction.

Nicholas: Is it, though? Does it matter if it was intentional? The result is the same.

Catherine: I think it does matter. Because if it was constructed intentionally, then it can be recovered intentionally. If it’s just something that happened to some grandmothers in Brooklyn, then when they die, it’s gone.

Takeshi: What she’s pointing at is something Tanizaki doesn’t quite say directly but implies throughout: that this aesthetic is fragile. It requires transmission. It has to be passed on through practice and environment, not just through reading about it.

Nicholas: How is it transmitted in Japan? Like, do kids just absorb it?

Takeshi: Mostly, yes. Though less than before, I think. You grow up in spaces that were designed for a certain quality of attention. Temple visits, traditional restaurants, rooms where someone has arranged a single branch of something in front of a scroll. You don’t think about it philosophically — it just trains your eye. And your expectations.

Catherine: That’s true everywhere, though. I grew up in a house with a lot of natural light, big windows, white walls. Very California. And for a long time I thought rooms with a lot of light were just — correct. Healthy. Rooms that were dim felt depressing to me. I had to actively unlearn that.

Nicholas: What changed it for you?

Catherine: (She thought for a moment.) Honestly? Living in Japan. My apartment in Toyonaka is quite dark, and for the first few months I kept thinking I needed to do something about it. Buy more lamps. Then I stopped noticing, and then I started preferring it. Now when I go back to California, my parents’ house feels almost — aggressive to me. All that light.

Takeshi: That’s the process Tanizaki is lamenting happened in reverse in Japan. Overnight, essentially.

Nicholas: Okay, here’s where I’ll push back a little. Because there’s a version of this argument that becomes — look, I work in finance. I spend most of my day in a glass-fronted building that is, objectively, very bright. And I like it. I can see everything. I can read everything. Nothing is hidden.

Takeshi: Nothing is hidden — is that only an advantage?

Nicholas: In a financial context, yes. Absolutely.

Takeshi: I’m not arguing with you about financial contexts. I don’t want shadow in a spreadsheet.

Nicholas: (a short laugh) Okay, fair.

Takeshi: But I think you already know that “I can see everything” doesn’t apply the same way in every part of life. You found this bar, which is not a place where you can see everything. You’re not even slightly bothered by that.

Nicholas: (He looked around the room.) …Point taken.

Catherine: That’s kind of the key, isn’t it?

We’ve built our public spaces and work environments on the principle that maximum visibility equals maximum function. But we keep retreating, privately, into spaces that are softer.

Dimly lit bars, candlelit dinners, bedside lamps. We’ve just stopped thinking of that as aesthetic choice. We call it “ambiance.”

Takeshi: Or “mood lighting,” which manages to make it sound slightly embarrassing.

Nicholas: (dry) “Sorry, I need to turn off this overhead light for ambiance reasons. Very spiritual.”

Catherine: (laughing) Right, exactly. There’s no vocabulary for it that doesn’t sound either pretentious or like you’re setting a romantic scene.

Takeshi: Tanizaki gives you vocabulary. That’s part of what the essay does — it names something that was operating without language. And once it’s named, you can’t quite un-notice it.

Catherine: There’s one part I want to ask you about. The section on the toilet.

Nicholas: I was going to say — that section is bizarre.

Takeshi: He knows it’s going to seem bizarre. That’s why he writes it with such composure. He’s essentially daring you to dismiss it.

Catherine: And you can’t, really. I kept waiting for the logic to fall apart and it didn’t. He’s describing something very specific — this idea that the most functional room in the house was also given the most careful aesthetic attention. Not the grand rooms. The room you go to alone, in the cold, briefly, every day.

Takeshi: There’s something in Japanese spatial design — I’m being careful not to over-generalize here — where the threshold, the edge, the pause-point, gets more attention than the destination. The genkan where you remove your shoes. The covered walkway between buildings. The small garden you cross to reach a tea room. These transitions matter. The toilet, for Tanizaki, is a kind of forced pause in the day. A moment of solitude and quiet. Why wouldn’t you design it well?

Nicholas: You know what that actually reminds me of? Fenway Park.

Catherine: …The baseball stadium?

Nicholas: Hear me out. Old stadiums — Fenway, Wrigley — have these narrow concourses, low ceilings, you can barely see where you’re going. And then you come up the ramp and the field opens up in front of you. Green, enormous, completely unexpected even though you knew it was there. New stadiums give you sight lines from the moment you walk in. They’re bigger, more comfortable, objectively better in most measurable ways. But they don’t do that. That moment of emergence.

Takeshi: That’s a remarkably good example.

Nicholas: I have my moments.

Catherine: So the darkness before the light makes the light mean something.

Nicholas: I guess so. I never thought about it that way, but yeah.

Takeshi: Can I say something that might complicate this conversation slightly?

Nicholas: Go ahead.

Takeshi: Tanizaki wrote this essay in a moment of genuine loss. He was watching something disappear in real time. But I don’t think he was entirely right that it was disappearing. I think it was relocating.

Catherine: What do you mean?

Takeshi: The aesthetic sensibility he describes — preference for suggestion over exposure, for the beauty that lives in partial concealment — I see it everywhere in contemporary Japanese life. In the way food is plated. In the design of certain interiors. In how people dress here. It didn’t die with gas lamps. It migrated.

Nicholas: So the form changed but the instinct stayed.

Takeshi: Something like that. Though I’m not certain about it. It might also be that I want that to be true.

Catherine: I think that’s actually the most honest thing you’ve said tonight.

Takeshi: (quietly) Yes. Probably.

The bar filled up around nine o’clock — salarymen, a few couples, a table of young women drinking highballs and laughing loudly at something on someone’s phone. The frosted glass door opened and closed, letting in brief rectangles of cold air.

At some point Nicholas finished his Yamazaki and switched to beer. Catherine ordered a second glass of wine and started taking notes on her phone, which she does when she’s thinking hard about something. I watched the light from the single lamp above the bar shift slightly as someone walked past it, and I thought about the bowl on my grandmother’s table.

Not my grandmother — Nicholas’s. I don’t have that story.

But I think I know exactly what he saw.

What We Didn’t Figure Out

Whether the aesthetic Tanizaki describes is uniquely Japanese, or simply named by Japan — we didn’t resolve that. Nicholas’s grandmother never read a word of Japanese philosophy. Catherine’s shift in perception happened through exposure, not study. And yet both arrived somewhere close to what Tanizaki is pointing at.

Maybe the more interesting question isn’t where this sensitivity comes from, but why certain cultures built visible frameworks around it and others let it operate without a name.

What you name, you can protect. What remains unnamed tends to get renovated away.

I don’t know if that’s Tanizaki’s argument exactly. But it’s where I ended up.

[embed]The Light We Forgot to Leave Out What Tanizaki Jun’ichiro Knew About Beauty That We’ve Spent a Century Unlearning.medium.com

This dialogue is based on real conversations, reconstructed and edited for narrative clarity. Nicholas and Catherine are composite characters inspired by people I know.

This article was developed with AI assistance. The thinking, research, and perspective are mine. The English expression is a collaboration.