This work is a series of book illustrations for a memoir by Junichiro Tanizaki ‘In Praise of Shadows’. The book looks back at a time before western influences arrived in Japan.

I used black paint in my work, relying heavily on shadows in order to generate atmosphere. I created ‘spot’ illustrations, as I find it more satisfying to place these between paragraphs – using the illustrations as a sort of grammar, adding emphasis to particular moments in the text.

I focused mainly on the locations in the book as they are so vividly described.