Abstract
Tanizaki Jun.ichirō's Éloge de l'ombre and Roland Barthes' L'Empire des signes seem to postulate the existence of two stable, antagonistic cultural systems: Japan and the East on one side, and the West on the other. Each would have its own semiology and categories, inverted reflections of the antithetical pole. This binary, culturalist reading can be irritating. But it is also imbued with a form of irony that tends to deconstruct the East/West paradigm, or at least assumes its fabricated, even false, character. Roland Barthes, like Tanizaki Jun.ichirō, thus indulges in a form of invention of the exotic that evokes certain aspects of contemporary neo-Japanism.
