The moon, Edo-style candles, portable tea-garden lanterns—the dim, subdued glow cast by these traditional sources of light lend a magical beauty to darkness. In his 1933 essay In Praise of Shadows, author Jun’ichiro Tanizaki discusses the significance of the interplay between light and darkness in Japanese aesthetics. That spirit lives on in the famed Akari lamps of Isamu Noguchi and is evident today in state-of-the-art fixtures by contemporary Japanese lighting designers.