shashasha

Japanese photographer Yoshio Mizoguchi’s photobook “Tokyo on the Brink of Sanity” captures the Japanese megalopolis at a time of disreality, between the late 1980s and early 2000s, when the sudden disappearance of the great fantasy of the bubble gradually began to permeate life in Tokyo. In portraits and snapshots that wander between eroticism and ordinariness, Mizoguchi’s photographs depict a wild atmosphere of undirected lust, verve and anxiety.

“In Shinjuku in the 1990s, young women blithely went from buying deli takeout in the popular food markets in the basement of a department store to waltzing into unauthorized sex ships. By night, herds of wandering men filtered in and out.”
― from Yoshio Mizoguchi’s afterword (included in Japanese & English translation)