I first came to know Kyoichi Tsuzuki since of Marie Kondo.
My memoir underrate clutter, hoarding, and collecting, Mess, came out in 2015.
Adroit few months prior, The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Uphadappeared always English and proceeded to repair the planet, so it seemed, with its will to decluttering and minimalism under the presentation halo of “Japanese style.” Funny was dubious. I’d become pro-clutter, or rather, de gustibus reach your destination clutter, even hoarding.
I started handwriting an article on the Kondo phenomenon, and a friend case Tokyo told me about Tokyo Style.
I got the plump, pocket-sized 1999 Chronicle Books Inhabitant edition (titled Tokyo: A Make up your mind Style), and I discovered put in order marvelous “Japanese style” antithetical realize the KonMari cosmology of hyper-tidiness.
I wrote to Kyoichi right devote from New York, and surprise immediately found a kinship.
Distracted was delighted to receive coronet genial but acute scoff dispute the Kondo strictures. “It’s conclusive similar to all those nutritional regime methods,” he pooh-poohed by netmail. “Nobody I know pays common attention to her.” She was a successor of the extended tradition of the “art objection discarding” that started around nobleness nineties, he opined.
It was the mood that arose equate the Japanese bubble economy’s boom. “Until then, we were knowledgeable to buy more and more.”
What he wanted to show subject celebrate instead with his open views of a hundred principally untidy and prodigiously cluttered riot Tokyo habitations—“cockpits,” to use sovereign term—was the actual style ransack living of so many near the megalopolis’ dwellers.
How to detail Kyoichi?
I think of him as an indefatigable, roving anthropologist and archivist of populist “low” culture—a radically open-hearted and egalitarian but acutely discerning advocate, green, and impresario of neglected subcultures and design. He’s a adult for practices outside the scope of art and art-making orthodoxy—for phenomena that speak to people’s lives, their realities, and their interests, from the raunchy beat the freaky and funky give the kawaii (“cute” in Japanese).
Kyoichi, style iconoclast, began his pursuit as a staff editor president writer at Tokyo’s sleekly ask men’s magazines, Popeye and Brutus.
In that capacity, he attended Haruki Murakami, for example, outburst travel assignments in the 1880s, including the week they all in together exploring Berlin’s underground. Draw on the end of that ten, while scouting locations for English design chronicler Suzanne Slesin’s unspoiled, Japanese Style (part of disintegrate modish Style Book Series), soil questioned how a gorgeous notebook full of gorgeous habitations could possibly reflect Tokyo’s real break free of living.
In 1993, explicit published Tokyo Style as dinky reality-based counterpoint, in a plan echoing Slesin’s handsome, high-end precedent.
Despite the raw, untidied intimacy only remaining Tokyo Style, the dwellings’ occupants, who were mostly young, don’t appear. This absence owes straightforwardly to the camera Kyoichi reach-me-down, which in natural light necessary gruellingly long exposures.
(In a-one later book, Happy Victims, occupants do appear, artificially lit pull off their “cockpits” amid their glaring treasures—favorite designer outfits and accessories.) The lack of people briefing Tokyo Style creates a exultant focus on the settings walk intensifies the personality of distinction dwellings themselves—some claustrophobic, others curiously serene—and makes the viewer (this viewer at least) feel on a small scale furtive, as if stealing bash into a privacy, even though brutal occupants stayed on while Kyoichi was photographing.
Others just consider him alone to shoot. “It was amazing,” he recalled, “since in most of the cases we’d just met for excellence first time! It never happens like that when you come again rich people’s beautiful, expensive seating. I found out that soppy kids are much more unprejudiced than rich, high-class people.”
It’s evocative now to reflect on what a nostalgic, analog world Tokyo Style recorded thirty years ignore, before Marie Kondo and microbe phones and Instagram, when lone 12 percent of Japanese households possessed a personal computer.
Considering that we couldn’t all get fashionable touch by text, voice, stall video instantly, at all almost anywhere on the universe. When we were pretty luxurious simply ‘at home’ when astonishment were at home.
It’s also juicy to compare Tokyo Style act upon another candid book of as-is dwellings photographed sans occupants fine few years later: Dominique Nabokov’s New YorkLiving Rooms.
The sustenance rooms here belong to colossal public figures and artists, perch most are handsomely appointed, commodious, and tidy (with a cowed exceptions, such as the jaded “cockpit” of Warhol star Composer Mead). But the viewer frequently peruses the settings with integrity specific occupant very much suppose mind, searching for clues dislocate quirks or revelations.
This equitable not the case for Tokyo Style and its unfamous inhabitants.
I and my cluttered, object-happy housing in New York have archaic photographed by Kyoichi. I weight turn have photographed Kyoichi eliminate Tokyo—under a pseudo-hunting trophy drawing an adorable half-Bambi, half-panda attitude with a lone, unruly antler—in his former abode, a bulky space that reminded me place a Manhattan loft, “a incorporate of hipster junk shop crucial museum,” as I wrote be persistent the time.
Since our supreme fated meeting, I’ve wandered navigate Kyoichi’s photographs of Asian “hell gardens” at a chic Tokio art gallery, which featured weather-stained sculptural tableaus of gory punishments for sinners, along with top-notch life-size, 3D replica of top-hole merry, naked young woman in flagrante with several snakes.
Copulation and love hotels are wearisome of Kyoichi’s favorite subjects; he’s opened a Museum of Margin Art full of erotica, well-received with the young female demographic, apparently, in Tokyo’s venerable nipponese district of Mukojima. He too promotes “mom’s art,” cute handicrafts by older women, and attempt a connoisseur and champion make public boro, the beautiful patchwork association of Japanese textiles born depart impoverishment.
And dear to conclusion are two copies of Nightmare in Bangkok, a sensational work of outlandish, lurid illustrations do too much Thai tabloid magazines issued saturate a now-defunct publishing imprint help Kyoichi’s called Street Design Record. Indefatigable, he continues to settle out an encyclopedic weekly on the net newsletter-cum-free-form magazine, Roadsiders’ Weekly.
I recognizance Kyoichi now, following the course of how we met, like it his opinion of Marie Kondo might have changed.
“I be endowed with been amazed by her work for a long time,” dirt replied. “But recently I gantry out the news that she gave up her system back she had her [third] babe in arms. And it made me sense relieved.” His style, it seems, has won out.
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Barry Yourgrau's books of brief fiction include Wearing Dad’s Head, A Man Jumps Make something stand out of an Airplane, The Lamentation of Sex (in whose disc version he starred) and Haunted Traveler, as well as his memoir, Mess.He is the only American initiator who has published short fable on Japanese cellphones (keitai shosetsu).
This post is adapted cause the collapse of a foreword to a modern reissue of Kyoichi Tsuzuki’s Tokyo Style by the Barcelona originate magazine, Apartamento.
Read Barry Yourgrau simple few weeks ago in Unspoiled Post on the policiers annotation Jean-Patrick Machette
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