Memoraphilia is the second photobook by Akiko Tobu, published in Tokyo by Studio Parabolica in December 2004. It is a hardcover volume of 119 pages with Japanese text, and its subtitle states the fact plainly: 藤部明子第2写真集, Akiko Tobu’s second photography collection.

The title is glossed within the book itself. Memoraphilia: the love of memory, attachment to things not easily forgotten, a mind that drifts into recollection at some small prompting. Tobu is credited with photographs and text — 写真・文 — so the writing stands as part of the work rather than as commentary around it. That pairing gives the book its shape: images and language placed side by side on the same unsettled question of how the past returns to us.

Memoraphilia also carries an essay by Tjebbe van Tijen, “The arts of oneself,” and is documented as a bilingual Japanese–English edition. Van Tijen’s own project listings place the essay in this volume, which means a photographer’s second collection from a small Tokyo imprint speaks in two voices and two languages. The essay’s title gestures toward self-representation in its broadest sense, and set beside Tobu’s photographs it asks the reader to treat memory as something practised rather than merely recorded.

For a collector, the interest lies in position rather than in any claim of scarcity. Here is an independent Tokyo publisher’s book from 2004, by a photographer already on her second collection, with a commissioned essay arguing for the personal archive as a form. It belongs to a period when small Japanese houses were issuing concentrated, essayistic photobooks, and it shows how much a modest volume can hold: one author’s images, her own text, and a second writer’s response to both.

Its subject — memory, attachment, involuntary recall — is one photography has never resolved. Memoraphilia approaches it as a premise rather than a theme, and that composure is what makes the book worth returning to.