On Christmas Eve 1991, Issei Suda walked through Tokyo with a camera and recorded what the city had made of a holiday it does not, by and large, believe in. The result, published by Chose Commune in 2022 as Holy Night, is less a document of celebration than a wry inventory of borrowed ritual: couples, cakes carried home, shopfronts lit for an occasion observed without conviction. Suda, who died in 2019, spent his career photographing ordinary life at its most fleeting, and the night suited him — a crowd performing feeling on cue, seen by someone alert to the gap between the performance and the thing itself.

The book’s temperament is the source of its strength. Suda’s own note on the project, quoted by the publisher, oscillates between exasperation and affection: he could scold his countrymen for reheating a faith that is not theirs, he writes, but it would be a waste. That sentence describes the photographs. Humor and a faint cynicism run together, and the camera stays close to the street rather than rising above it. There is no essayistic distance here, no thesis about Japanese modernity imposed on the material.

The sequence is compact — sixty pages holding forty-two plates — and the design credits name Akiko Wakabayashi, with editorial direction by Cécile Poimboeuf-Koizumi. The square format, roughly 28 by 28.3 centimeters, gives the night’s symmetries and clutter equal room, and the section-sewn hardcover suits a book built to be handled rather than shelved away. Text appears in English, French and Japanese, so Suda’s remark travels with the pictures into three readerships.

For a collector, the case rests on the conjunction of a single night, a single city, and a photographer who had been preparing for both for decades. Suda’s method — instantaneous, furtive, attuned to the snapshot — was formed in theater work and then applied to daily life across more than 190 solo exhibitions. Holy Night isolates one of his subjects’ most self-conscious evenings and lets it stand as a small, complete book.