Standing chest-deep in the sea, Asako Narahashi pointed her camera back at the shore. The photographs gathered in Half Awake and Half Asleep in the Water were made in that posture—body half-submerged, horizon tilted, land held at a distance that is at once literal and psychological. Coastlines, breakwaters, industrial silhouettes and, at least once, Mount Fuji appear as if seen by someone already drifting away from them.

Nazraeli Press published the book in 2007 as a hardcover of seventy-five pages, in a large format close to 33 by 30 centimetres. It was the second title chosen by Martin Parr for his Edition of Ten, and Parr contributed an accompanying text. Narahashi, born in 1959, had exhibited widely in Japan before this volume appeared, but the series had not previously been collected in book form.

The photographic historian Kotaro Iizawa described the sensation the pictures produce—of being stranded—as strangely comforting. That paradox is the heart of the work: the swimmer’s buoyancy and the viewer’s unease arrive together, and a familiar Japanese shoreline becomes something less settled than landscape. Related prints from the series have entered museum collections in Tokyo, and individual images appeared in the ICP exhibition Heavy Light: Recent Photographs and Video from Japan.

For collectors, the case is concrete rather than speculative. The book is out of print; its position within a publisher’s curated series is documented; and its images belong to a body of work already absorbed into institutional collections. What lingers is not the drama of the sea but its slow undoing of orientation—a quiet, disorienting achievement that has kept the series in circulation among photographers long after the edition left the shelves.