Toshio Shibata came home to Tokyo in 1980 after four years in Flanders, and found the city resistant to his camera. Yodaka gathers the nighttime photographs he made there in that interval, when Japan’s postwar construction was finished, the student movement had run down, and the bubble economy had not yet begun. Shibata’s afterword describes a Tokyo in which prewar and postwar Showa lay over one another, a scene he calls disorderly and difficult to capture. His response was to chase the lights of the night, holding the confusion at arm’s length while he worked out how to photograph his own country.

The publisher presents these photographs here for the first time. The edition is hardcover with a slipcase, 48 pages, 41 duotone plates, issued in a limited run of 350 numbered and signed copies, and it is Shibata’s seventh monograph from Nazraeli Press. The afterword, written in his own voice and printed in English and Japanese, attaches the images to a particular experience of return and readjustment, so that the sequence reads as a concentrated whole rather than a survey.

Shibata was born in Japan in 1949 and entered the painting department of the University of Arts of Tokyo in 1968. He continued his studies at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Ghent, where he turned to photography. His work is held by institutions including the Museum of Modern Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the J. Paul Getty Museum, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris, and the National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo.

What should interest a collector is the conjunction the book records: a group of early Tokyo night photographs, published as a limited, numbered and signed volume, with Shibata’s own afterword fixing them to the circumstances in which they were made. His account of that return, placed beside plates made in the same months, gives this early body of work a documentary weight it would not carry as images alone.