Photograph collection Nagaya Meiro (Row House Labyrinth) (2004)

Client: PIE BOOKS

This book is a collection of photographs by Katsuhito Nakazato of Mukojima and Kyojima, Tokyo.

It was designed to take the readers deeper and deeper into a "labyrinth" as they turned the pages. Photographs taken were so perfect that Takahashi did not want to trim any of them. She therefore thought of a way to include as many photographs as possible while she was laying them out, and decided to leave them untrimmed, preserving even the portion usually trimmed for the 3 mm-wide bleeds, and connected all of them together. (Takahashi completed the composition in an extreme brief period of time.)

Pages of text in between the photographs were designed so that even the vertical texts were to be read from left to right, the same direction as the pages were turned, to prevent the reader's sense of "getting lost in a labyrinth" from being interrupted.

To achieve that, the writer of the book, Jun Nakano, was asked to write in reverse order (left to right)―another example of how Takahashi comes up with a "three-dimensional" idea, whatever she works on. The book contains precious scenes of "original Tokyo," many of which have since been lost.