Obi and Sand: Kyoto/Enoshima — Two Locations, One Sustained Gaze
Obi and Sand: Kyoto/Enoshima (帯と砂) is a signed 2024 hardcover photobook by Yoshio Mizoguchi, published by Sokyusha in Tokyo as a first edition, first printing, limited to 400 signed copies. Across 176 pages and 172 black-and-white images, the book moves between two settings photographed by Mizoguchi in the 1990s and 2000s — Kyoto and Enoshima — held together less by a shared subject than by a consistent method of looking.
The Kyoto section is built from women and passersby set against the city's historical weight: a face turned mid-motion, cloth against skin, the particular density of light in older streets. Mizoguchi does not decorate the setting. The Enoshima section that follows shifts register entirely — bathing suits, black sand, sweat, and the looser time of a coastal summer replace the city's stillness. The two halves do not resolve into a single theme; instead, contrast itself becomes the organizing principle.
What connects the sections is Mizoguchi's particular combination of documentary directness and proximate, unguarded attention. As he writes in the book's afterword, describing his return visits to Enoshima: bodies "covered in black sand," heat, and the sense that "the summer sea sadly fades away with memories of the hot sand." The erotic charge running through the work is observational rather than staged, arising from timing and closeness rather than composition for effect.
The book was produced by Michitaka Ota and designed by Katsuya Kato, with English translation by Bonnie Pong-Wai Ma and printing and binding by SunM Color Co., Ltd. in Japan. It is presented in English and Japanese, and forms part of a small group of recent Mizoguchi publications that includes Tokyo on the Brink of Sanity.
About Yoshio Mizoguchi
Yoshio Mizoguchi began photography as a self-taught practitioner in 1970. His published books include HOTARU(FIREFLY), Days of Smelling Like Grass, Tokyo on the Brink of Sanity, and Obi and Sand: Kyoto/Enoshima. Across these works, he returns consistently to women, urban and semi-urban drift, and a tension between ordinariness and charged presence.
That sensibility is especially clear here. Mizoguchi photographs bodies and passersby with unusual lightness, but the images never become casual. Even the most ordinary moments seem touched by heat, memory, and a slightly unstable emotional weather — which is what makes this book feel both immediate and lingering.
