Yoko

Yoko by Masahisa Fukase — 2025 Reprint (Akaaka Art Publishing)

First published by Asahi Sonorama in 1978, Yoko is one of Masahisa Fukase's most sustained and personal bodies of work. This 2025 reprint, issued by AKAAKA Art Publishing, makes the book available again after decades of scarcity, retaining the full sequence of photographs from the original edition while presenting them in a revised format designed to foreground the images themselves.

The photographs were made between 1964 and 1976, tracing Fukase's marriage to Yoko Miyoshi from its beginning through their eventual divorce. The work occupies an unstable register — part private record, part deliberate construction — in which the boundary between snapshot and artwork is neither resolved nor abandoned. Scattered through the sequence are images of ravens, the motif that would later define Ravens (Karasu, 1986), and whose appearance here reads, in retrospect, as an early signal of the psychological terrain Fukase would continue to map throughout his career.

This edition retains original texts by Shoji Yamagishi, Harumi Setouchi, and Masahisa Fukase, alongside writing by Yoko Miyoshi under her former name. New to this reprint is a critical essay by photography historian Masako Toda and an afterword by Yoko Miyoshi herself, who supported the project and agreed to retain the full original sequence — including photographs she initially wished to exclude. Her afterword is candid about the complexity of that decision:

"At the time, looking through the pages of 'Yoko,' although I knew it was overflowing with the quintessential Fukase obsessed with photographing people, it was only a personal collection of photographs of our twelve years of married life, a statement that 'Fukase and I were here,' so I thought it would never become widely known. At first, there were a few photographs I wished not to be included in this reprint — as for which ones, I'll leave that to the imagination. But let me say that out of respect for Fukase's intentions and in the hope that this book will once again become known in the world, it was decided that the reprint would retain the composition of the original edition. If Fukase were still alive and I could say one thing to him now it would be, 'Well, it is what it is, right!!!!!!!'"
— Yoko Miyoshi, afterword

The book is part of a broader publishing effort to restore Fukase's key works to print. Related titles available here include the Masahisa Fukase 1961–1991 Retrospective and Homo Ludens. For further context, the Japanese Photobooks collection situates Yoko within a wider history of the form.