Diary: Barry Yourgrau, Kyoichi Tsuzuki, Chronicler of mess
An anthropologist and archivist of populist “low” culture—a radically open-hearted and democratic but acutely discerning advocate, preservationist, and impresario of neglected subcultures
An architect’s quarters, from Tokyo Style. A caption notes that he has lived here since his university days
I first came to know Kyoichi Tsuzuki because of Marie Kondo.
My memoir about clutter, hoarding, and collecting, Mess, came out in 2015. A few months prior, The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up had appeared in English and proceeded to engulf the planet, so it seemed, with its will to decluttering and minimalism under the marketing halo of “Japanese style.” I was dubious. I’d become pro-clutter, or rather, de gustibus about clutter, even hoarding.
I started writing an article on the Kondo phenomenon, and a friend in Tokyo told me about Tokyo Style. I got the chunky, pocket-sized 1999 Chronicle Books American edition (titled Tokyo: A Certain Style), and I discovered a marvelous “Japanese style” antithetical to the KonMari cosmology of hyper-tidiness.
I wrote to Kyoichi right away from New York, and we immediately found a kinship. I was delighted to receive his genial but acute scoff at the Kondo strictures. “It’s just similar to all those diet methods,” he pooh-poohed by email. “Nobody I know pays any attention to her.” She was a successor of the long tradition of the “art of discarding” that started around the nineties, he opined. It was the mood that arose after the Japanese bubble economy’s crash. “Until then, we were educated to buy more and more.”
What he wanted to show and celebrate instead with his candid views of a hundred mainly untidy and prodigiously cluttered, tiny Tokyo habitations—“cockpits,” to use his term—was the actual style of living of so many of the megalopolis’ dwellers.
How to describe Kyoichi? I think of him as an indefatigable, roving anthropologist and archivist of populist “low” culture—a radically open-hearted and democratic but acutely discerning advocate, preservationist, and impresario of neglected subcultures and design. He’s a man for practices outside the confines of art and art-making orthodoxy—for phenomena that speak to people’s lives, their realities, and their interests, from the raunchy to the freaky and funky to the kawaii (“cute” in Japanese).
Kyoichi, style iconoclast, began his career as a staff editor and writer at Tokyo’s sleekly hip men’s magazines, Popeye and Brutus. In that capacity, he accompanied Haruki Murakami, for example, on travel assignments in the eighties, including the week they spent together exploring Berlin’s underground. At the end of that decade, while scouting locations for American design chronicler Suzanne Slesin’s book, Japanese Style (part of her modish Style Book Series), he questioned how a gorgeous publication full of gorgeous habitations could possibly reflect Tokyo’s real way of living. In 1993, he published Tokyo Style as a reality-based counterpoint, in a format echoing Slesin’s handsome, high-end precedent.
Despite the raw, untidied intimacy of Tokyo Style, the dwellings’ occupants, who were mostly young, don’t appear. This absence owes simply to the camera Kyoichi used, which in natural light required gruellingly long exposures. (In a later book, Happy Victims, occupants do appear, artificially lit in their “cockpits” amid their gaudy treasures—favorite designer outfits and accessories.) The lack of people in Tokyo Style creates a heightened focus on the settings that intensifies the personality of the dwellings themselves—some claustrophobic, others oddly serene—and makes the viewer (this viewer at least) feel slightly furtive, as if stealing into a privacy, even though some occupants stayed on while Kyoichi was photographing. Others just left him alone to shoot. “It was amazing,” he recalled, “since in most of the cases we’d just met for the first time! It never happens like that when you visit rich people’s beautiful, expensive places. I found out that poor kids are much more open-minded than rich, high-class people.”
It’s interesting now to reflect on what a nostalgic, analog world Tokyo Style recorded thirty years ago, before Marie Kondo and smart phones and Instagram, when only 12 percent of Japanese households possessed a personal computer. When we couldn’t all get in touch by text, voice, and video instantly, at all hours, almost anywhere on the globe. When we were pretty much simply ‘at home’ when we were at home.
It’s also interesting to compare Tokyo Style to another candid book of as-is dwellings photographed sans occupants a few years later: Dominique Nabokov’s New York Living Rooms. The living rooms here belong to well-known public figures and artists, and most are handsomely appointed, spacious, and tidy (with a few exceptions, such as the glutted “cockpit” of Warhol star Taylor Mead). But the viewer mostly peruses the settings with the specific occupant very much in mind, searching for clues or quirks or revelations. This is not the case for Tokyo Style and its unfamous inhabitants.
I and my cluttered, object-happy apartment in New York have been photographed by Kyoichi. I in turn have photographed Kyoichi in Tokyo—under a pseudo-hunting trophy of an adorable half-Bambi, half-panda head with a lone, unruly antler—in his former abode, a voluminous space that reminded me of a Manhattan loft, “a mix of hipster junk shop and museum,” as I wrote at the time. Since our first fated meeting, I’ve wandered through Kyoichi’s photographs of Asian “hell gardens” at a chic Tokyo art gallery, which featured weather-stained sculptural tableaus of gory punishments for sinners, along with a life-size, 3D replica of a merry, naked young woman in flagrante with several snakes. Sex and love hotels are some of Kyoichi’s favorite subjects; he’s opened a Museum of Roadside Art full of erotica, popular with the young female demographic, apparently, in Tokyo’s venerable geisha district of Mukojima. He also promotes “mom’s art,” cute handicrafts by older women, and is a connoisseur and champion of boro, the beautiful patchwork style of Japanese textiles born of impoverishment. And dear to me are two copies of Nightmare in Bangkok, a sensational book of outlandish, lurid illustrations from Thai tabloid magazines issued by a now-defunct publishing imprint of Kyoichi’s called Street Design File. Indefatigable, he continues to put out an encyclopedic weekly online newsletter-cum-free-form magazine, Roadsiders’ Weekly.
I asked Kyoichi now, following the trajectory of how we met, whether his opinion of Marie Kondo might have changed. “I have been amazed by her success for a long time,” he replied. “But recently I found out the news that she gave up her system after she had her [third] baby. And it made me feel relieved.” His style, it seems, has won out.
Barry Yourgrau's books of brief fiction include Wearing Dad’s Head, A Man Jumps Out of an Airplane, The Sadness of Sex (in whose film version he starred) and Haunted Traveler, as well as his memoir, Mess. He is the only American author who has published short fiction on Japanese cellphones (keitai shosetsu). This post is adapted from a foreword to a recent reissue of Kyoichi Tsuzuki’s Tokyo Style by the Barcelona design magazine, Apartamento.
Read Barry Yourgrau a few weeks ago in Book Post on the policiers of Jean-Patrick Machette
Read Book Post’s Anakana Scofield on the subject of Marie Kondo and books, and Book Post’s April Bernard a related theme, the craze for Danish hygge.
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