Daido Moriyama: Terayama SIGNED

First Edition, 2015. unpaginated.

Book measures 5.25 x 7.75 inches. Illustrated cloth with embossed text to front cover, with cardboard slipcase. No dust jacket as issued. This is the English language version, published in a limited edition of 1500 copies. SIGNED by Moriyama on the title page. B&W photographs throughout interspersed with the text. A clean copy in crisp binding. Near Fine.

Excerpt from Satoshi Machiguchi’s afterword The Spell Moves On, published at the conclusion of the book:

This book contains five of the seventeen essays that make up Life on the Wrong Side of Town: Sports Edition, which originally appeared as a series in the magazine Mondai Shosetsu (“Problem Novels,” published by Tokuma Shoten) in 1975 and was then published as a single volume by Shinyosha in 1982, the year before Terayama passed away. This text is accompanied by Moriyama’s photographs.

While putting this project together, I went back to Terayama’s words as expressed in many literary forms—haiku, tanka, poetry, ruminations, essays, novels, scripts, theatrical productions and dramas. The enormous volume and quality of his output was overwhelming, but I eventually settled on this work, Life on the Wrong Side of Town: Sports Edition. The reason lay in this passage from the Afterword:

“This book is a kind of rear window view of the life of what we call sportsmen. From the rear window you can see the river. Sometimes you can see people saying goodbye. But however miserable the view is, you have to keep the rear window open.”