Tokyo: A Certain Style

(Tokyo: A Certain Style by Kyoichi Tsuzuki.)

For Christmas, I bought Ryan a copy of Tokyo: A Certain Style by Kyoichi Tsuzuki.  It’s a fascinating photography book that features the apartments of regular people living in Tokyo, Japan, where space is limited and housing is incredibly expensive.  I love taking house tours on Apartment Therapy and various design sites because it’s interesting to see how other people live, so I “borrowed” this book as soon as Ryan opened it on Christmas morning.

In Tsuzuki’s book, he profiles many single people who either spend all of their time at home working, or none at all.  There are families so obsessed with anime characters that their collections have taken over their homes, vintage album collectors who carefully catalog their records but don’t ever take out the trash, and university students who live in neat and tidy apartments within walking distance to a public bath.

It’s an incredible glimpse inside a densely populated city and a culture so different from my own, and it was so much fun to read.  In fact, the book actually fell apart as I perused it over the holidays (due to a design flaw), so Amazon graciously sent us a new copy.  It’s still on Ryan’s night stand, and I might have to borrow it again soon, just for fun.