Record No. 26

This is the issue in which Moriyama finally turns his camera on his own neighbourhood, and finds it does not feel like Shinjuku at all.

Published by Akio Nagasawa Publishing in 2014, 90 pages, softcover, at 27.8 x 22.0 cm, Record No. 26 collects black-and-white street photographs made in Ikebukuro and the districts beside it. Moriyama explains in his afterword that he had moved into an old apartment building in what is now West Ikebukuro more than ten years earlier but had given his attention almost entirely to Shinjuku, rarely going there at all; a picture he happened to like, taken on a walk in the spring of 2013, made him aware it would be a waste not to shoot his home ground, and he spent more than a year prowling the area. What he found was that although both are major terminal districts, the air in the streets differs, and the body temperature of the people in Ikebukuro suits his own. He summarises the result as lovable Ikebukuro, redoubtable Ikebukuro.

Moriyama began Kiroku in 1972 as a private counterweight to his commercial magazine work, abandoned it after five issues, and revived the series with Nagasawa decades later. The collection also holds Record No. 31, No. 32 and No. 34.