Sentimental Journey by Nobuyoshi Araki, 2016 reprint edition

Originally self-published in 1971 and reissued here in facsimile by Kawade Shobo Shinsha in 2016, Sentimental Journey is Nobuyoshi Araki’s foundational work—a raw, intimate, and now-legendary photo diary of his honeymoon with his wife Yoko. Shot over five days in the early months of their marriage, the book documents everything: their hotel room, train rides, meals, sex, boredom, tenderness. The photographs are small, grainy, and direct—bound together by a radical, confessional sincerity that shaped Japanese photographic culture for decades to follow.

Unlike Araki’s later work, where eroticism often turns theatrical or provocative, Sentimental Journey is restrained and emotionally naked. The photographs feel like they were made not to be seen, but to be kept—as if the viewer is trespassing gently on a private world. It is not just a love story, but the beginning of a lifelong photographic mourning, one that would echo painfully in his later book Sentimental Journey / Winter Journey, made after Yoko’s death.

This 2016 edition replicates the original format with high fidelity, down to the kraft paper cover and the sequence of 108 images. In the Darwin archive, Sentimental Journey stands as a primary document of 20th-century Japanese photography—quiet, vulnerable, and unshakably honest.

Technical Sheet
Title: Sentimental Journey
Artist / Author: Nobuyoshi Araki
Date: 2016 (originally 1971)
Technique / Printing Method: Offset
Medium / Materials: Softcover with obi strip
Dimensions (cm): approx. 21 × 18
Language: Japanese
Pages: 108 images
Publisher / Editor: Kawade Shobo Shinsha
Condition: Near fine