Every Corner Watched Over

It’s not only creepy old men like me who derive genuine pleasure from animated Japanese women—large eyes, larger everything else, answering to names like Asuka or Nami or Chie. Girls in Tokyo are just as devoted to their drawn counterparts, maybe more so, covering entire apartments in posters and figures and body pillows printed with the faces of whoever they’ve been obsessed with longest. The otaku bedroom as a total environment. Every surface claimed.

Photographer Shiori Kawamoto visited a number of these women and turned the project into a book—room portraits, essentially, each space functioning as a kind of autobiography rendered in merchandise and fan art. What I find interesting about his framing is that he doesn’t treat any of this as a problem to be diagnosed. For him, these rooms are genuine alternative worlds, built on the logic that wherever you look, something looks back. There’s a specific warmth in that, once you sit with it. A lot of people live surrounded by things that mean nothing to them. These rooms aren’t that.