I'm not sure whom these people are who are calling this sorry excuse for a book a masterpiece, but, let me tell you, it's far from. First of all, the photos are poor, grainy, amateurish, rather than stark and beautiful. The reader is given no frame of context. Instead of a book of pictures telling a story, you're given a lot of random images, which apparently aim to get by on shock value alone. Problem being, if it is your desire to see these types of images, you can probably find them somewhere on the Internet for free, with better photography and better sense of place--and in color. Therefore, Tokyo Sex Underground fails on that level. It offers nothing we haven't seen before. My hope from this book was to learn something about a world that I would probably never see, to get the sense that I'm a voyeur in a place I could never have access to. Instead I felt like a sucker who just wasted money on cheap, crappy pseudo porn. Honestly, I saw more Tokyo sex underground wandering the streets of Shinjuku. It was far more interesting and I didn't have to drop 16 bones to see it.
