Watabe Yūkichi spent twenty days in 1958 with a couple of policemen — Mukōda Tsutomu and his younger sidekick Midorikawa Katsumi — working on a murder investigation. You’ve probably heard the story (here): after some photographs from the series were published in 1958, the series was mostly forgotten in Japan (and Watabe’s work seemed entirely unknown elsewhere) until Parisian publication in 2011 of A criminal investigation. The book went down very well. In retrospect I’m surprised by the coolness of the welcome that I gave to it; I was better disposed to a different collection, 張り込み日記 (Harikomi nikki) = Stakeout diary, in 2013. Both books went out of print and have been reprinted at least once.

And now there’s a third collection, confusingly again titled 張り込み日記 (Harikomi nikki). I’ll call it Nikki2.

I can’t think of any precedent for this…