Soo... I managed to download Shinjiro's second photobook, the one that was a limited edition thing, and which, according to that interview he gave, apparently has nude shots. (But there aren't that many, really; most of the book seems composed of clothed or just topless shots.)

Thing is, it really is quite tastefully done; I like the pictures (no, it's not just because he's in them; there're some of the Shanghai skyline as well, since that's where the setting of the "story" for the photobook is), but more than that, I love the text that they're paired with. There's a very subtle storyline that goes together with the pictures, and the first-person narration of the text, combined with the lovely photos, is what I really love about this.

There was that Tokyohive article where Shinjiro described the photobook as the story of "a young boy who matures after being trained by an older woman". I was kind of "Umm... what?!?" at that, because really, am I the only one who thinks that sounds more like "young boy corrupted by older woman"...? LOL.

So, was a bit wary of what I'd find in the pictures, although I was curious to see them.
(I'm not posting any of the pictures here. I found them in an online fan community which only grants access to it to its members, so as a matter of courtesy, I'm not reposting.)

What I found was kind of unexpected, but in a good way. I'm not sure about the boy (which is how I'll refer to him from here on, because it honestly doesn't feel like Shinjiro in the book; it's more like he's just modelling for the role) being "trained", but the little bits of text interspersed among the very beautiful pictures make it seem more like the story of  an older woman and a younger man who like each other, but seem to have a strange roundabout way of expressing it. Or not expressing it.

There're pictures of the boy in a dingy kitchen, a just-barely-modest living room, and text which says that he grew up in these kinds of working-class surroundings. And it was here that he came to like a woman, a foreigner.

And that mention of the environment which the boy grew up in kind of reminds me of those lines in E.M. Forster's "A Passage to India", when I was studying it for A Levels. The exact lines escape me, since I last touched the book some 8 years ago, but it ran somewhere along the lines of how beauty could sometimes be found in the most rural, primeval, bare-essential of places, where one would least expect it.

And that seems to be the story of this photobook, to some extent.
(As practice for myself, I translated the text that I could make out from the pictures.)

An older high-society woman from another country, who seems to have found an unexpected love in a younger man of a poorer background, in this new land that she's come to. They don't say it, but there's a chemistry that drives them together, which prompts her to bring him to these high-class hotels with panoramic city views from their windows, and which makes him actually turn up there, dressed in suits which he most probably didn't buy on his own.

「ここで、待っていてもいい？」
"Can I wait for you here?"

彼と出会うずっと前から、男にそうされることを望んでいた。
Before I met him, I'd always wished for a man like this.

It shows in the way that her hands with her dark-red-lacquered nails touch his face, and the way that he smiles at her. But they don't say it openly. And maybe they both just remain as some kind of hope for the other, a kind of hope for a different kind of life.

ぼくもいつか、飛ぶ。
Someday, I will fly.

Someday, maybe he will. And maybe so will she.

Such is the beauty of things that are not said.