In the 1960s and 1970s, a time of unrelenting economic development and generational change, Japan's urban landscapes underwent immense transformation in what Franz Prichard calls ‘the Cold War remaking of Japan’ (p. 2). In his remarkable book, Prichard shows how the endemic refunctioning of urban ecologies entailed new work practices and forms of embodiment and sociality and produced remarkably prescient new ways of seeing. Prichard explores the aesthetic tactics and literary discourses of the era, zooming in on key examples of experimental film, photography and modern fiction to discuss the consequential refigurations of politics, aesthetics, architecture and human subjectivity. Residual Futures makes a case for the residual presence and constant drive of the geopolitical and technological demands of the Cold War and shows how these off-centre renderings of spaces and events made urban transformation visible. His examples show a ‘sustained pursuit of decentered ways of seeing as a locus for continuously regenerating critical knowledge of, and forms of relating and becoming in, a world in constant flux’ (p. 118).

Residual Futures covers a lot of ground. The introduction examines the ‘residual vocabularies of practices…extracted from [and] unleashed in Japan's Cold War remaking’ (pp. 6–7). Prichard considers how visual and literary practices ‘generated new geopolitical and aesthetic vocabularies’ and have expressive ‘afterlives’ that shape the ‘pathways of possibility for thinking critically’ (p. 8). In this sense, the author hopes to think about Japan's urban remaking not only in relation to its representation in artistic practices, but how that very action created new forms of media and visualization in which the notion of landscape ‘named a radically expanded geopolitical imaginary’ (pp. 10–11). The chapters of the book consider these points in relation to keywords: infrastructural aesthetics, disappearance, landscape, urban overflows, threshold and residual futures.

Infrastructural aesthetics is discussed in chapter 1 via Tsuchimoto Noriaki's film On the Road: A Document (1964). Focusing on the work of taxi drivers and the ‘traffic wars’ in streets choked with cars and pollution, the film is part documentary and part ecological criticism, a ‘synthesis of documentary and avant-garde methods’ (cited p. 28). In chapter 2, Abe Kōbō's The Ruined Map (1967) is discussed using Maeda Ai's theory of literature in urban space. Prichard argues that ‘Abe's topological fiction mobilizes both novel sites (topoi) within the urbanized terrain and the emergence of a visual environment derived through a logic of abstraction to trace the forces at play in this transformation’ (p. 50). There is much to learn from Prichard's analysis here. Abe was also a playwright, photographer and musician, yet his critical reception has been constrained by its connections to existential fiction. Here the analysis focuses on how ‘the textual production…materializes and makes legible a logic of abstraction…[making] perceptible the sensory artifacts of urban transformation’ (p. 54).

The last three chapters of Residual Futures concern the work of photographer and essayist Nakahira Takuma, one of the founders of the influential magazine Provoke. Chapter 3 explores the discourse of ‘landscape’ in relation to Nakahira's 1970 photobook For a Language to Come. As Prichard argues: ‘[r]ather than gesturing to any sense of the “futurity” of a “new” language located beyond the text, the photobook instead sought to open up the relation between text and reader to an immanent form of crisis itself’ (p. 99). Crisis and a critical focus on decentring visuality is further discussed in chapter 4. Most of this chapter explores Nakahira's 1973 critical anthology Why an Illustrated Botanical Dictionary? alongside the large-scale photographic installation, Overflow (1974). Prichard argues that Nakahira's critical writings and exhibitions produce an awareness of excess and overflow. In comments that speak to the significance of his study as a whole, Prichard writes: ‘For Nakahira…photographic mediation constituted a radically open modality of seeing, a decentered relational medium of knowing and becoming in the world’ (p. 121). The question of openness and, contrasting this, the limits of what can be made meaningfully visible in the arts, is taken into the final chapter on Nakahira's writing and photography on ‘postreversion’ Okinawa. This closing body of work is seen as a limit point for Nakahira, and Prichard notes that the artist left Okinawa with doubts about photography's capacity ‘to confront and make sensible, the geopolitical thresholds at play’ (p. 161).

I cannot do justice to the depth of Prichard's arguments in a short review; suffice to say, his book draws new attention to a corpus of works from one of Japan's most formative eras and is an excellent addition to the current literature. Moreover, reading the era in relation to contemporary challenges of neoliberalism, control society and the Anthropocene (p. 197) is a relevant way of ending the study. Indeed, it is fitting that Prichard concludes with reference to the need for ‘multidimensional cartographies for the production of subjectivity’ (p. 207) as advanced by Felix Guattari.