Book Review: Tokyo Genso Art Works

Tokyo Genso is a Japanese artist known for depicting post apocalyptic versions of Tokyo. This is a book for those who love background art, environment design and Japanese anime-style background art.

The project started in 2008 and the first edition of this book was published in 2020 by Geijutsu Shinbunsha, with a reprint in 2024.

This is a beautiful artbook with environment of a deserted ruined Tokyo. It makes you wonder about the reasons why Tokyo was abandoned. There is a huge eight-legged alien in some artworks so that's probably the reason. The city streets and buildings are now being reclaimed back by nature, and animals have started moving back in.

It is interesting to see familiar and iconic sites being reimagined. There's a painting of Tokyo Station where the whole back of the station was completely gone and you can see the sun rays coming through the front windows. Many streets and train tracks are now under water. Many of the artworks reminded me of the movie I am Legend.

There are several pieces of artworks that seem out of place though. For example I saw a few brand new looking yachts above clean pristine clear water in front of an abandoned building that's almost covered by greenery. There are a handful of sci-fi scenes which feel quite out of place when they suddenly appear in the book. There are also a few artworks with hint that there could be humans around but in this book you don't see any humans at all.

One thing I noticed is there isn't much depiction of the famous Japanese suburbs that are so common in Japanese animation, and there aren't many temples. Most of the environment art are of the city buildings, commercial structures.

The end of the book has a short interview with the artist but all the text is in Japanese.

Here are direct links to the book:
Amazon.com | Amazon.ca | Amazon.co.uk | Amazon.de | Amazon.fr | Amazon.it | Amazon.es | Amazon.co.jp

This book was borrowed from Basheer Graphic Books for review purposes. You can order the book from them. Check with Basheer on Facebook.