Love & Free: Words & Photos collected from the streets around the world

Ayumu Takahashi
One Peace Books (2009)
ISBN 9780978508470
Reviewed by Ali Neshati for Reader Views (7/09)


I really wanted to enjoy this book... I really, truly did. But despite its simple charms, “Love & Free,” the quaint collection of quotations, photographs, poems by Ayumu Takahashi, filled me with far more confusion than it did wanderlust.

The book’s premise is thrilling to say the least. A newlywed husband and wife quit their jobs and go on an epic globetrotting adventure, chronicling their journey in the form of a travel journal - an undeniably romantic notion, and one that holds considerable literary potential. For all its promise, however, “Love & Free” comes across as a disjointed exercise in self-indulgence that cuts one too many corners yet begs to be taken seriously.

In many ways, everything you see before the book even begins is a snapshot of the dissonance to come, from the cover’s informal subtitle asking the reader if they “Wanna see the world?” to the “Forward” which contains the following laughable disclaimer: “From an English viewpoint, the grammatical errors, such as tenses and pronouns, are deliberately translated to convey the Japanese original as is, in hopes that the reader will sense the reality of the writing. In addition, for those words that cannot be directly translated into English or can only be expressed in Japanese, footnotes were not added to preserve the general tone and feeling of this work. In doing so, additional explanations in English are not included.” Weak rationalizations, no doubt intended to justify lazy editing and further obfuscate some otherwise forgettable nuggets of beach chair philosophy.

This laziness is pervasive throughout the entire book; not even the art is spared. A substantial number of the photographs in “Love & Free” are pixilated or “blocky” beyond what could (or should) reasonably be expected from any published work. Whenever I began to be the least bit sucked into the book--even the least bit immersed in a stanza or a clever turn of phrase--I was jolted back to reality by something that looked like a beginning art student's late class project. For a book that contains over 170 photos, the poor image quality on display is a crushing blow. Reading this book was disappointing, to say the least.

To be fair, “Love & Free” does contain its high points. Many of Takahashi’s poems are quite nice, and the photographs of people and geography showcased throughout the book are beautiful and artistic for the most part. I just wish the book’s highs were consistently high. As it stands, however, the only thing truly consistent about “Love & Free” is its inconsistency.

Make comment on weblog