With more than 8 million users per day, Tokyo’s subways are a pulsating aorta supplying the city with life. Since his student days, Masakazu Murakami has been capturing the scenes unfolding underground as a fellow passenger.

Murakami kept shooting as Japan entered its long recession after the burst of the Bubble, the people at the other end of his gaze seemingly lost in a city without exits, drifting through Tokyo’s subway system as if it were an endless sea.

With Tokyo embracing the milestone year of 2020, having switched to a new imperial era after thirty Heisei years, will the figure drawn by Murakami’s Subway Diary be one of the past or one of the future?