[3] Sean O'Hagan wrote that "broke the traditions of photojournalism and landscape photography, leading it towards a more experimental, often polemical form.
Brett Rogers, director of The Photographers' Gallery, London, has said it is a "deeply moving and highly original investigation into a seminal moment in Japanese history.
1, Martin Parr and Gerry Badger describe Chizu as being amongst four books that "constitute photography's most significant memorials to the defining event in twentieth-century Japanese history" and that it is "the ultimate photobook-as-object, combining a typical Japanese attention to the art of refined packaging with hard-hitting photography, text and typography – a true photo-text piece.
By turns impressionistic and surreal, the book demands a degree of patient, silent contemplation that echoes the act of remembering.
"[7] O'Hagan wrote of The Last Cosmology (1995) that "the strange skies full of lunar portents, forks of lightning, fleeting meteorites and blocked out suns are a kind of mirror of Kawada's brooding, troubled soul.