Kikuji Kawada was 25 years old when he first visited Hiroshima. It was July 1958, and he had been assigned to help Ken Domon, a renowned photographer 14 years his older, by a Japanese news magazine. As Domon worked in and around Hiroshima Peace Park, Kawada was drawn to the ruined shell of a once ornate, steel-framed building that had been badly damaged but remained standing when the United States dropped the first atomic bomb on the city at 8.15 a.m. on August 6, 1945, obliterating everything else within a mile radius.

"That's when I discovered the stains on the walls of the rooms beneath the dome," he would later recall. The bomb was dropped almost immediately above the Hiroshima Prefectural Industrial Promotion Hall, which was then known as the Hiroshima Prefectural Industrial Promotion Hall.

Kawada realized, alone among the gloomy ruins, that the soiled walls carried the only traces of some of the deceased. “There were about 30 people (who) had arrived for work and ended up vaporized when the place was destroyed,” he told Aperture magazine in 2015.

The atmosphere in the establishment was deplorable. It was overpowering just looking at it.”

Kawada then returned to Hiroshima with a large format 4x5 plate camera and began photographing the spooky shapes on what is now known as the Genbaku (A-Bomb) Dome, a tribute to the victims of the bombing, using only natural light entering through the damaged dome overhead. The so-called "stain" images are the emotional and conceptual dark heart of Kawada's book Chizu (The Map), which was first published in an edition of 500 in 1965.

"It's the holy grail of Japanese photobooks," says British photographer Martin Parr.

Parr, an enthusiastic photobook collector, discovered a rare original imprint in a bookshop on the outskirts of Tokyo in the late 1990s. "It cost me £10,000, and it's now worth around £25,000," he says.

“The ultimate example of the photobook as art object,” he says. The images, the ambitious design, the amazing use of gatefolds, and just the wonderful intricacy of it all tick all the boxes."

The original edition of The Map, designed by Khei Sugiura, is a work of intricate beauty and disturbing intensity. The two gatefolds spread out to reveal images that seem resonant with deeper significance, and the book is printed in high contrast black and white.

Grainy views of everyday objects – Coca-Cola bottles stuck in the ground, a crumpled Lucky Strike cigarette package, a trampled Japanese flag – relate to the cultural disruption caused by American imperialism. Photographs of wrecked buildings viewed from below at weird angles, brutalist concrete bunkers, and ribbons of twisted scrap metal emerge, barely recognisable, from pages of inky blackness, evoking the pain of WWII.

His images of the stains have an abstract quality to them, with a dark, frightening vibe that is as far from from typical photojournalism as one can go.

Kawada took five years to make The Map, which is a personal archeology of postwar Japan's social suffering that is both intensely resonant and willfully elusive. Despite this, the photographer eventually "expressed a degree of ambivalence about the book that became his calling card," as Joshua Chang, senior curator of photography at the New York Public Library, writes in his introduction to a new edition.

Instead, he preferred the two-volume maquette he had originally developed but abandoned as his cooperation with Sugiura grew."

The handmade maquette was purchased by the Current York Public Library in 2001, and the new Mack edition of the book is a reproduction of it. It's a completely different artefact: a two-volume book (with an accompanying volume of texts) that's twice as big as the first, with different tones and picture crops, and no gatefolds, which were so important to the first edition's willfully disruptive narrative push.

Instead, a series of full-bleed photos is presented in the style of a typical photobook. The maquette version, on the other hand, is superbly crafted and distinctly Japanese, dating from an era of wild and irreverent image-making and design.

Kawada was a founding member of the Vivo collective in 1959, and was part of a pioneering group of Japanese photographers that included Eikoh Hosoe and Shomei Tomatsu, whose influence lasted until the Provoke era in the late 1960s.

"In the 1960s and 1970s, Japan had the most exciting photobook publishing," recalls Parr. "The extraordinary innovation of Japanese photographers and designers was all but ignored until the 1980s, which speaks volumes about the arrogance of the west."

The Map is now widely considered as the emblem of that era's Japanese photobooks."

Chizu (Maquette Edition) is the closest we'll get to the visceral, frightening force of the first edition for all save the most ardent collectors. It's a lovely object in and of itself, but its visual mapping of history, pain, memory, and horror appears to be less cryptic and multifaceted than its more meticulously crafted predecessor.

Whatever the distinctions, though, the dark insight that marked The Map’s genesis resonates just as powerfully in both situations.

"I felt like I had encountered this terrifying, unknown place," Kawada remembers in an interview that accompanies the newly published version. I had the impression that I could hear faint voices mixed in with the wind and cracking sounds coming from the wall."

As you turn the pages, you can almost feel his uneasiness.

Thanks to Sean O’Hagan at The Guardian whose reporting provided the original basis for this story.