SHINE: Arisa Hoshiki MyStar Stardom Photobook Review


Starting in late 2018, Stardom began a new photobook series called MyStar with their top wrestlers getting their own smaller photobook all to themselves. Arisa Hoshiki was the seventh wrestler to be featured in the series, following Mayu Iwatani, Starlight Kid, Hazuki, Jungle Kyona, Momo Watanabe, and Utami Hayashishita. SHINE: Arisa Hoshiki was released in April 2019. You can read reviews for all the MyStar Series photobooks released so far on the Joshi Photobook Reviews page.

Full Photobook Details

Title: SHINE: Arisa Hoshiki from the Stardom MyStar Series
Release: April 2019
Pages: 30
Cost: ¥2,000 (or for $20.00)
Where to Buy: Third Party Vendors

As mentioned above, these are smaller (and cheaper) photobooks than Stardom usually puts out, however that does not mean the quality of the photobook is negatively impacted. Stardom at this point has become almost as good at producing photobooks as they are at producing wrestling shows, and the effort put into this photobook shows this. Even though the photobook features a single wrestler, there are still multiple scenes/scenarios presented that fit the personality of the wrestler so its not just random scenes chosen at the whim of the photographer.

At the time of this review, Arisa Hoshiki just won the Wonder of Stardom Championship, so her stock in Stardom is on the way up. This is a well done photobook, one of Arisa Hoshiki’s best features is her smile and she flashed it plenty throughout. For such a short photobook they still did a lot of outfit changes, eight total, so that the photos never feel stale or repetitive. The shots range from the beach to a studio, and like the other photobooks is pretty clean of anything controversial. As the point of the series is to highlight the individual wrestlers, I think this book did that job well for Arisa, although I wouldn’t have minded as we get deep into the series a bit more to differentiate it from the books that came prior. Here is a sample of photos from the photobook: