Miyako Ishiuchi underwent an experience in her late 20s that was, if not entirely unique, certainly highly unusual: She became entranced with photography because of its smell.

It was 1975, six years since she had abandoned an art degree at the height of nationwide student protests. Not sure what to do next, Ishiuchi had been bouncing from one odd job to another when she walked into a dark room for the first time and immediately felt at home.

In part, it was the running water, which reminded her of washing newly dyed thread at Tama Art University. Most of all, however, it was the smell of acetic acid, the fixing agent used to halt printing in black-and-white photography. It was the same chemical she had used to fix animal dyes as a weaving student.

"I thought, 'That's a familiar smell,' and it dawned on me that there was a big overlap between photography and fabric dyeing," Ishiuchi said.

With that in mind, she picked up a camera, and in quick succession produced three award-winning collections.

After hitting a creative wall in the early 1980s, she regained her footing and since has seen both her early and more recent work shown at top museums worldwide. "Time Textured in Monochrome," a retrospective of her photography at the National Museum of Modern Art's Film Center in Tokyo, vividly illustrates why: She has the rare ability to awe, shock and delight.

After a less than perfect childhood, Ishiuchi approached photography as something akin to self-therapy, and for her first major collection turned her lens on Yokosuka. She had moved there from Gunma Prefecture when she was 6 and stayed until she was 18.

It was a time when the town was racked by violence, and she quickly came to hate it. As the United States stepped up the Vietnam War, its base in Yokosuka swelled with soldiers letting off steam.

Growing up, Ishiuchi was confused and later angered by her mother's stern but vague warnings not to go to Dobuita-dori, a street lined with cheap drinking spots controlled by Japanese gangsters and popular with U.S. troops.

"Back then the attitude was that if a woman walked along Dobuita-dori, well, she was asking to be raped," Ishiuchi said.

At the same time, Yokosuka was a magnet for Japanese opposition to the war, and to the U.S. military in general. Yet Ishiuchi ignored almost all of this in her impressionistic record of the town, focusing instead on images that hint at why she found it anathema. In one photograph she shows the peeling facade of a store, in another a forlorn housing development.

In her next two collections Ishiuchi photographed the "rabbit hutches" many people lived in after World War II and the red-light districts. As with "Yokosuka Story," both projects were deeply personal, and when she completed them in 1980 she felt as though she'd exorcised her teenage demons. She liked Yokosuka for the start it gave to her career. She accepted growing up in a dank six-mat room with her parents and a sibling, and by photographing the exteriors of bordellos in Yokosuka and elsewhere came to understand her femininity.

"Femininity isn't something a woman comes to terms with on her own. She learns about it from her surroundings," Ishiuchi said. "When I went to the red-light districts and realized that I was a woman with a body that I could sell, it was a huge shock to me. I feel that's where I finally grew up."

The only trouble was that she had run out of subjects that interested her. She struggled for the next seven years and it wasn't until 1987 when she turned 40 that she stumbled across fresh inspiration. "Forty is a strange age. You're not young, but you're not old either. You've lost some of the energy you used to have, but life is somehow easier. You're more comfortable and you're still healthy," she said. "I wanted to photograph time. You can't see time, but with my own eyes I wanted to see how people 'wore' their 40 years. In the end I settled on photographing hands and feet. They're our extremities. They are tough, individual and beautiful."

From there it was only a short leap to her latest and arguably most ambitious project: photographing human scars as art. As a child, Ishiuchi was left with a large scar after an operation to remove a ruptured appendix, and the more scars she came across in the course of photographing people's hands and feet, the more she came to see them as things of meaning and beauty. In particular, she saw them as markers of time, because people invariably remembered in great detail when, how and where they'd been scarred. Moreover, for Ishiuchi, scars came to represent human resilience and the will to live.

"To say you have a large scar is the same as saying you've had a near-death experience, battled through it and live on," she said.

Looking back, Ishiuchi feels she has always been photographing scars, her own psychological ones in her early work, and literal ones more recently. Indeed, some critics have characterized her work as overly dark. She concedes it can often seem that way in books and magazines, but insists the original prints, which she still makes herself, better reflect her positive intentions. Either way, she intends to continue photographing scars for a few more years, and only hopes she doesn't spend another decade looking for a project after that.