Here. Still. (The Book of Windows)

A ten-year project of wandering and isolation, longing and stillness, "Here. Still." is a story of loss felt through a presence of people not visible, of seeing life play out as if on a stage, but we sit in an empty theatre, on the inside of a window.

In the winter of 2000, when I was nineteen and a university student in Canada, my father suddenly passed away. At a loss for what to do next, upon graduating in 2002 with a degree in History, I moved back to my birthplace of Tokyo to start a career in finance.

A dozen years later, my career had taken me to New York, where it had reached a crossroad: I was burned out from the stresses of work and
had come out of a long-term relationship. I gave up the lease on my apartment, placed my things in storage and looked ahead to an uncertain future. I realized that I had never reconciled with the direction of my life after my father’s death. In 2015, I set out on the road, with just a backpack and suitcase, unsure where my path would take me.

My initial destination was the Southwest United States. There, I met the photographer Sam Abell. Under his tutelage, I found a photograph from 2009 that I had made in a hotel room at Lake Louise, Canada, a place my father used to take our family. I remembered being there, alone in that room and looking out at the late summer twilight and the turquoise lake and longing to see my father again.

I continued my journeys for nearly a thousand days, and as I did, I made photographs where I felt the presence of humanity inside a space, and the stillness of life unfolding beyond the window- inaccessible, as if on a screen in an empty theatre. I recalled my childhood growing up in the organized chaos that is Tokyo, looking out on the enormous city from my bedroom, which provided a safe distance from which to view the world, and my days trapped inside a crowded office, wanting to be outside.

There is a Japanese word: nukumori, a lukewarmness that might refer to the presence of someone who occupied a place but had departed: an empty chair, a tea cup, the inside of a bus or train car, and of course, the many hotels and motels where I found myself. Nothing in the series is staged; everything is just as I found it in real life.

The series has been exhibited in venues around the world including the Tokyo Photographic Art Museum in 2024, and a monograph is in the works.