Images of dead rodents, gushing waterfalls and swarms of moths, alongside street scenes of children and stray dogs leaping into the lens. Eriko Masaoka’s new book “In the Flap of a Bird's Wing, Water Dries Up,” shot largely in remote corners of Japan, treads a line between life and death. She tells Marigold Warner how, influenced by the animistic beliefs of Japanese culture, she captured everything, whether dead animals, inanimate objects or living humans, with the same effervescent life and haunting energy.
Eriko’s project will be on show at KANZAN Gallery in Tokyo from 10 October to 2 November.
They say the closer you are to death, the more you feel alive. The sentiment feels true in Eriko Masaoka’s latest book. A rush of gritty black-and-white, the sequence feels as though traveling through a kind of purgatory, where morbidity and mortality linger in equal measure. Masaoka made many of these photographs over a decade ago, while living with an indigenous community in Hokkaido and around other peripheral places in Japan and abroad. Now, they are published for the first time as a collection of 61 photographs, whittled down from thousands. Masaoka finally invites us into this mysterious world, a glimpse into her unique worldview and the unusual journeys that shaped it.
The idea that everything in nature has a spirit, and should be respected—it’s something that’s part of the base of Japanese culture.
The photographer began shooting the project back in 2005, after graduating from a photography course in Osaka. She was in her early 20s, and found herself drawn to scenes that “felt connected by the same energy.” This driving force—raw, primal, instinctive—was deeply shaped by her travels to Hokkaido, Japan’s northernmost island. Masaoka first went there to work on a farm, where she hoped to witness a cow in labor. “I was fascinated by the idea of seeing an animal give birth,” she says. “The intensity of it—this enormous, powerful event… At that point, I hadn’t given birth myself yet, and I think I wanted to experience that raw force—what it really means to bring life into the world.”
After her time on the farm, Masaoka joined a university friend in a nearby indigenous village. She didn’t know anything about the Ainus—an ethnic group native to north Japan—but she had nowhere else to be, and after years of living in busy cities, she felt disconnected and burnt out. “Suddenly, I was immersed in something totally different,” she says. “It felt like entering a whole new world… Everything was unfamiliar and intense.” She ended up living there for two months, chopping firewood and eating from the land. “I felt like a totally different person,” she says. “After that, I started saving up money in Tokyo, then going back to Hokkaido whenever I could to shoot. It became a cycle.”
Over the next decade, Masaoka embarked on even more adventures. She walked the famous Kumano Kodo pilgrimage—where she discovered bones of a wild boar—and bought cheap train tickets to remote corners of the country. She traveled by motorbike—as far as Aomori in the north and Kagoshima in the south—for two months, carrying a tent and camping at roadside stations. Eventually she went to France, Iceland and the Azores, capturing a similar energy in these landscapes.
Even in the fraction of a second when a bird flaps its wings, or when water is drying up, there is a life force that continues to burn.
With time Masaoka’s work has become synonymous with Animism, the belief that all objects, places and creatures possess a spiritual essence. She only adopted the term herself in 2016, when a photography critic used it to describe the unnamable force behind her images. “The idea that everything in nature has a spirit, and should be respected—it’s something that’s part of the base of Japanese culture,” she reflects. “Even if I wasn’t consciously thinking about it, the way I was seeing the world was already animistic.”
Her thoughts on analog photography share frequencies with Animist thinking too. “There’s just something essential about the whole process,” she says. “In the darkroom, your whole body is involved—preparing chemicals, washing prints—all of it requires physical engagement.” For this book, Masaoka took the process even further by rephotographing her prints through a shoji screen, a traditional Japanese room divider made of thin paper and wood. This added even more texture to the grain of the images, which she describes as being “alive.”
It all ties back to that fickle line between life and death, which in part inspired the book’s title: “In the Flap of a Bird’s Wing, Water Dries Up.” While working on the farm all those years ago, Masaoka found a mouse that had been beaten with a shovel. “The mouse was on the brink of death, but I had the illusion that something like steam, its life force, was rising from its body… Every cell seemed to be burning with a will to survive,” she recalls. In that moment she realized that the energy of life exists in everything—humans, mice, insects, trees and flowers. Perhaps then, it is not a trepidation of death that rushes through these photos. It is life, burning through each grain and blur. “Even in the fraction of a second when a bird flaps its wings, or when water is drying up, there is a life force that continues to burn—to rise like vapor.”