This is a project that my friend Maria and I have been working on for years. Maria takes artistic photos, and that is what she did when she took her first trip to Japan back in 2018. She could have published these photos as a regular collection as she had done with photos of her other trips, but I was honored to be invited to write essays to accompany her photos for this collection. What she wanted was not casual captions to describe or explain the photos; rather she wanted me to engage with her photos as a Proustian moment and tell my personal narrative based on my memories evoked by these pictures. At that time, I had been living in North America for more than 20 years, and Japan was more of a childhood memory. So writing these essays was a major undertaking, and it required me to research, prod my memory, talk to my family, and reflect on my relationship with Japan. So my recherche is also deeply personal, but my goal was to use my personal memory and reflections to offer insights into Japanese society and culture, while simultaneously providing the context for Maria’s pictures. I hope I was able to do justice to Maria’s beautiful pictures and enhance the reader’s appreciation of them.
The book is now available both in print and digital editions.