Introduction
Yomogi soshi
And who might you be?
One day, a single weed popped up along a route I often took to school.
Rainy season had just begun, and the weed was shooting up, taller each time I saw it.
I looked forward to monitoring the progress of that weed day-in, day-out as I passed by each morning and evening.
I wondered what landscape the weed saw – roots burrowed in the ground, spending its entire existence in the same place, unable to take a single independent step – and what it looked at.
Lowering my camera to its level, lying flat on the ground, I peered through the viewfinder.
Captured in the square frame, looked at, the weed was in turn looking.
The weed's name was himemukashi-yomogi – Canadian fleabane.
Having encountered this specimen of yomogi I started noticing other weeds unobtrusively growing wild about the place.
From the rainy season into summer, I set out to check out different paths, eager to encounter their tiny presences.
After a while I noticed that the yomogi had fallen over. I continued to photograph it, whatever state it was in. Then one morning, it had disappeared without trace.
That weed fulfilled its life, albeit short, and even now, as if searching for its reincarnated form, I find my eyes drawn to other yomogi, on other, different paths.
Memories all mine, of which no one else knows: sometimes they threaten to melt, mirage-like, in the heat of that hot summer, yet our conversation, like a series of trysts, is captured on film, crystal-clear and evidence-like.
