Eriko Masaoka’s In the Flap of a Bird’s Wing, Water Dries Up is a meditative visual journey through landscapes both remote and familiar, captured over the course of ten years across Japan and beyond. In this quietly powerful body of work, distinctions between human, animal, object, and nature blur into a shared state of being—each presence rendered with equal dignity and imbued with breath. The book suggests an animistic worldview, where even the briefest form of life, like a single raindrop, holds meaning and vitality, regardless of how fleeting its existence may be.
Photographed in places as diverse as Hokkaido, Okinawa (including the islands of Iriomote and Aguni), Kagoshima, Kikaijima, the Tōhoku region (Akita, Aomori, Nagano, Niigata), Tokyo, Osaka, and Mount Kōya, as well as in distant lands like Rotterdam in the Netherlands, Gullfoss in Iceland, and the Azorean archipelago of Macaronesia, the book unfolds like a visual poem—introspective, spacious, and elemental.
The artist’s travels were not led by a defined purpose but rather by intuition: she followed her thoughts, arriving in places almost by chance, letting each environment shape the images that emerged. People, animals, buildings, and natural forms appear less as subjects and more as fellow presences, coexisting in a gentle rhythm that runs throughout the book.