Shiretoko Peninsula, 2022. From 2018 onward, a brown bear repeatedly entered residential areas over a period of four years, attacking dogs tethered in front yards.

Tracing the presence of this bear, I installed trail cameras deep in the mountains while continuing to walk through the town at night, where bears were known to appear.

Moving back and forth between the forest and the town, I gradually began to sense the ambiguity of the boundary believed to separate human habitation from the wild.

Had they already been quietly passing beside us long before humans became aware of them? Perhaps what we believed to be emptiness was not absence, but simply something unseen.

“Jyonokuchi” is not a document about the bear itself. Rather, it traces the gradual destabilization of a world once taken for granted. Through night landscapes, infrared photographs, and traces left behind, the work follows the presence of something that can never be fully grasped.

As viewers turn the pages, they move repeatedly between the nighttime town and the nighttime forest, crossing the threshold between what is seen and what remains unseen.

This artist book serves as the prologue to an ongoing long-term research project.