For a long time, every house in this country was inhabited by the yokai known as Yanari, or “house-rattlers.” But as wooden houses gradually fell into decline, they came to be inhabited only by the hard of hearing elderly, and the voices of the house-rattlers could no longer be heard. The house-rattlers sometimes feel lonely about that. The protagonist of this work is a small yokai, only a few inches tall, called “Yanari,” which appears in Japanese folklore. It has long been believed that the strange creaking and other mysterious sounds sometimes heard inside houses are the work of these beings, who try to startle the residents. In Japan, people have long believed that the homes they live in, like the house-rattlers, contain unseen shadowy aspects, and they have feared them, calling them “oni” and treating them as something distant from everyday life. Today, this culture is fading, and the residents who once sensed “oni” have grown old, as if living on the side of the oni as shadows of modern, bright society. This work is a video piece that depicts the figures of elderly people being left behind by contemporary society and creatures from folklore, using effects of shadow and light. This is an animated work shot by physically moving dolls on location in my grandmother’s 80-year-old house in a depopulated port town. That house had long accepted and seen off many residents over its 80-year history, and because it still bore traces of the lives they had lived there, I always felt the presence of something “uncanny” whenever I heard a house-rattler in the house, and as a child I was always afraid. In this work, faint natural light, shadows, and the contrast of light and dark shining through the transom were used to create effective boundaries between bright and dark areas inside a Japanese house. I attempted to recreate the folklore creature moving between light and shadow using actual dolls, making it seem as if it truly existed. By filming the dolls at their actual size as the scale of “Yanari,” I aimed to blend our everyday world with the world of animation, and to visualize the eerie presence lurking within the Japanese house.

The Spirits of Cairn is a story imagined as a possible afterlife for a child who died young. The destination is a world between heaven and hell, with neither joy nor sorrow, something found in various religions, such as Sai no Kawara or the limbo of infants. The protagonist feels remorse for having died early, but remembers only the emotion itself, like an echo, and does not know how long he has been there, what he is there for, or the true nature of his lingering attachment. His task of mourning the countless heads resting in the ground continues endlessly.