The Grass Garden

I am deep in the mountains at the western end of Shimane Prefecture. This is where Yuki lives.

Everywhere I look, I am surrounded by the color green.
Around me are mountains and rolling hills, and in between them, rivers, paths, and roads where animals come and go.
I had heard before that plants communicate with each other. Here, I begin to feel as if we are all just tiny beings living in the world of the mountains.

I always try to let people be themselves in front of my camera, free from doubt or self-consciousness. I believe it only really works if what I expect of my subjects also applies to me. Being ourselves means trusting each other.
I often borrow techniques from the theater to help build that trust. But here, there was no need.
All we needed to do was surrender to the present moment. Yuki understood this well.
She had been so used to it already that she didn’t need to understand it first.

Yuki runs the restaurant Kusa no Niwa together with her mother. Every day, they cook and bake using vegetables grown in their fields, herbs and plants from the forest, and small fish and freshwater crabs from the nearby Takatsu River. Her mother built this place thirty years ago. In the garden, wild mountain flowers bloom across the ground, smiling up at me from below.
Everything here is infused with a gentle sense of freedom. Nothing feels forced; everything flows naturally. This is how Yuki grew up.

Together, we spent time beneath the trees, with light filtering through the leaves above, walked through fields lit by the evening sun, and relaxed in the quiet shadows of the old farmhouse. With the many valleys and marshes around us, I had to be careful not to lose my footing.
On my camera, the bright and lightweight 12mm F1.4 ultra-wide lens felt like an extension of myself. I began to move without thinking and let my senses take over.

I also headed toward a spring, then to a secluded waterfall. I could sense the forest getting deeper by the way the wind changed. I passed a bench that must have been placed long ago. But no one would sit on it again now. The forest had begun to reclaim it as its own: an ending, but also the beginning of new life.

As I approached the basin of the waterfall, the leaves and plants around it swayed gently, as if to welcome me. It felt like a scene from an anime, where the protagonist meets the spirits of the forest in a strange land. I was neither scared nor unsettled. Perhaps my imagination had helped soften the moment.
I couldn’t say how much time I spent there. I stayed until the night brought in a different wind.

In the mountains, we become aware of both nature’s vastness and its intricacy.
We are reminded how important it is not to lose sight of either. With the Sigma 12mm F1.4 DC | Contemporary, I could capture both with a single lens.