Hatching night chirps Kisei KOBAYASHI AKAAKA/2019/Japanese/280 × 220 × 10 mm Noriharu Kobayashi's series of photographs of festivals and rituals throughout Japan has finally been collected in one book. Following in the footsteps of "The Boat That Came from Far Away," which won the 22nd Tadahiko Hayashi Award, this book contains about 40 scenes of festivals, ranging from relatively well-known festivals to strange local festivals hidden in the local area. The work captures the impulse to go back to the depths of the senses, seeing the intersection of festival and reality in the figures that appear as something other than human beings, deeply burdened by darkness. What attracts the viewer's attention even more are the bodies hidden on the rocks, the nude bodies on the beach at night, and the shadows of costumed figures standing silently, perhaps waiting for their cue. The images are life-size, depicting figures standing on the border between the conscious and the unconscious, the mundane and the sacred. In this book, scenes appear from several tunnels and from inside a speeding car. Throughout the book, the viewer can feel the eyes moving through space, and at the same time, it appears to be a passageway to another world that leads one through everyday life and into the depths of the world. The back of the bus flashes back. The photographs themselves are also permeated with moments that attempt to transcend individual consciousness. Over the past six years, I have visited about 40 festivals and rituals throughout Japan. Many of them, which have been handed down from generation to generation, are often held in the dark, and it is not unusual for them to be held throughout the night. Whenever I am there, I am struck by a strange sensation. The people, scenery, and scenes in front of you are turned inside out. The present world and the other world are violently reversed. It is as if time and space are twisted and turned inside out, so that the present is next to a thousand years ago, or a hundred years in the future is next to a scene from a hundred years ago. When the participants transform into Malevito, a crack appears in the darkness, and we are sucked into the other world. And then, we witness the birth of something new.