My pinhole photographs featured in the visual book “Ichiyo ni aitakute (I want to meet Ichiyo” (published by Kawade Shobo Shinsha 2007) were produced over a year from 2006 with the cooperation of Pola and were later exhibited at its gallery “Pola Museum Annex” for a month along with the models that were the subjects of my photographs.
These are one-twentieth-scale reproductions of the homes of Higuchi Ichiyo (1872-1896), one of Japan's leading female writers of modern literature, and the settings of her novels, created by Hiroshi Miura (1926-2019), a master cypress craftsman.
Last year, 17 years after the publication of the book, all of my pinhole photographs in the book, along with Hiroshi Miura's model, were donated to the Yamanashi Prefectural Museum of Literature, where Higuchi Ichiyo's parents were born.
I hope that the small but elaborately detailed space and the magic of the pinhole photographs, which depict the house as if it were a real house, will help visitors to remember the Meiji era in which Ichiyo Higuchi lived.
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