shashasha

The first picture in Japanese photographer Natsuko Tajika’s photobook “On the morning of the second time” shows the bathroom in her parents’ house. This is where the beloved family dog died in the beginning of summer, and it is where Natsuko, when she was three years old, witnessed her grandfather die in front of her. The e-mail from her parents informing her of the dog’s death brought up vague memories from her childhood, as if intertwined with this very bathroom. “The sultry stickiness of the bathroom,” she writes in her afterword, “made life and death more immediate than under sunny skies.”
Her series begins in that bathroom, the strange connecting place, and becomes a short meandering story through the incidental moments that are the texture of lived life — details, scenes, instants.

“[I]t felt as if the days would pass, and this event too would become distant, like water flowing from a tap, like a river flowing from upstream to downstream.”

All texts included in Japanese and English translation.