The summation of a lifework that questions human existence. For many years Taishi Hirokawa has tried to express human existence and activity in relation to the earth and to the cosmos, and this book has a sharper critical edge: landscapes where people have destroyed nature, landscapes where nature tries to take back its place (and sometimes natural disasters), landscapes brought about by earthquake and nuclear power, infrastructure, urban scrap-and-build. Artefacts, at times of overwhelming beauty, are seen as abrupt and rootless presences, and the various human acts on the surface of the earth are surveyed as if from above. The photographs, in which almost no people appear, are a message to a humanity heading for the future. In his text Our Place the novelist Keiichiro Hirano describes the work as an extremely stoic approach: man-made objects set in nature have an indescribable tedium, their orderly geometry is at a loss, and the glare of the modern ambition to conquer nature has already become inertia, leaving a bleak result.