Short hope is the result of three years that Maki Miyashita spent photographing the novelist Novala Takemoto. It is an intensely private look at his life: the first photograph shows the outside of his apartment door, and many of the photos were shot inside. Miyashita focuses on many of the details of Takemoto's room, which offers some insight into the character of this writer and musician who is also a pioneer of the recently popular Gothic and Lolita fashion trends. His apartment is strewn about with gothic accessories, figurines, paintings, clothes, shoes and books. It is not particularly romantic, and when we see Takemoto outside he does not look all that comfortable. Despite focusing on a single celebrity, Short hope is far from a mindless celebration of Takemoto's genius: it is a direct and sometimes difficult portrait of his existence. Miyashita writes that during those years she felt as if she were in a fictional world, yet this world was his reality, and the way he lived in it was fragile, lonely and strikingly beautiful; she felt she had been reading, through the camera, a novel titled his way of life.