A complex work on spirituality and history in Okinawa, the islands south of mainland Japan. All the photographs were made in seaside caves known in Okinawan as gama, said to harbour the spirits of the dead and used since ancient times as burial grounds and offering sites. They also have a more recent history: in the Second World War civilians first took refuge in them, but they became places of massacre when Japanese troops took them over and tried to hold them against American forces. A Japanese-American married to a woman from Okinawa, Nakagawa himself carries some of this complicated history. To photograph the entirely dark caves he opened the shutter and lit the surfaces gently with a small flashlight, a way of drawing out the spirits that live there, and later made the images more legible with digital techniques. The black pages of the oversize book echo the darkness of the caves and the descent into an unknown world.