A trip back to the New York of the 1980s that nurtured both the photographing self and the writing self. Sharp shadows cast by steel buildings, graffiti overflowing the streets: thirty years ago Akiko Otake crossed to chaotic New York and set off with a camera into the city and into the world, an eye that breathed the raw energy of life and confronted the riddle of existence. An important book in which an author who works across genres unravels the circuit between photographs and words. In her own words, what runs through it is a single lens street, a street that joins fiction and reality and connects past, present and future, in which she became convinced that the reality of life lies in grasping it.