July 12, 2012.
Kyoto Botanical Gardens.
These are roses just after the rain.
On December 16, 2011, after eight long months in the hospital, I was discharged fully recovered.
The following year, in 2012, I spent an extraordinary 300 days out of the year’s 365 photographing the beauty of nature at the Kyoto Botanical Gardens.
I photographed flowers.
I photographed birds.
I photographed light.
I photographed rain.
I photographed the wind.
From spring into summer, from summer into autumn, and eventually into winter, I continued to capture the fleeting moments through which the seasons revealed themselves.
That is why I was able to take photographs such as these.
Roses just after the rain.
Droplets still remained upon their petals, while the leaves carried the memory of the rain that had fallen only moments before.
They were different from roses beneath a clear blue sky.
There is a particular stillness in roses after the rain.
There is fragility.
And yet, at the same time, there is an astonishing radiance of life.
For me, having only recently emerged from a long hospitalization, the Kyoto Botanical Gardens that year was far more than a place to take photographs.
I went there day after day.
I discovered light that had not been there the day before.
I encountered a flower that had not yet opened yesterday.
I listened to the birds.
I felt the wind.
I watched a single raindrop resting upon a leaf after the rain.
Those days were also, I believe, a way of confirming again and again that I was alive.
For this film, I have brought together these roses after the rain, photographed on July 12, 2012, with Mendelssohn’s Violin Concerto performed by Sayaka Shoji.
Sayaka Shoji’s violin.
Its poised, penetrating voice.
Every note finely drawn and intensely alive.
Mendelssohn’s melody reaches deep into the heart from its very first phrase.
It carries melancholy, yet it never remains imprisoned within sorrow.
The music moves forward.
And eventually, it moves toward light.
The roses after the rain seemed to do the same.
They had endured the rain, yet they continued to bloom.
And when the rain finally stopped, covered in droplets, they revealed a beauty that could never have been seen beneath an ordinary clear sky.
Rain can fall suddenly in our lives as well.
Sometimes it continues for so long that we cannot imagine when it will end.
But eventually, the rain stops.
And there are sights that can only be seen after the rain has passed.
Because I was alive, I could encounter these roses.
Because I was alive, I could preserve this moment in a photograph.
July 12, 2012.
Kyoto Botanical Gardens.
Roses after the rain.
And Mendelssohn, performed by Sayaka Shoji.
This is not simply a film about the beauty of roses.
I was able to see the beauty of this world once again.
This film is my own record of that moment.