フェアが、できていくまで

In 2025, on a single remark from an acquaintance — "You should go to Besançon" — I arrived in this town and wandered around with nowhere to be. Whenever I reach a new town I look for a bookshop and step inside. In a corner of one, I picked up a sheet of paper with today's date on it, apparently an event flyer. Apart from the word "beer" and "17:00" I could read none of it, but what looked like an address was fairly close, so I decided to walk there.

What I found was a very small place — the kind where you order at a counter and drink outside. A few people had gathered out front, preparing some small happening.

"Um. I came because of this piece of paper."

They seemed startled that I had found it at all. Today is the launch of this book, they explained.

I had just come back from an art book fair in Basel, so I felt I had found people who make books, and I was glad, and I showed it — but no gladness came back from them, and I had no choice but to go quiet myself.

Going home like that would have galled me, so I leaned in and decided to stay. I no longer even remember whether I ordered a beer.

There were only about two people who would speak English with me. As for me, I understand almost no French. I offered to buy one of their books. Perhaps surprised at how readily I bought it, one of the English speakers explained the book to me very carefully. It was made by a group of artists; this is Lucie's piece, a study of ways to die in The Sims; I wrote a fiction about a man who goes into the mountains with his parent and thinks about leaving the parent there, attempting a murder — whether it was the English or whether the contents really were quite strange, I could not tell, but it made no sense to me. I said I would translate it when I got home; you probably won't understand it, they said, it's French humour. Anyway, since it was a precious thing, I asked the people there to sign it, and they were so bewildered — as if none of them had ever signed a book — that I felt I was being treated as an eccentric.

That English speaker was Bertrand Bellay. When I asked him what I should do in this town, for some reason he recommended places outside it, which thoroughly confused me. There's a winery in the next town where I used to work, you should go; if you take a bus from here there's an art festival — a travel plan demanding even for someone as used to travelling as I am. In the end he suggested I go and stay at his parents' house, and right there he phoned them, and it became a matter of please do let me come and stay. His family took very good care of me. It was then that I learned he is a hitchhiker who always travels by hitchhiking, which tied itself to a hypothesis that the grandness of his travel plans came from that.

By now we exchange works, and his younger brother comes to visit Japan. We even made a promise that when they make a second book, I should take part — but before that, I pressed Bertrand and asked him to send one more copy of this book to Iga.

The artists I met in Besançon felt different from artists working in Paris. Very reserved, and I thought there could hardly be a chance to meet their work in Japan, let alone in this country town. That is why I felt so much meaning in going out of my way to bring this book here. The contents may feel as incomprehensible to you as they did to me; you could read it wielding every technology at your disposal, or you could look forward to the day, some ten years of studying French from now, when you decipher it.

Having someone else carry on the journey of a single sheet of paper — that is rather exciting.

When I was shown the tokonoma alcove in Yukoryo, the detached building at our venue, I remembered Thomas Vauthier's performance Monomi. The performance "Monomi," which he gave at Nuit Blanche Kyoto in 2024, drew me into the world of tea.

More than tea itself, it was the moment my own culture was cut out by his hand, and light fell on things that until then had simply passed in front of my eyes. The tokonoma was one of them.

After that I began to experience several of his works and tea gatherings. Performance art was a strange thing to me. That a performance held for only a few people, over a few dozen minutes, should take place not in a large hall or on a stage but in a small space made in the likeness of a tea room. That such preparation, such spirit, should be poured into it. Why go out of your way to do it in this form? At the time I had only just let go of my business career and begun working as an artist, and it puzzled me.

In starting this fair, I asked Thomas if he would use the place freely.

Something that will not stay there, the way a painting or a book stays. The fleeting thing that appears between performance art and a tea gathering — something only for these two days, just as the same season never comes twice. A tea gathering I do not know yet, prepared by a host I do not know yet.

Please, let yourself fall under the spell of the world he makes.

A committee member, Shibakawa, runs an independent bookshop called AprilBooks, a few minutes on foot from JR Tsuge Station. One day I stopped by for a meeting about the book fair, and someone who had drawn for GARO was there. I was born after the era of GARO, and even so the magazine had become familiar to me, at Kogera Bunko in the same town of Tsuge. He gave a comic book to Shibakawa and me as a present. I opened it and a rainbow world spread out, the kind that widens your pupils. I had almost no familiarity with manga or comics, but I liked it very much, and I learned it was from the comics series of kuš!, a publisher in Latvia. When I told him I wanted to contact the publisher, he gave me their details right away. I wrote that I really wanted to bring this book to the people of Iga, and they said they would send some copies here.

I remembered Riga, Latvia, where I got off in transit in 2017 on the way from Estonia to Germany. It was only a few hours, but the sky was clear and the scene is burned into me. I know nothing about Latvia, and still those few hours in transit leave me feeling close to it. Through knowing a publisher from Latvia at this book fair, I hope that someday, like me, someone hears the word Latvia and remembers a world that struck them.

Before the municipal mergers of the Heisei era, each town and village around here was making its own culture. People may have thought the culture was the ninja, Bashō, Iga ware. I think the seeds were in the present tense.

The mergers seem to have cut some of those shoots. The international exchange that really did exist — a sister-school program with Worcester in England, among others — vanished as if it had never happened. New things were surely born in its place. Still, the further you go from the center of town, the fewer municipal functions remain, and the places where culture can start disappear one by one.

Could a seed that connects this place to the world be planted here once more?

I ask because it was seeds like those, small and many, that led to a life moving back and forth between this town and elsewhere.

While I was planting small seeds, with hope, a photographer in Oslo wrote to me: unable to come to the fair, but wanting to send books for us to carry.

It's the first parcel I've ever received from Norway. The address handwritten in Norwegian, the stamps — they thrilled me.

I doubt many people coming to the fair will hold a book made in Norway more than a few times in their lives. What will they feel when they do? I'm looking forward to it.

I'm Lily, director of Waza Waza. I live and work in Iga as an artist — though long before I ever called myself one, what I've always done is make things from zero to one. Somewhere along the way, beyond making work, solo shows and exhibitions, that practice grew into making places, and letting them unfold.

In 2022, Sukodo hosted the centennial exhibition of Motonaga Sadamasa, beloved for the picture book "Mokera Mokera." I had just returned from three months in Paris, having let go of a long career.

I walked through the hall feeling the floorboards creak underfoot, taking in the work, sometimes sitting down on the tatami. Watching wind and light drift through the space between Motonaga's paintings, I began to think: I want to make something here. That was long before I attempted my first solo show.