The Sound of Rain

I returned to Japan during the rainy season of 2015, twenty years after the 1995 earthquake that had dislodged me. The visual landscape was nearly unrecognizable—no visible cracks or remnants of the past remained beneath the polished surface of contemporary Japanese urbanism. In response, I set out to reconstruct the city of my birth, where I grew up as a foreigner, not through its architecture, but through the sounds that remained familiar.

These lingering sounds—echoes carried across time, space, and perhaps embedded in the memory of water or soil—became the raw material for a visual sound alphabet I began to develop using suminagashi, the ancient Japanese art of marbling ink on water. Under the guidance of Fukuda-san, one of the last living masters of the technique, I apprenticed in the traditional method: ink, water, breath. Eventually, I replaced breath with sound—projecting spoken words into the inky surface—and watched as vibration gave shape to meaning.

From this process emerged my own evolving pictographic alphabet, untethered from place, born of resonance. The Sound of Rain is a selection of Japanese onomatopoeia collected during these homecoming encounters—an attempt to inscribe the ephemeral, and to listen a city back into being.

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