Playing the Piano Upstairs

This series grew out of my relationship with my sister and our shared memories of childhood in Niigata, one of the snowiest regions of Japan. When we were young, our personalities were at odds, and our connection felt distant.

After losing our mother to cancer in our late teens, we faced grief together, and over time, a deeper understanding slowly took root. Photographing my sister became a way to acknowledge the transformation of that bond—how years of silence, conflict, and care have shaped a fragile but enduring closeness.

All the photographs were taken in our hometown, a small coastal town where our father worked at the Kashiwazaki-Kariwa Nuclear Power Plant — the world’s largest. As kids, we played on the beach in summer and watched the towers flicker at night, finding the sight somehow magical. Since the Fukushima disaster, that same coastline has come to embody both nostalgia and anxiety, its beauty now inseparable from unease.

In this work, I combined portraits of my sister with quiet studies of the surrounding landscape—fields, snow, and sea. The snow scenes are especially resonant: Niigata’s long winters and record snowfalls shaped our sense of time and endurance, where the world often disappeared under layers of white. These snowscapes serve as metaphors for memory itself—mutable, obscured, yet softly glowing just below the surface.

We both took piano lessons growing up. My sister was completely absorbed by it—she would come home from school and play for hours, almost pouring all her emotions into the keys. That memory inspired the title.