Here’s the thing about Tsukimi Ayano that’ll either crack you open or leave you mumbling platitudes about “healing” and “resilience” like some asshole at a TED talk: she’s not doing this because she’s broken. She’s doing it because she’s whole.
Thirty people left in Nagoro. Thirty. Used to be three hundred. You do the math on entropy, on the slow fade, on what it means when the children leave and don’t come back. The school closed four years ago, those last two kids made scarecrows of themselves in home economics class, dressed them in their own clothes, and then they were gone. Just gone. And Ayano, she fills that school now with cloth and newspaper bodies, with faces she stitches by hand, with the memory of what full classrooms sound like.
Four hundred of these things she’s made. Four hundred. They’re everywhere, fishing in the creek, working potato fields, waiting at bus stops that no buses come to anymore. Mrs. Miyako Ogata sits in front of her abandoned house wearing the same clothes she wore when she was alive, when she was active, and Ayano walks past every morning and says hello. “Good morning, Mrs. Ogata.” No response. Never a response. Doesn’t matter.
The tourists show up calling it “creepy” and “haunting” because they are fucking cowards, because they can not handle the raw fact of it: this is what love looks like when everything you love is disappearing. The locals get it, they call the scarecrows “cute.” They understand. They wave to them. They mistake them for their neighbors in the early morning light.
At 67, Ayano’s one of the younger residents. Let that sink in. She came back from Osaka fifteen years ago to care for her father, came back to this dying place, and instead of weeping or writing op-eds about rural decline, she started making people. Not art, don’t call it art, she’ll tell you, just figures. Just company. Just her hands refusing the silence.
“I greet them every morning,” she says. “I never get a response, but that doesn’t make a difference.”
That’s the line, right there. That’s the whole goddamn thing. The stubborn, beautiful, absurd insistence on saying good morning to emptiness and expecting nothing back. The village dies. The scarecrow population grows. And somewhere in that exchange is something true about what it means to keep making, keep speaking, keep populating the world with evidence that you were here, that they were here, that this mattered.