On the second day of each new year, communities in northeastern Japan gather to perform Zaido, a ritual dance dedicated to the gods and intended to bring good fortune. Its participants undergo demanding purification before appearing in elaborate masks and costumes. Yukari Chikura’s *Zaido* records this tradition, whose history extends across some 1,300 years, while attending to the shared labor through which ritual knowledge and collective memory endure.

The project began in circumstances of profound personal upheaval. After her father’s sudden death, a serious accident of her own, and the 2011 Tohoku earthquake and tsunami, Chikura dreamed that her father directed her toward a village deep in the snow where he had once lived. She travelled there with a camera, beginning the first of several journeys through the region. What emerged was therefore more than a study of ceremony: the work joins cultural observation to a private search for recovery and orientation.

Chikura’s approach depends upon contrast. Snowfields, mist and pale winter landscapes sometimes approach abstraction; against them, the patterned surfaces of masks and ceremonial dress appear intensely material. The movement between environment, costume and performer prevents the ritual from being reduced to spectacle. Instead, Zaido is shown as a practice sustained by distinct communities whose differences coexist with a common responsibility for its continuation.

Published by Steidl and unfolding over 160 pages, the book brings personal testimony, regional landscape and ritual documentation into a single photographic structure. Its significance for a serious collection lies not in an exhaustive ethnographic account, but in the way the photobook form holds several histories together: an inherited ceremony, a region marked by catastrophe, and an artist’s return to life through repeated acts of looking. That convergence gives *Zaido* both documentary weight and an unusually intimate emotional register.