Charles Fréger’s YOKAI NO SHIMA takes its title from a name he gave to the Japanese archipelago, treating it as a single imagined territory of spirits. Across 58 locations, from Akita in the north to the remote islands of Okinawa, he photographed masked figures associated with local rites: gods who visit, demons, and presences tied to fields, mountains, forests, and shorelines. The book follows WILDER MANN, his earlier study of European beast-men, but shifts the terms of that inquiry. Here the masks are not framed as festival documentation. They are pulled away from the calendar of events and photographed as apparitions, so that the costume and the person wearing it carry the image on their own.

The result is a taxonomy that refuses to settle. Fréger’s sitters face the camera with the same frontal composure he has brought to earlier series, yet the effect is stranger: familiar bodies made unfamiliar by carved faces, straw, fur, and cloth. The sequence moves between regions and types without explaining them away, letting repetition and variation do the work. What emerges is less a survey of Japanese folklore than a study of how communities give form to the unseen, and how photography can hold that form still.

The book’s apparatus supports this restraint. Ryoko Sekiguchi contributes an introduction, Akihiro Hatanaka supplies captions and descriptions, and Toshiharu Ito adds an essay, while Leo Favier’s graphic design and GOLDEN COSMOS’s graphic figures shape the volume as an object. Published by Seigensha in 2016 at 256 pages, it is a compact, carefully built book rather than a sprawling catalogue.

For collectors, its interest lies in that combination: a major photographer working at full strength on a subject that extends his long engagement with costume and collective identity, and a design team treating the sequence as a constructed whole. It sits alongside Fréger’s other series as a distinct chapter, and rewards the kind of looking a book of this size and pacing invites.