Takashi Homma’s *Trails*, published by MACK in 2019, gathers photographs made between 2009 and 2018 in Shiretoko National Park, on the Japanese island of Hokkaido. Its subject is not the deer themselves but the blood they leave behind after being killed in winter: red traces across snow, detached from the animal yet charged with its absence.

The book’s restrained premise gives the images an unusual formal force. Against the white ground, the blood appears as stain, mark, or line—at times resembling ritual residue, at others calligraphic composition. Homma moves between abstraction and symbolism without resolving either into a single reading. The photographs remain materially direct while opening onto questions of death, landscape, and the ways a society assigns meaning to wildlife.

That tension is inseparable from the circumstances behind the images. Deer in Japan may be regarded as sacred, yet in Shiretoko their growing population has led to controversial culls, prompted by agricultural communities seeking to protect crops. The photographs therefore register not only the aftermath of individual hunts but also a conflict between reverence, ecological management, and local livelihood. Their quietness makes the ethical problem more, rather than less, insistent.

At 66 pages, *Trails* is a compact, focused publication whose strength lies in the sustained pressure of its limited motif. For collectors, its interest rests in the precision with which Homma turns a specific regional event into a spare photographic study of evidence and disappearance. Published as a paperback by MACK, it offers a concentrated example of how sequencing and visual reduction can carry historical and moral complexity without explanatory excess.