Masako Tomiya was raised in Aomori, in the far north of Japan, and has long lived in Tokyo. News that her sister and sister-in-law, both still near her hometown, were pregnant set in motion the series gathered in Kito, published by Chose Commune in 2017. The title reads as “homeward” in Japanese; reversed, it becomes toki, “time.” Tomiya lets that double sense do structural work rather than decorative work, so the book moves between return and duration without ever settling on one.

The photographs turn on renewal and birth, with women as a constant presence. Tomiya stages self-portraits and pictures the daily lives of her mother, her sisters and the new-borns, treating family as both subject and medium. Seasonal change in nature runs alongside, not as backdrop but as a parallel measure of how a sense of home can be altered by time. Identity, family and transmission are the questions here, approached obliquely through the ordinary.

In place of an outside commentator, Tomiya supplies the book’s essay herself, a notable choice for a project this personal: the maker also writes, and the photographs are not handed over to another voice. Bureau Kayser designed the volume and Satsuki Shibuya made the cover artwork, so the object carries several distinct hands. Eighty pages hold thirty-eight plates, in a hardcover with Swiss binding at 22 by 27 centimetres, the text given in French, English and Japanese.

Its weight for a collector lies in that combination: a coherent, tightly argued sequence by a photographer still early in her working life, in a first printing that gathers word and image under her own authorship. Kito is best read slowly, and kept for the rereading.