Ayu no Kaze takes its title from a sailor’s phrase found in Japan’s oldest book of poetry, where it means “the wind of promise,” and where the ancient word ayu is understood to mean that the sea brings various things to the land. Asako Shimazaki gives that phrase a photographic life. Her landscapes, made in the early morning across northern, central, and coastal Japan during summer and winter, return to a country she left behind.

The book is published by TBW Books in an 80-page hardcover with 30 plates, and includes an afterword by Sandra Phillips, Curator Emeritus of Photography at SFMOMA. Its trim size is 6.25 by 8.75 inches, or 159 by 222 millimeters. Scarcely any people inhabit the photographs of the summer and winter countryside. Working alone through mild sun and fierce blizzards, Shimazaki treats her images as an exploration of a land left behind.

The publisher describes the sequence as a diary of yearning and serenity, noting that Shimazaki’s gaze alludes to life transitions that are at once privately intimate and deeply universal. The title phrase, carried through folk songs sung by fishermen, merchants, travelers, and immigrants, gives the work a cultural depth that the photographs themselves do not insist upon. The pictures are quiet, and the elements moving through the landscapes and her lens are large.

Shimazaki has said that no matter the changes in our lives and culture, Ayu no Kaze returns every year, and that it speaks to her of eternity. That idea runs through the whole book. For readers drawn to landscape photography about land and return, this collection holds its own place.