Miki Soejima’s photobook The Passenger’s Present, published by Fw:Books, takes as its starting point a found photograph. It shows people dancing at a memorial service for the war dead of the Japanese Imperial Army, with the flags of Japan, the Imperial Army, and the puppet state of Manchukuo above them. The picture comes from an album that Soejima’s grandfather compiled in Manchuria between 1931 and 1945. He once remarked, “There is nothing to believe anymore.” That sentence, and the historical period it distills, becomes a lens for looking at the present.

Since 2013, Soejima has photographed in and around Tokyo, Okinawa, and elsewhere, interspersing those images with constructed still lifes. The sequence—a kamikaze aircraft, a nuclear reactor, reappearing rainbows, American candy named after the atomic bomb—assembles a web of histories, myths, and built narratives that sit beneath the surface of Japanese society. The result is a layered view of a country facing great uncertainty. Soejima’s approach is not documentary reportage but a form of visual thinking: she asks how imagination can set in motion a process that questions the stories we inherit and the frameworks that hold them in place.

The book is designed by Hans Gremmen. In its 128 pages (64 visible), the combination of archival material and new photographs creates a structure that is as much about reading as about looking. Soejima studied cultural anthropology in Kyoto before turning to photography, and that training informs the work’s central inquiry.

For readers drawn to photobooks that treat history as something active and unresolved, The Passenger’s Present deserves close attention. It does not offer easy resolutions; instead, it holds the past and present in a sustained, questioning frame. What distinguishes it is the way it uses the personal—a grandfather’s album—to open onto public memory and its discontents, and the care with which it has been assembled.