2012-2024
Ever since I was a child, I have thought of death as something strangely alluring. Naturally, it was accompanied by fear, but more than that, I felt that the tragedy created by death arriving at an early age might make me seem special. If I died, would my death be treated as a tragedy, leaving a wound that would never disappear from the hearts of those who had continued to ignore my existence? Or, like a genius who died young, could my lost talent be spoken of for generations to come? If I were stricken with an incurable disease, I would eagerly write a diary about the pain and hardship of my life. I would fill it with passages that would make adults—people who ordinarily did not seem to use their minds very much—sob with tragedy and emotion, and then have it published as a book after my death. Surely, then, my name would be inscribed in history as that of a child prodigy who had died young. I was still a child, but my way of thinking was already sufficiently twisted.
And compared with those geniuses who died young, I turned out to be unexpectedly healthy and strong. I was no genius, and I remained healthy until, before I knew it, I had passed the age of fifty. An ordinary life—that was the truest form of my life.
Even so, as an adult, rather than distancing myself from death, I have continued to live with its presence constantly beside me. This does not mean that I kept doing dangerous things. Rather, I could never stop wondering why, in the course of everyday life, I continued living without choosing to die.
If I wanted to die, I could die at any time. It is astonishingly easy. The knife, the scissors, the window, the car in front of me—they are always waiting for my decision. Every day, in order to live, I stand in the kitchen and cut a glossy piece of meat with a kitchen knife. But why does that knife not cut into my own body? If it did, I could move toward death at any moment.
If the choice to live and the choice to die were given to us on equal terms, then, as a matter of probability, each choice should have an exact fifty-percent chance. And yet, in the course of our daily lives, we continue unconsciously choosing to live. In front of me, there are always two buttons—“LIVE” and “DIE.” Why do I continue pressing only one of them, endlessly? Even now, I do not really understand the reason.
There is, however, one thing I do understand. The “DIE” button can be pressed only once. Once I press it, I can never press the “LIVE” button again. Every day, I look at the “DIE” button without touching it. Instead, meaninglessly, almost out of inertia, I continue pressing the “LIVE” button, and that is how I remain alive now.
As the world of the Internet became saturated with information, a strange system of values emerged within it: anything that does not exist on the network is virtually equivalent to something that does not exist in the world.
Even now, when there is something we want to know, we almost never go to a municipal office or a library to look for information. If there is an artist we want to know about, we will probably search for them online before going to see their exhibition. Since the development of the Internet, the structure of our thought has been completely reversed. If information cannot be found online, then the thing to which that information refers either does not exist or is somehow false. The value of a subject is determined by the quantity and quality of the information about it available online. This has become the structure through which we now perceive reality.
But if that is so, might I not be able to observe my own death?
For me, this was the greatest discovery and the most fascinating fact. I could not choose to experience my biological death, but I could experience the “death of information” about myself online.
If I ceased to exist on the Internet, I could simultaneously experience a virtual death. The idea that I might observe my own death while remaining alive struck me as the perfect experiment.
A few years after my first photobook was published, I began removing information about myself from the Internet. I deleted every website I had previously created, and I closed the social-media accounts I had maintained as a photographer. I contacted every website that had featured my work and asked them to remove the images.
Little by little, the traces of me disappeared from the Internet. Rather than frightening me, the process gave me a quiet sense of relief. During the first year or two, searching my name would still sometimes produce images of me or information about my work, and each time I saw them, I felt disgust. But as time passed, even those results gradually diminished.
Over the course of roughly ten years, I disappeared from the online world. Eventually, the only thing that remained was information about my first book.
I had—safely—died.
When I died in that sea of information, I finally felt as though my body had become my own. Until then, I had always felt a kind of frustration, as though my body were being forcibly moved by someone else, or forcibly prevented from moving, unable to act as I wished.
I had died. I was no longer even myself. I no longer needed to be myself. Little by little, I began to feel nerves returning to the fingers and legs that had refused to move. Then, trembling slowly, the extremities of my body began to move, ever so slightly.
To say that my virtual death on the Internet set me free would be far too simple an explanation. What I experienced was not so much death as a slower process of forgetting. If someone tried to look for me, there was no information to be found. Even if something remained, it was a photograph—that is, something I had seen, not myself.
While I drifted through a space of death on the Internet, no information existed there about what I was doing, what I was seeing, or what I was hearing. What remained was the blank space created by the fact that I had been silent and dead. Those ten blank years are known only to me.
In 2024, I reappeared in the online world. Even now, however, no information has emerged from the roughly twelve years during which I remained silent. If my name is searched today, an enormous number of photographs I have posted on social media will appear. But this means only that I have once again pressed the button marked “LIVE” within the world of online information. My own figure is not there.
When I eventually experience biological death, the updating of this information will stop. In time, it too will be buried within the same slow process of forgetting. But for me, this is something I have already experienced.
I can die in peace—this time for good, forever.
Feb. 6 2026
