Nothing Happens, Yet Something Settles.

The book, as one of the world's oldest media, has carried information across centuries. Every book, whatever its subject, has its own message—its own reason for being. This is because the book inherently contains a sense of direction.

A cover, endpapers, a table of contents, a title page, the main text, an afterword, and a colophon—although there are countless variations, this sequence remains an almost universal format throughout the world. Just as a text cannot be read backwards, information is an order, and the book is a form that organizes this irreversible flow into a kind of soft architecture. Within this linear structure reside Chikamatsu's The Love Suicides at Sonezaki, Dante's Divine Comedy, and Otomo's AKIRA. Editors conduct sequence, and designers shape pagination. In both content and form, books cannot escape their destiny of having a beginning and an end.

This book was born as a small act of resistance against that long history of the book. It is a non-linear book. It has no beginning and no end. You may open it anywhere and stop anywhere. It is simply a place where something quietly comes into being, only to disappear again.

Tomohiro Okazaki is a designer who creates stop-motion animations using everyday objects such as matchsticks. "I design movement," he says. Before becoming a designer, he was an enthusiastic insect-loving child. Perhaps because of that, he approached the material nature of the book with the patient curiosity of a boy observing the natural world, playfully exploring the possibilities of paper itself.

For this book, Okazaki chose a single sheet of paper as his motif. Using stop-motion animation, he changes the appearance of the paper ever so slightly from page to page, creating the illusion that the paper itself is moving as you turn the pages. Paper moves upon paper, yet nothing really happens.

It is a little like absentmindedly watching a curtain stirred by the breeze, or gazing at waves washing onto the shore. Those fleeting, almost magical moments that nature occasionally offers seem to appear at your fingertips and then quietly disappear with each turn of the page. There is neither a beginning nor an end, and yet, somehow, the experience leaves the mind feeling calm.

We hope you will take it into your hands and experience it for yourself.


Director of FRAGILE BOOKS
Osamu Kushida