In 1968 Tatsumi Hijikata, the instigator of the Japanese avant-garde movement form, butoh, engaged in a collaboration with photographer, Eikoh Hosoe. This project, titled Kamaitachi, consisted of a striking set of images created as what Hosoe called a “subjective documentary” of their youth in rural Tohoku in the far north of Japan. In the photographs, published under a book of the same name, the avant-garde Hijikata cavorts with the traditional villagers and landscapes of his home region, a trickster like the “sickle weasel” of the title.