Hiroki Yamamoto (Inu no Senaka-za) ─ A Map of Making and Thinking

At the root of Yamamoto's early interests lies a sensation that language does not merely describe reality but, simply by being written, generates an event. As a teenager Yamamoto was strongly drawn to SF, horror, and violent narratives, yet he also read novels by Le Clézio and Claude Simon — whose intense textual operations tend to earn them a reputation for difficulty — as if they were extensions of SF and horror. Leaps, ruptures, and warps in time-space within a sentence became, as they stood, forms of experience. This powerful literalism is his starting point.

This starting point connects directly to his later horror essay, his essays on diary, and his theory of fiction. For Yamamoto, expression is first of all not a container for meaning but an event that produces specific thoughts, sensations, and constructions in the body. At the same time, this early interest was inseparable from the question of "the self in a text." No matter what kind of sentence, one cannot help sensing "who" said it, "from where," and "in what kind of environment." Yamamoto would later name this phenomenon 〈subjectivity〉, but even before he had any such concept, the sensation was already strongly felt.

The novel "Enro Shigai" (Distant Road, City Streets) (written at age 17–18; third-round pass for the 111th Bungakukai New Writers' Prize) contains the prototypes of what would later become theoretical problems. The inhabitants of a city governed by a "keynote" are absorbed by it, forced into repetition under an "inescapable ground." As the line "people, absorbed into the keynote and fearing that they would unknowingly slide between vanity and self-abasement, could not speak" condenses, the anguish of being unable to escape "being myself" within a world permeated by law, and the urgency of nonetheless attempting to speak, drives the entire work. It is the prototype of what would later be theorized as 〈objectivity〉, 〈law〉, and 〈free will〉.

"Eiyōgaku no Sokutei" (A Measurement of Nutritional Science) — The First Essay

"Eiyōgaku no Sokutei", written at age 19, is virtually Yamamoto's first critical essay. It can be positioned as an attempt to take the inescapability of "being myself" felt in "Enro Shigai" and work it through as a reconfiguration of the material environment that sustains the self — nutrition, food culture, the body. It treats the transmission of food culture from mother to child as "a process in which the transmission of history is half-forcibly passed on," extending in a single rush to eating disorders, cannibalism, the closedness and compossibility of the monad, the recognition that "the gazes of others are woven into my body," and the question of "deviation from the domesticated human."

The closedness of this self and the way it connects (cannot help connecting) to the community of society, the problem of the body's constraint by law = environment and free will, the problem of historical transmission and education through the body — all are already set down as felt experience, before any theoretical vocabulary has been formed.

A Line from the Early Work to the Present

These early concerns would go on to connect to the concept of the 〈pseudo-I-novel〉 in the Ōe Kenzaburō essay — a method of rethinking "the self" not as naked disclosure of interiority but as an artificial unit of production that takes in the outside while still writing as "myself" — and from there to the problems of 〈atelier〉 and 〈acting〉, which attempt to process "being myself" in parallel across multiple spacetimes and other people's bodies. The inescapability of the keynote in "Enro Shigai," the reconfiguration of the material environment in "Eiyōgaku no Sokutei", the 〈pseudo-I-novel〉 of the Ōe essay, and the theory of acting. All of them ask how to handle the inescapability of "being myself," and one of the lines running through Yamamoto's work originates here.

A foundational concern that has been consistently emphasized since before the founding of Inu no Senaka-za is the distinction among "depth," "surface," and "the life on this side" in writing. This problem is organized in connection with historical shifts in "Sei ni totte Gengo Hyōgen to wa Nani ka" (What Is Linguistic Expression to Life?), and continues to be treated in the title essay of Fiction to Nikkichō.

Existing literary value systems and literary history have bundled and evaluated writing by its "depth" — a worldview or theme that subsumes into a single integration, and the presumed authorial figure. Against this, a "postmodern" stance was proposed that finds value in the operation of the multiple, mutually contradictory surface itself. Yamamoto occupies a third position distinct from either: he emphasizes "this side" of the text — the concrete body that reads and writes, the environment in which that body spends its days, the modest texture of life.

The Age of "The Life on This Side"

This recognition is deeply connected to changes in the situation surrounding linguistic expression from the 2010s onward: the diary boom, the foregrounding of experiential authority, the acceleration of personality consumption, the declining value of fiction. Yamamoto grasps these as the age of "the life on this side," neither simply affirming nor rejecting the trend, but rather searching for a theory and method that takes "the life on this side" seriously without letting it slide into naive valorization of personality or personal consumption. The stance received from Hōsaka Kazushi — "to think of text as continuous with the time of life" — was a foothold for this search. All of Inu no Senaka-za's activities since its founding — criticism, editing, design, publishing, performance — stand under the question of how to open "the life on this side" collaboratively and technically.

Founded on May 1, 2015, Inu no Senaka-za was neither a coterie magazine circle nor a theater company. In the foreword to Aratana Kyori, Yamamoto writes that around the time of the founding a "conversion" had taken place within him: "a conversion from the idea that all living beings, including humans, might be able to escape death through some ongoing effort, to the idea that at least this self of mine will someday die in a form severed from those around me."

The founding of Inu no Senaka-za was triggered by "the suicide of a mutual friend." To leave expression and technique not for oneself but for those who live on after death — this recognition corresponds to the origin of the later problem-system of "posterity, education, and archiving" (discussed below).

The Founding Manifesto

The manifesto published at the time of founding (under the name Yamamoto Hiroki + h) already concentrates the prototypes of the later theory. "To learn and seek out techniques for making things using the material of 'being myself'"; to maintain "a place, like sediment, where as many selves as possible can be laid side by side"; to "design a place of education = experimentation"; and "you must not believe in a single improvisation. If you want to find merit in improvisation, it should be layered many times over." The later concepts of 〈atelier〉, 〈layout〉, 〈renewed distances〉, 〈objectivity〉, and the problem-system of education and archiving all have their seeds in this text.

A symbolic early method was the series of "conversations" (zadankai) carried out over long periods on Google Drive. Participants accessed a shared document from their own devices over a set period, building from a blank page a fictive record of dialogue. They considered and responded to other participants' statements while simultaneously revising their own past statements. Over weeks, "a record of dialogue that was never supposed to have existed" gradually took shape — a practice of collaborative writing in which each participant erected their own closed text — or rather, the unique relationship between that text and the body = 〈atelier〉 — under their own responsibility, then made these adjacent through the establishment of a fictional space of dialogue. Nine numbered conversations were held in total.

Publishing as a Form

For Inu no Senaka-za, a book was not a container for finished products but a form for bundling the accumulations of individual production and thought (ateliers) and casting them outward. To preserve individual works while preventing their isolation, inserting criticism, dialogue, records, design, publications, performances, and exhibitions between them. The creation of such habits was itself the work of Inu no Senaka-za.

While Yamamoto began his activities as a novelist and poet, he has simultaneously produced a large body of critical writing. He did not, however, set out to become a "critic." In his 2024 lecture "What Kind of Linguistic Expression Is 'Criticism'? — The Disclosure and Sharing of 'Criticism' in Inu no Senaka-za" ("Kotoba no Gakkō" Term 3, Criticism Class, March 2024), the reasons and background are set out systematically.

In Japan, the free consideration and discussion of things was long carried out under the framework of "literary criticism" (bungei hihyō). Discussing poetry and fiction overlapped with discussing society and the world; the place where criticizing "literature" and criticizing as "literature" coincided existed there. From the late 1990s onward, however, the decline in the social value of literature, the contraction of publishing venues, and the diversification of critical objects and methods led to the near-total dissolution of this framework. The ten years from Yamamoto's founding of Inu no Senaka-za in 2015 saw both the non-necessity of writing critical texts as accomplished works in their own right (speaking via video or podcast being more effective in terms of both influence and productivity) and the difficulty of simply making works of fiction or poetry without more (even excellent writing finds no existing soil, community, or industry of "criticism" to analyze and evaluate it) pushed to their extremes.

Under these conditions, Yamamoto's decision to write criticism despite being a practitioner served three purposes. First, as a means of disclosing and sharing what his own production relies on and what it does: packaging use-value and necessity as text without depending on existing authority or media — an endeavor that is half of a piece with design. Second, as a tool for analysis and self-transformation: rather than keeping questions inside one's head, externalizing them as writing so that they can be handed on to oneself at a different time or to another body, deepening thought. Third, as a distinctive form of linguistic expression that takes in the exterior of the text (the object under discussion, the publication venue, the reader, and the writer's own life) as the material and form of the text's interior, in a manner different from fiction or poetry.

On this third point, Yamamoto provisionally defines criticism as a form within linguistic expression. Poetry has meter and line breaks; fiction has description and narrative — each serving as a "fixed form" that makes the text necessary. In the case of criticism, the fixed form lies outside the text: the object under discussion, for whom and where one writes, and the fact of writing "as this self." When the exterior of a text is treated as a problem internal to the text, the text becomes "criticism."

This view of criticism and the practice based on it are continuous with Inu no Senaka-za's method of disclosing the thinking behind production through conversations and receiving one another's individual 〈ateliers〉. The major essays and records of practice that follow are all written as criticism in this sense.

In the formation of Yamamoto's theory, the work on Hōsaka Kazushi, Ōe Kenzaburō, and Arakawa Shūsaku occupies a special position.

Hōsaka Kazushi — Literalism and Beyond

What Yamamoto received from Hōsaka was a way of seeing the novel not as commodity in the entertainment market but as something concerned with lived time, bodily sensation, and the very manner of thinking. As discussed in detail in "Sei ni totte Gengo Hyōgen to wa Nani ka", Hōsaka positioned the novel as competing not with film or television as one more entertainment product but with ways of spending leisure time such as walking and gardening; he questioned management by plot and, in both practice and criticism, pursued a "literalism" of taking each sentence exactly as it stands.

Yamamoto was strongly aided by this stance, yet he sees the danger that the Hōsaka-esque position, by emphasizing the life on this side of the text, may end up as a mere reflection of "the writer as they are" and thereby converge with the consumption of personality under post-Fordism. From here arises the need for a third position — to use linguistic expression as "an experimental ground for collaboratively reconfiguring life" (for details, see the sections on "the life on this side" and the Hōsaka essay).

Ōe Kenzaburō — The Producer Who Bears "the Self" and "After Death"

Ōe Kenzaburō is an even more central reference. For Yamamoto, Ōe is the novelist who kept asking how the Japanese-language novel could bear "the self," "the postwar," "the nation," "the dead," "education," and "the relation to the world," and to analyze Ōe's production process was simultaneously to think about what one could bear as a producer oneself. As discussed below, the Ōe essay "Aratana Kyori — Ōe Kenzaburō ni okeru Seisaku to Shikō" (Renewed Distances: Making and Thinking in Ōe Kenzaburō, 2015) already contains the cluster of problems at the core of all Yamamoto's subsequent work.

Arakawa Shūsaku — Designing the Environment and 〈Blank〉

The work on Arakawa Shūsaku opens linguistic expression toward fine art, architecture, perception, and community design. Arakawa + Madeline Gins aimed not to adapt to a given environment but to design new environments themselves and thereby change the body ("reversible destiny").

When Yamamoto would later foreground 〈layout〉 and 〈atelier〉 as central concepts, Arakawa's orientation stands behind them. In "Nikki to Jūryoku" (Diary and Gravity), Arakawa's placing of "being myself" at the core of production and education, and his project of reversing death, are connected to a theory of making linguistic expression. More concrete discussion of Arakawa is developed in "Seisaku-teki Kūkan to Gengo" (discussed below). Yamamoto's theoretical concept 〈blank〉 also derives from Arakawa + Gins' 〈blank〉; its relation to Takiguchi Shūzō's 〈margin〉 is treated in detail in the entry for that essay.

From the beginning of his novel-writing career Yamamoto treated rewriting as a core method of production. This recognition deepened through his analysis of Ōe Kenzaburō's production process, and was further theorized, after the fact, on the basis of the Hōsaka essay and insights from ecological psychology.

In "Sei ni totte Gengo Hyōgen to wa Nani ka," taking Hōsaka as a starting point, the understanding of improvisation is organized. Yamamoto there conceives of human thought as "a process of simulating, in multiples, at sites external to thought itself (body, matter, text, etc.), the contingent responses of the human body to its surrounding environment (= improvisation), including memory and fiction, combining them, discovering higher-order patterns (= 〈figure〉) there, and putting them to use in controlling one's next thought." One does not deepen thought alone in the here and now; one discovers one's own thought in the course of accumulating simulations carried out through the interplay of self and external law. Rather than unconditionally affirming the one-time improvisation, it is rewriting as a compounding of improvisations that supports this process of discovery.

The idea articulated in "Conversation 1" (2015), at the time of Inu no Senaka-za's founding — "by writing in this way I can make a soul that sees the world in this way" — and the methodology of describing and operating under a monistic framework of "discovering" expression (for oneself and others) are also introduced in this essay (for details see the entry on "Sei ni totte Gengo Hyōgen to wa Nani ka" in the Major Essays section).

The Compounding of Environments and Immortality

This problem-system also further extends the ecological-psychological idea that "the soul exists within the environment." In "Nikki to Jūryoku" (Diary and Gravity, in Aratana Kyori), language is conceived as "a device that brings about the compounding of environments," and with Arakawa Shūsaku's architectural disruption of bodily balance as a clue, a path is drawn toward defining free will not as a soul isolated from the environment but as the compounding of multiple contradictory environments. Immortality too is grasped as a circulation of communal succession of trial and error aimed at better compounding of environments (see the Major Essays entry on "Nikki to Jūryoku" for details).

Around 2018, Yamamoto's theory acquired a clear conceptual apparatus. The turning point was the second session of the Inu no Senaka-za lecture series "Layout for (the Purpose of) Pushing Linguistic Expression to Its Limits," titled "Shukan-sei no Ugomeki to Sono Yado" (The Stirring of Subjectivity and Its Dwelling, 2018), later published as a booklet (Inu no Senaka-za, 2023). The definitions of 〈subjectivity〉, 〈objectivity〉, 〈figure〉, 〈blank〉, 〈object〉, and 〈subject/self〉 were established here, and a framework for treating selfhood, fiction, politics, the body, design, and performance within a single vocabulary was achieved (see "Theoretical Map" for each concept).

The Formalization of 〈Belief〉 (2019)

At the workshop "Miracle, Figure, Belief (The Gesture of Hurling-Forth Salvation)" in 2019, 〈belief〉 was formalized and the discussion extended to dance and bodily movement, opening the next stage of the theory. The most recent definitions as of March 2026 are given in the "Definitions" reproduced at the end of this page.

From the late 2010s onward, Yamamoto's theory has increasingly been organized around 〈atelier〉 and 〈acting〉, rebundling 〈subjectivity〉, 〈objectivity〉, and 〈layout〉. The foreword to Fiction to Nikkichō states:

The fact that I have come to place "atelier" and "acting" at the center of my theory is significant. The terms "diary-notebook" and "addressee" treated in the essays collected in this book mean, in my recent principal terminology, "atelier," and to read, write, and live using them means, in other words, the body's taking-on of the "atelier" = "acting."

〈Atelier〉 is the central concept that Yamamoto himself calls "the most important concept for me": an environment that sustains production, a unit of analysis for the environment retroactively constructed from a text, and also a basis for community design that can be taught. 〈Acting〉 refers to the practice of taking on that atelier with the body (see "Theoretical Map" for details of each concept).

The lecture "Sei no Atelier" (The Atelier of Life, 2023), delivered at Tōkō Gakuen, is the text in which this concept is explained most plainly. It contains, among other things, the argument that to be selfish — to make one's own atelier — can itself be altruistic, and gathers Yamamoto's thinking about the affirmation of each individual life. The argument in this lecture is further developed in the draft preface to the book Sei no Atelier, which redefines 〈atelier〉 as a space that not only specialist producers but all people carry within their daily lives (see the Theoretical Map entry on "〈Atelier〉" for details).

The Turn to Performance Criticism

The foregrounding of these concepts is also linked to shifts in Yamamoto's areas of activity. The reason Yamamoto has recently been writing performance criticism intensively is the concreteness of "taking-on" that can only be seen in that place. The taking-on here is double: the body on stage takes on "what is not here and now" (role, law, script), and the spectator, facing that, also takes on something other than the here and now — both occur within a single performance.

Workshops — The Communal Activation of 〈Atelier〉

The concept of 〈atelier〉 extends beyond Yamamoto's individual theory of production into practices in which multiple bodies communally activate an 〈atelier〉.

In the workshop "Miracle, Figure, Belief (The Gesture of Hurling-Forth Salvation)" (STspot, 2019), a process was designed in which each participant wrote short texts, shuffled them, took on others' texts as their own, generated 〈figures〉, and produced new texts.

In the lecture + workshop "Making 〈the Gaze from Death〉" (blanClass + Kamimura Megumi "Living with Just a Body," BankART Life7, 2024), participants went out into the city to write, exchanged texts, and then walked the city retracing each other's texts.

In each case, the presentation of theory leads directly into collective production practice, embodying the fact that 〈atelier〉 arises not within individual introspection but among multiple bodies.

The founding of Inu no Senaka-za was triggered by "the suicide of a mutual friend," and leaving expression and technique not for oneself but for those who live on after death has been a consistent concern from the earliest days of Yamamoto's activity. In "Conversation 1" (2015) Yamamoto states, "The season in which the current me should live with myself as my axis is over as of today; from now on I must devote myself to the people who will live after my death."

The Wavering of "Belief in Posterity"

That said, Yamamoto does not place great faith in the idea that the texts he has written will survive long into "posterity." In "Conversation 9" (2024) he frankly speaks of a recognition that the world might end tomorrow, while at the same time voicing a desire to convey and pass on something to contemporaries. If expression is to be inherited on the scale of centuries, it is more likely to be through conversion into abstract technique and principle, exchanged among contemporaries and then quietly, vaguely carried on, than through works being read as they are.

Leaving Works + Methods of Use + Criticism as a Set

What follows from this recognition is a policy of not presenting works alone but unfolding their methods of use and criticism as a set. Inu no Senaka-za's publications have consistently been designed on this principle. Inu no Senaka-za Issue 1 and Issue 2 place conversations, criticism, and design commentary alongside the works; Hai to Ie (Ash and House) is accompanied by interpretive notes; the Kōno Satoko poetry collection includes "Conversation 5." Records of the lecture series "Layout for (the Purpose of) Pushing Linguistic Expression to Its Limits" were published in a format that combines lecture content with workshop design.

It is not enough for a work to be excellent in itself; design must extend to what techniques and communities the work creates and how it is handed on to subsequent production. To make each achievement reusable by subsequent bodies. This stance also forms the practical foundation of the later 〈atelier〉 concept.

Archive Lecture — Redefining "Leaving"

The lecture "Kotoba, Hyōgen, Archive" (Words, Expression, Archive: What Does It Mean to Make Expression, Share It, and Leave It Behind?), delivered at the Tokyo University of the Arts Future Creation and Succession Center (2025), articulates this policy more clearly.

Share not only the "work" but also its production process. Value not the work itself so much as what techniques and communities it creates and how it propagates (after death). By conveying not only how to use but also how to make, "translation" becomes possible even after that genre has lost its social significance/function.

Yamamoto thinks of "leaving" as the design of "methods of reading," "methods of using," and "methods of re-performing" before physical preservation. The same lecture also contains the definition "education is the process of selecting from a large archive and giving what is chosen to subsequent human bodies."

At the starting point of Yamamoto's theory is the decision not to see language merely as a tool for conveying meaning. In the lecture "Sei no Atelier" (2023), he states: "Language is in fact a very powerful, distinctive, and handy device, custom-made to act on the human body." Books, pages, scripts, poems, and critical essays, when read, generate certain movements, thoughts, and constructions in the body.

At the heart of this recognition is the property that linguistic expression cannot help making the body before it construct "the bearer of expression = 〈person〉 and the surrounding 〈environment〉." For instance, the sentence "A dog came from the other side of the fence" generates, in the reading body, a "this side" that is not literally written. Even with mechanically arranged words, insofar as one finds expression there, one reads into it the existence of the person who made it and the surrounding environment.

In this sense, linguistic expression must be understood as a problem of the arrangement of "the bearer of expression + environment," including layout, speed, repetition, blank, format, and medium, not just an analysis of meaning. The methodology presented in "Sei ni totte Gengo Hyōgen to wa Nani ka" — describing and operating monistically under the rubric of "discovering expression (for self and others)," rather than siding with either writing or reading — takes this recognition as its departure point.

The theoretical minimum unit derived from the above recognition is 〈self + environment〉. One cannot think of the "self" alone; where expression exists, the person who made it and the surrounding environment are constructed as one. 〈Self + environment〉 is not the author's actual existence but a fictional unit — yet one powerfully imposed on the body — that the reading body retroactively assembles from expression. Every poem, every novel, comes to be seen as a swarm of 〈self + environment〉 units laid side by side, layered, passing each other, and contending.

A text cannot help retroactively constructing the 〈person〉 who 〈expressed〉 it and the 〈environment〉 that determined and enabled 〈expression〉 in its surroundings. A certain coherence of this tendency/quality is called 〈subjectivity〉. / The lawfulness that determined and enabled 〈expression〉 is called 〈objectivity〉. / A text is a construction in which 〈subjectivity〉 — the force that compels retroactive reading into the active gesture of expression — and 〈objectivity〉 — the force that compelled expression passively — are laid out in multilayered overlap.
— Yamamoto Hiroki, Shukan-sei no Ugomeki to Sono Yado

〈Subjectivity〉 does not mean "the author's inner life" but the tendency of expression to generate a subject and environment behind it.

〈Objectivity〉 does not mean "objective fact" but the force of the lawfulness that made the expression what it is.

Expression exists within the misrecognitive entanglement of these two, and Yamamoto's theory does not reject this misrecognition but seeks to take it on as the essential process of expression.

The tendency/quality constituting the interior of 〈subjectivity〉 is called 〈figure〉. 〈Figure〉 is not a rhetorical technique of metaphor but a more fundamental operation that functions beyond the scale of 〈subjectivity〉. In Shukan-sei no Ugomeki to Sono Yado, through Yoshimoto Takaaki's theory of 〈kyoyu〉 (virtual trope) and the relation between the upper and lower verses of tanka, 〈figure〉 is positioned as a tendency/quality at the root of language. Paul de Man's discussion of prosopopoeia is also connected here.

〈Belief〉 is defined as the misrecognitive relation between 〈subjectivity〉 and 〈objectivity〉. What is seen as genuine feeling, what as external compulsion — that this judgment constantly slips and can be reversed is what sustains the operation of expression.

〈Projector〉 refers to the agent that, before expression, supplies and projects 〈figure〉 to construct a subject and environment; 〈belief〉 exists as what constrains that 〈figure〉.

At the presentation "Shukan-sei to Bussei no Gonin-teki Kankei" (The Misrecognitive Relation of Subjectivity and Objectivity) at the first session of the workshop "Miracle, Figure, Belief" (STspot, 2019), 〈belief〉 was formalized and extended to body theory; in "Shi no Tōeisha (Projector) ni yoru Kokka to Shi" (The Nation and Death by the Projector of Death), the concept of 〈projector〉 was presented and developed. The concrete analyses of 〈belief〉 developed in the Ōbayashi essay and the Yanagita essay are all based on this formalization.

For Yamamoto, 〈layout〉 is what he himself positions as the most important concept of his earlier period, and it is not limited to the question of page design.

Text Is the Layout of 〈the Self〉

At the heart of Yamamoto's theory is the proposition that a text is a construction in which 〈subjectivity〉 and 〈objectivity〉 are laid out in multilayered overlap (Shukan-sei no Ugomeki to Sono Yado). When one writes a sentence, a 〈self + environment〉 is constructed there. When one writes the next sentence, another 〈self + environment〉 arises. The very act of laying sentences side by side forms the layout of 〈the self〉.

In "Sei ni totte Gengo Hyōgen to wa Nani ka" this recognition is stated most clearly. Language exists as a "layout of provocation" that forces specific thoughts and sensations on the body; the constructions generated sentence by sentence collide with surrounding words and sentences and are invented as new forms of integration = new thought. The body set in motion writes the next sentence. Thought as 〈the self〉 through text is nothing other than this chain of "construction — collision — recombination."

Accordingly, 〈layout〉 refers not only to the arrangement of characters on a page but to the very condition of expression — how it is divided, laid out, made to collide, how it generates blanks and gives rise to different environments and subjects. It resonates with the "arrangement of surfaces of the environment" that comes from Gibson/Sasaki's ecological psychology. Line breaks in poetry, chapter structure in novels, page design, the order of lecture materials, the arrangement of actors on stage can all be treated on the same theoretical plane, because each concerns how 〈self + environment〉 units are arranged.

The Law of Layout as 〈Objectivity〉

This layout of 〈the self〉 is not something the writer freely designs. In Shukan-sei no Ugomeki to Sono Yado, 〈objectivity〉 is defined as the lawfulness governing layout. In a text written from the viewpoint of a person in a room, 〈environment〉 — the spatial relation of kitchen and television, the smell of grass, the presence of a window — is embodied implicitly by the selection and arrangement of words, even without explicit mention. 〈Objectivity〉 is a concept for grasping the event in which the content of expression and the layout of expression overlap, and the lawfulness of a single sentence extends to the lawfulness of the arrangement of sentences.

In the Ōe essay "Aratana Kyori," Ōe's practice of introducing unusual 〈objectivity〉 into his texts through descriptions of painting, film, and theater, thereby inventing singular arrangements of language, is treated. Further, the event in which multiple 〈self + environment〉 units are juxtaposed within a single text — the self of morning and the self of night, the living self and the dead self, utterly different yet connected by uncanny resemblance — is formalized as 〈renewed distances〉, using the many-worlds interpretation as a guide. The recognition that text is the layout of 〈the self〉 is thus opened onto questions of cosmological scale.

Extension to Poetry

Aratana Kyori contains many essays applying this perspective to concrete analysis of works. Among them, "Sei(katsu) no Haichi, 〈Shirabe〉 no Kizuki" (The Arrangement of Life/Living, Noticing the 〈Melody〉) squarely addresses historical questions of poetic form, ranging from Hagiwara Sakutarō's 〈melody〉 to the parallel tracks of Shinkoku Seiichi's visual poetry = 〈pictographic poetry〉 and recitation = 〈sound-pictographic poetry〉, and onward to contemporary practitioners such as Fukuda Hisayo, ni_ka, and TOLTA, discussing 〈blank〉 as a multi-layered emotional space woven by characters on the page.

The book also contains an essay on Fukuda Wakayuki discussing the objectification of time-space in haiku, an essay on Sadahisa Hideki examining the process of writing poetry itself, an essay on Saihate Tahi treating blank and the arrangement of rooms of the self, and an essay on Katō Kōta treating the arrangement of the world and its mineralized depth — all of which develop the theory of 〈subjectivity〉, 〈objectivity〉, and 〈layout〉 as individual analyses of poetry.

The term 〈atelier〉 is employed in this book to refer, by deliberately overlaying, to both the physical environment in which the producer's body is placed and the abstract space (system, matrix) that the producer prepares, constructs, and outputs for production. Even while living disorderly days, the producer can return there and restart the accumulation of production, placing the next brushstroke / the next word. Moreover, such an 〈atelier〉 can also be counted as one of the constituent elements of a text (a high-level unit thereof), as the environment that compelled (afforded) production in the producer, in retroactively grasping the producer.
— Yamamoto Hiroki, Aratana Kyori, p. 13

Yamamoto's recent central concept. First, atelier is a technique for sustaining production, a unit that persists across interruptions; second, an analytical unit for the environment that recipients retroactively construct from a text; third, a foundational unit for inheritable community design. 〈Atelier〉 is not simply a new concept of the later period but functions as a hub rebundling the earlier 〈subjectivity〉, 〈objectivity〉, and 〈layout〉. 〈Acting〉 refers to the practice of taking on this atelier with the body (see "Law and Performance" for details). Note that the definition from Aratana Kyori quoted above takes "the producer" as its subject; in the later Tōkō Gakuen lecture "Sei no Atelier" and the draft preface to the book Sei no Atelier, the concept is redefined as a space carried not only by specialist producers but by all people within their daily lives.

"Atelier no Tame no Memo" (Memo for the Atelier)

"Atelier no Tame no Memo" (in Aratana Kyori) is the most condensed definition text for this concept. It departs from the proposition that "a person is a bundle (stratum) of environments they have encountered," and the coupling between this bundle and action, ungraspable from the outside, is what is called 〈atelier〉. "Language" and "art" exist as means of more fully compressing the bundle of environments and "placing" it outside the body.

A refined action output by one body arrives for another body as a new environment — "such a bundle of environments is possible?" — and simultaneously becomes a transmission/education on the methodological side — "expression can be done in this way?" Through works made as such nodal points, one learns of another 〈atelier〉's existence, uses it as something that figures one's own life, and thereby acquires the accumulated technique of 〈atelier〉, heading toward the design of an 〈atelier〉 to save oneself. An act for the individual is simultaneously an act for others, and my life becomes a figure for the life of another — this recognition forms the foundation of Yamamoto's fundamental idea that selfishness can be altruistic.

Redefining 〈Atelier〉 — From the Tōkō Gakuen Lecture to the Preface to Sei no Atelier

It was the lecture "Sei no Atelier" (November 2023) at Tōkō Gakuen that opened the concept of 〈atelier〉, as presented in "Atelier no Tame no Memo," to all people rather than specialist producers alone (see the Major Essays entry on "Sei no Atelier" for details).

There, Yamamoto reframes fiction and poetry not as "narratives completed in a fixed span of time" but as devices for "briefly thinking about something alone and then returning to society." Open a book a little each day and think; close it and go to school or hang out with friends; open it again in a moment alone. Fiction and poetry exist as the site of this back-and-forth.

Drawing on Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own, Yamamoto argues that fiction, poetry, and books are themselves "rooms of one's own," then introduces a crucial turn. A room makes me "me" — but that simultaneously means being made into "the same old me." Inescapable habits, regrets, things that cannot be changed. Yet a room or a piece of writing is far easier to rearrange than oneself. One can redecorate; one can take another person's methods as reference. That is, by changing the room, one can become a different "me." The renaming from "room" to "atelier," with greater consciousness of the "making / being made" relationship, is grounded in this recognition.

Sharing many of these arguments while reworking them as the preface to a book, the draft preface (full text published) to Sei no Atelier further develops the concept.

Here Yamamoto redefines 〈atelier〉 not as the dedicated studio of a painter or writer, but as "what I am thinking about and working on now," something that continues to accumulate even within days that have been torn to shreds. Adding a sentence on a smartphone between conversations with friends, drawing in the living room after the family has gone to sleep, thinking about the continuation of a story on a packed commuter train. Even for the majority of people who have neither dedicated production time nor a dedicated space, there exists a "place" scattered across daily life that persists over many days. This, it is argued, is the core of 〈atelier〉.

What is important is the recognition that this persistence does not rest on the body's memory alone. Yamamoto here also grasps 〈atelier〉 as "a device that makes oneself think." People do not think or remember by their bodies alone; they are supported by, and linked to, various concrete and abstract things — texts written outside the body, drawings, the smartphone one uses, the room one often spends time in, friends one can consult about all sorts of things, one's daily schedule — and through these linkages, thinking that transcends the self of any given moment becomes possible. People live in a constant illusion that this totality of linkages is "truly myself." Conversely, simply by changing things or environments outside oneself, one can think of something different from what one thinks now, remember what one had forgotten, or arrive at thoughts one believed oneself utterly incapable of.

This argument is not limited to those who produce expression. Even without making any concrete work, each person continuously thinks and worries in their own distinctive way, living supported by these things. Dragged along like a curse, yet transformed, layered, sometimes resolved, and occasionally unexpectedly transmitted to another person through the surrounding environment and the process of expression. To grasp expression as a technique for the transformation and transmission of "things that are not enclosed within me," and to consider that all people potentially carry the place that supports this technique. This is the range of the 〈atelier〉 concept, and the implication of the name "the atelier of life."

In Yamamoto's theory, improvisation and rewriting are not opposed concepts but two sides of the same coin.

When the human body encounters a law = script (〈objectivity〉), an improvisatory expression is generated as the coupling of that law and the body. This improvisation is not a one-time accident but arises at the intersection of the structure of law and the response of the body; only by multiplying it and opening it onto diverse acts does free will come to be discovered after the fact (this problem is examined in detail in the Ōbayashi essay).

The founding manifesto of Inu no Senaka-za also contains the line: "You must not believe in a single improvisation. If you want to find merit in improvisation, it should be layered many times over." In "Sei ni totte Gengo Hyōgen to wa Nani ka," this problem is organized from Hōsaka as a starting point: rather than opposing the once-ness of improvisation to the technique of rewriting, rewriting as a compounding of improvisations is pursued.

On the other hand, viewed from the side of 〈objectivity〉, rewriting is also an act of repeatedly passing through the lawfulness of expression and, in the process, inserting misrecognition (〈belief〉) to re-erect 〈subjectivity〉. The law = script exists first as the force (〈objectivity〉) that makes expression what it is, and "the self" is discovered after the fact in the process of expression arising from it. Rewriting is nothing other than the technique of repeatedly updating this discovery.

The concept of 〈atelier〉 stands at the juncture of improvisation and rewriting. The property of atelier — that one can leave and return to restart the accumulation of production — is the condition for not closing improvisation into a one-time event but making it accumulable and transmissible through rewriting; it is also the technical foundation that sustains the continuation of production and succession to community.

〈Renewed distances〉 is a concept whose prototype was presented almost simultaneously in the Inu no Senaka-za founding manifesto (May 1, 2015) and at the conclusion of the Ōe Kenzaburō essay. In the manifesto, Yamamoto writes of "the instantaneous perception of the breadth between many-worlds, which would be acquired in the process of using selves that have scattered and begun to contradict each other in the course of making, to think while constantly hurling-forth (saving) 'this self.'" In the Ōe essay, against the background of many-worlds theory, the instantaneous quality of perceiving that the self of morning and the self of night, the self at birth and the self just before death, are utterly different yet connected by uncanny resemblance, as multiple spacetimes are linked through expression, was discussed.

In the March 2026 Definitions, when the community that has arisen through 〈atelier〉 is "rediscovered in expression as a 〈figure〉 of robust construction," that 〈figure〉, as something bringing about a singular gap between expression and 〈the self〉, is also called 〈renewed distances〉. It refers not to the establishment of community per se but to a distance of difference that can be traversed through expression, criticism, technique, and atelier while preserving individual isolation.

〈The Gaze from Death〉

A key for further excavating the substance of this concept is 〈the gaze from death〉. In the lecture + workshop "Making 〈the Gaze from Death〉" (blanClass + Kamimura Megumi, BankART Life7, 2024), the origins of Yoshimoto Takaaki's 〈world gaze〉 — an ideal gaze that surveys the world from above at a stroke — developed in his urban theory High Image-Ron, are retraced. What is revealed is that this was a 〈gaze from death〉, rooted in Yanagita Kunio's schema of "the ordinary person" and "the traveler," Miyazawa Kenji's overlap of science and faith, and the out-of-body experience of near-death.

〈The gaze from death〉 is at once a perception of a viewpoint that looks at the here and now from a distance, from another place, and an event in which everything is described in advance under a certain lawfulness. Yamamoto extends this discussion to the point of reconnecting it to "the life on this side" of the page and reconceiving the city as a device = environment that brings about the multi-layered generation of 〈atelier〉.

"Atelier no Tame no Memo" (in Aratana Kyori) is simultaneously the most condensed definition text for the 〈atelier〉 concept and a text that develops 〈the gaze from death〉 in conjunction with 〈atelier〉; it presents Yamamoto's fundamental idea of community as a relation in which, while remaining mutually isolated, persons figure each other and make each other into 〈ateliers〉 (see the entry on 〈atelier〉 in the Theoretical Map for details). Also in Aratana Kyori, the Kiyohara Yui essay "Shi kara no Shisen" (The Gaze from Death) takes the film All the Long Nights as its subject, discussing the experience of the survivor taking on the gaze of the dead and reliving the present under that gaze — concretizing 〈the gaze from death〉 and 〈renewed distances〉 within film criticism.

Behind the above cluster of concepts lie several theoretical genealogies. We organize them into the central references and supplementary intellectual threads.

Central References

Three genealogies directly shaped Yamamoto's theoretical language.

Tokieda Motoki's language-process theory is most deeply involved in the skeleton of Yamamoto's theory. In Shukan-sei no Ugomeki to Sono Yado, Yamamoto rereads Tokieda as a theorist who pushed the problem of subject and scene further than cognitive linguistics (Ronald Langacker's 〈ground〉 concept). Tokieda's distinction between 〈shi〉 (words representing material) and 〈ji〉 (words representing the subject's intentionality), their nested multilayered structure composing a sentence, and the concept of "zero-sign ji" are all emphasized. Yamamoto's concepts of 〈subjectivity〉, 〈objectivity〉, and 〈blank〉 can each be understood as inheriting and abstracting this Tokieda-esque framework.

Yoshimoto Takaaki is read by Yamamoto not only as political thinker and poet but as a theoretical resource on 〈figure〉 and 〈belief〉. Yoshimoto's development of Tokieda's 〈ji〉 and 〈shi〉 into 〈self-expression〉 and 〈referential expression〉, his positioning of prosody as "the root of referentiality," the concept of 〈kyoyu〉 (virtual trope), and the 〈world gaze〉 developed in his urban theory High Image-Ron (reformulated by Yamamoto as 〈the gaze from death〉) are all directly involved in Yamamoto's concept formation.

Ecological psychology was decisively shaped by Sasaki Masato's mediation of J. J. Gibson's theory of perception into Japanese art, design, and body theory. Sasaki treated perception as a problem of environmental exploration and action, understanding the world as a multi-layered "layout." Yamamoto's concept of 〈layout〉 derives from here. Further, the argument presented by Hirakura Kei in Godard-teki Hōhō (The Godardian Method) and elsewhere — that "through exposure to an artwork, the very sensory organization of the body can change" — supported Yamamoto's orientation of treating expression not as adaptation to an environment but as the design of a new environment = atelier.

Supplementary Intellectual Threads

Paul de Man's theory of prosopopoeia is an important foothold for the formation of the 〈figure〉 concept. The argument in "Autobiography as De-facement" — that any text can have an autobiographical structure — was presented in the Ōe essay and then fully developed in "Seisaku-teki Kūkan to Gengo". The chain of references from Yasukawa Nao's lyric poetry theory to de Man and then to Bruno Clément's La Voix verticale supports the recognition that 〈figure〉 is a force that provokes voice in the body.

Eduardo Viveiros de Castro's perspectivism (multinaturalism) resonates deeply with the concept of 〈being myself〉. In "Conversation 5" (2017) Viveiros' text was directly quoted as the plurality and mutual inclusion of 〈being myself〉 were discussed. This conversation was also the occasion on which the theoretical difference between Yamamoto and Suzuki Ippei was most clearly articulated.

Walter Benjamin, Nicholas of Cusa, and David Deutsch all greatly influenced Yamamoto's early intellectual formation and are discussed in detail in the notes to the Ōe essay and in "Conversation 1." Benjamin's theory of the redemption of the past, Cusa's "you must become your own," and Deutsch's many-worlds interpretation are directly involved in the formation of the concept of 〈renewed distances〉.

This is the first piece of criticism Yamamoto published externally in a sustained form, and one of his most important texts. For Yamamoto, Ōe Kenzaburō is not merely an important writer but a foundational apparatus for thinking about what kind of producer he himself could be. This Ōe essay already contains the cluster of problems at the core of all Yamamoto's subsequent work. The essay's notes discuss in detail the influences of thinkers including Benjamin, Cusa, de Man, and Deutsch (see "Theoretical Foundations" in the Theoretical Map for content).

The essay begins with the declaration that novels are expression "made from mere kilobytes of material" yet relate to life and the universe in a fundamental way, and proceeds to an analysis of Ōe's 〈pseudo-I-novel〉 method. In Ōe's production process, memory and fiction intermingle and the self is rewritten each time. Yamamoto reads in this the doubleness of what it means for the production of novels to be thought — to be thought as an act, and to handle thought as material for production.

〈The Novel of Film〉 and 〈Mori no Fushigi〉

Next, using Ōe's original concept of 〈the novel of film〉 as a guide, the essay discusses how, although novels possess neither vision nor hearing, an "excessively" vivid vision is generated fictionarily within the thinking body that reads and writes. In the "great vertigo" scene of Suishi (Death by Water), a poem carved on a round stone seen by the narrator is materially repeated on the page in ink, establishing an experience in which the narrator's self and the reader's self "see the same object." This is attributed not to visual resemblance but to the reflexivity of 〈the self〉, triggered by language pointing at and provoking the body on this side of the text.

The concept of 〈Mori no Fushigi〉 (Forest Mystery), recurrent in Ōe's work, is then organized under three properties: ① a recording medium from the universe that changes form and color in response to language; ② the totality of all souls when they were once many yet one (reincarnation through the force of 〈nostalgia〉); ③ a description of a disabled child's music (utterly different timbres that are yet "truly the same"). The blank of "being myself" is positioned at the heart of this 〈Mori no Fushigi〉.

〈Style〉 and 〈Dramatic Education〉

Ōe's distinctive concept of 〈style〉 is also examined. That the language itself communicates what kind of person the writer is, beyond what is written — this is 〈style〉 for Ōe, and Yamamoto, noting its affinity with the linguistic views of cognitive linguistics and ecological psychology, reinterprets it as the function by which a text causes the body on this side to retroactively construct the 〈self + environment〉 that produced it.

The latter half discusses 〈dramatic education〉 and 〈defamiliarization〉. Two kinds of linguistic error — making words that point to concrete objects understood abstractly, and making words that should not point to concrete objects understood concretely — operate at the clause and sentence level and take shape as 〈style〉, i.e., 〈voice〉, involving the body. The problem of poetic quotation and translation is also connected here. That the reading subject of the translator emerges in the space toward which two different things — original and translation — travel together, and that this process foregrounded is used as prime material for novel production, is identified as the core of Ōe's method.

〈The Odd Couple〉 and Mis-seeing

The technique of 〈the odd couple〉 is also analyzed. Ōe's method of generating new narrative from the slippage between similar characters functions as integrative person-combination at the layer of 〈dramatic education〉. From there, the essay argues that what is aimed at is not only the coupling of persons (the logic of imitative magic) but the coupling of persons and things (the logic of contagious magic) — that is, the generation of non-human narration. The father's "mis-seeing" — confusing 森々 and 淼々 and recognizing a new 〈style〉 in the confusion — is positioned as the culmination of this technique.

〈The New Man〉 and Posthumous Education

In the essay's conclusion, the problem of 〈the new man〉 is developed. The novelist cannot fully immerse in the "child"-like parallel-distributed thinking, but by carrying a technique that converts the misrecognitive force of "being myself" into communality, can embed the possibility of posthumous reincarnation in the novel's production process, sustaining the world's continuation. Ōe's 〈pseudo-I-novel〉 is concluded to have been a technique not of negating the metaphorical circuit but of accelerating it to the verge of collapse, thereby converting the autobiographical structure itself into material for production.

As Yamamoto himself states that the Ōbayashi essay "was written with a feeling like a sequel to the Ōe essay," the problems treated here — 〈dramatic education〉, 〈defamiliarization〉, 〈voice〉, 〈the odd couple〉, 〈the novel of film〉, mis-seeing, translation, posthumous education and 〈the new man〉 — are directly inherited by the Ōbayashi essay, the horror essay, the atelier essays, and the theory of acting.

"Zetsubō to Moderu" (Despair and Models) — Ōe as 〈Atelier〉

"Zetsubō to Moderu" (Despair and Models: A Personal Sentiment and the Atelier in Bungaku Nōto), published in Eureka special issue on Ōe (July 2023), rereads Ōe through the 〈atelier〉 concept.

Starting from bone-searching in Ōkuma-machi, Fukushima, and the witnessing of "despair" in Ōe's final-period lecture, and under the recognition that "a novel cannot change the world. But it can happen that a self transformed by writing a novel relates to the world in a way not possible before," Ōe's Bungaku Nōto (Literary Notes) is re-read in five compressed sections (① chaos and freedom, ② the concrete, experience, the totality, ③ characters as ateliers, ④ rewriting, ⑤ sharing). "Hand-making" Ōe Kenzaburō "as material for a novelist to be installed in myself" — the method of using Ōe as 〈atelier〉 — is presented as a method for taking on Ōe's "despair."

The question of why one chooses literature and linguistic expression is squarely treated. Yamamoto first organizes the historical shifts in the reception of texts in three stages: "literalism of depth" (reading texts under the integration of a worldview, theme, or presumed author), "literalism of the surface" (represented by Deleuze and Hasumi Shigehiko, attending to the fine movements of the textual surface), and "literalism of the life on this side" (represented by Hōsaka Kazushi, squarely looking at the relationship between text and the life on this side).

Hōsaka positioned the novel not as one more entertainment product competing with film and television, but as competing with ways of spending leisure time such as walking and gardening; he questioned management by plot and emphasized propelling each day's writing as far as possible. Yamamoto, strongly aided by this stance, nonetheless sees the danger that the Hōsaka-esque position may, by emphasizing the life on this side, end up as a mere reflection of "the writer as they are" and converge with the consumption of personality under post-Fordism. A third position is pursued: using linguistic expression as "an experimental ground for collaboratively reconfiguring life," rejecting both reading a work as "the writer's reflection" and reading it solely as "movements within the text."

Expression as "Discovery" and Rewriting

The methodological core presented in this essay is the attitude of describing and operating monistically under the rubric of "discovering expression (for self and others)" — a level more fundamental than either writing or reading, making or receiving. Each time one faces a text, one cannot help finding expression fictionarily tied to the lives of self and others. That one takes the alteration of text to be the same as the alteration of life — it is in the mode of this misrecognition that the irreplaceability of linguistic expression lies. Not a single improvisation (and through it, a reflection of the self onto expression) but something that enables one to speak of multiple improvisations layered together is required; the problem-system of rewriting as a compounding of improvisations is thereby prepared (see "Improvisation and Rewriting" in the Theoretical Map).

Hirakura Kei's 〈Figure〉 and Yamamoto's 〈Figure〉

The essay also touches on the relation between Hirakura Kei's concept of 〈figure〉 and Yamamoto's own 〈figure〉. What Hirakura extracted as "figure" was the event in which, through exposure to an artwork, the very sensory organization of the body can change; Yamamoto's 〈figure〉, while inheriting this Hirakura-esque argument, is more specifically formalized as the tendency/quality constituting the interior of 〈subjectivity〉 in the field of linguistic expression. That both use the word figure indicates a shared problem-sphere of action on the body.

This essay demonstrates that Yamamoto's theory begins not as "literary theory" alone but as a practical self-inquiry — "why practice linguistic expression at all?" — and records, in the most plainly written form, the concerns behind concepts such as 〈subjectivity〉, 〈objectivity〉, 〈layout〉, and 〈atelier〉.

One of the longest single essays in Yamamoto's books, it resets and expands the problems of linguistic expression from the side of art, architecture, and perception theory.

The essay takes Kozuma's Seisaku e as its starting point, noting that while the argument stakes much on language, its concrete connection to the techniques of linguistic expression remains unclear. From here, a four-part discussion unfolds: Part 1 "Non-personal Space" retraces Miyakawa Jun's work within the 1960s Japanese art controversies; Part 2 "Lyric Subject and 〈Figure〉" goes through Yasukawa Nao's lyric poetry theory, de Man's "Autobiography as De-facement," and Clément's prosopopoeia theory; Part 3 "Further toward Mimesis" traces Arakawa's work from Duchamp's lineage; and the conclusion "Toward the Design of a Community Woven by 'There I Am Over There'" offers poetry as 〈instruction〉 for forcing the body to insert and exchange multiple incompatible selves.

Yamamoto concludes that Arakawa is important to his thought because he provided a path for thinking of art as a technique for redesigning body and environment.

The concept of 〈blank〉 derives from Arakawa + Gins' 〈blank〉. This problem is also treated in the essay Shiteki Atesaki kara Kōtsūmō Sono Mono no Chōkoku e (From Private Addressee to a Sculpture of the Traffic Network Itself, Keiō Art Center, 2025) and in Obuje to Watashi, Shomotsu to Atelier (Object and Self, Book and Atelier), also in Aratana Kyori.

Departing from Hiroshige's woodblock print "Tagoto no Tsuki" (Moon at Each Paddy) — a composition in which multiple moons are reflected in the surfaces of terraced paddies, optically impossible from a single eye — the essay draws a single line through diary, sketching from life, linguistic expression, architecture, and immortality. Language is conceived as "a device that brings about the compounding of environments"; Arakawa's architectural disruption of bodily balance is used as a clue for defining free will not as a soul isolated from the environment but as a compounding of contradictory environments. Immortality is what is obtained when a cycle of communal succession of trial and error, aimed at better compounding of environments, grants communality to itself through its results and begins trial and error anew.

The keystone in which problems long felt by Yamamoto were for the first time formalized in theoretical language. From cognitive linguistics (Langacker), through Tokieda's language-process theory, Yoshimoto's theory and prosody, Sugaya's "zero-sign ji," to de Man's prosopopoeia — concepts are combined to examine how a text causes "the self" and "environment" to be constructed behind it. Starting from haiku, the analysis expands to tanka, to poetry, and then to prose, redefining linguistic expression from the ground up. All of Yamamoto's other work stands on the problems set out here.

The essay also includes the full development of this theory as applied to contemporary haiku practice. Six sequences by six poets are close-read, tracing how the "cut" in haiku pushes the expressive subject outside the linguistic surface and causes 〈objectification〉. The two "routes" shown in the conclusion — the flow from 〈objectification〉 within the text to the mutation of the body on this side, and the flow from the recording/decomposition of this-side bodily sensation to the transformation of the layout of verses — anticipate the later paired concepts of 〈atelier〉 and 〈acting〉.

Where Shukan-sei no Ugomeki to Sono Yado established the definitions, this presentation squarely treats 〈belief〉 — the misrecognitive relation between the concepts — marking the next stage of the theory. The first half, starting from Yoshimoto's text, reformulates 〈self-expression〉 and 〈referential expression〉 as the 〈subjectivity〉/〈objectivity〉 pair and formalizes their misrecognitive relation as 〈belief〉. The second half extends the discussion to dance and bodily movement, and the possibility that the theory of linguistic expression can reach as far as the body's movement — including dance and acting — is preliminarily opened here.

Yamamoto explicitly applies to Ōbayashi the same procedure he applied to Ōe. With the posthumous film Labyrinth of Cinema at its center, 〈war〉 is read not as a specific historical event but as a recurring structure/curse, and the act of an 〈actor playing a role〉 is identified as the means of escape. The precise examination of the crossing of 〈one actor, multiple roles〉 and 〈multiple actors, one role〉 is the core of the essay. Through this double structure, what Yamamoto extracts is the double 〈discovery〉 between actor and audience, and the misrecognitive relation that arises there. Furthermore, at the point where 〈one actor, multiple roles〉 and 〈multiple actors, one role〉 cross, a gaze emerges in which the one who has undergone a change of role looks back at themselves — as if viewing the place where one once stood from the position of someone who is no longer oneself. This structure connects directly to the problem of 〈the gaze from death〉. The later concept of 〈acting〉 is excavated here almost to its core.

Originally based on Yamamoto's presentation at the event "Sekka Shō" Session 2, "The Fiction of Horror" (moderator: Ōiwa Yūsuke / guests: Nakayama Hifumi, Yamamoto Hiroki / venue: theca, September 5, 2020), substantially revised and expanded. Published in Eureka special issue on J-Horror (September 2022). (Full text)

Treats horror as an experimental ground where 〈subjectivity〉, 〈objectivity〉, and 〈belief〉 become visible in extreme form. The newly presented concept is 〈projector〉. Ghosts are redefined as "effects that arise when a body tries to self-referentially describe the infrastructure that makes life life." The core argument traces how individual projection connects to the hierarchical structure of social/institutional law. The world becomes "a noisy spirit-nation = theatrical space in which laws compete behind every expression to update their ranking." The problem-systems of 〈projector〉, 〈spirit-nation〉, and 〈the malfunction of belief〉 have since pervaded Yamamoto's work broadly. Together with the Ōbayashi essay, this horror essay forms the starting point for the problems of projection, law, and free will that are repeatedly foregrounded in performance criticism. It is also in a mutually referential relationship with the problem of 〈déjà vu〉 and natural law in the Yanagita essay.

The lecture begins by defining language as "a very powerful, distinctive, and handy device, custom-made to act on the human body." Just as the words "No Entry" or "I'm watching you" can change a person's behavior simply by being there, language acts powerfully on the body. "A device in which a massive number of dangerous instructions for the body have been gathered — that is, for example, a book."

How does the "book" function within daily life? Drawing on Hōsaka Kazushi's remark that "the rival of the novel is not cinema or television but whale watching, gardening, and the general problem of how to use leisure time," Yamamoto reframes fiction and poetry not as "narratives completed within a fixed span" but as devices for "opening a book a little each day, thinking about something, closing it and going to school or hanging out with friends, then opening it again in a moment alone." Briefly thinking about something alone, then returning to society — fiction and poetry exist as the site of this back-and-forth.

Through reference to Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own, Yamamoto argues that fiction, poetry, and books are themselves "rooms of one's own" — places where better living and better expression connect at a personal level. The lecture then introduces a crucial turn: a room makes me "me," but that also means being made into "the same old me." Inescapable habits, regrets, things that cannot be changed — the curse-like aspect of rooms and writing that fix "me." Yamamoto reverses this recognition: rooms and writing are far easier to move than oneself. One can redecorate, one can take another person's methods as reference. In other words, changing the room can make a different "me." The history of literature is "usable" as an accumulation of such redecorating methods. Yamamoto himself recounts how, as a high-school student, he encountered Le Clézio's The Interrogation after the author's Nobel Prize, spent three months reading and imitating it, and found his way of seeing the world transformed.

Thus the lecture traces how "room" came to be renamed "atelier" with greater consciousness of the "making / being made" relationship. The argument that selfishness — making one's own atelier — can itself be altruistic is developed via Gunji Pegio Yukio's theory of natural intelligence, Ōmori Yasuko's lyrics, and Yoshimoto Takaaki's words, making this the text that most concentrically gathers Yamamoto's thinking about the affirmation of each individual life.

An essay that expands the problems of 〈subjectivity〉, 〈objectivity〉, and 〈belief〉 to the scale of nation and history, with an especially wide range. The starting point is the 〈déjà vu〉 pervading Yoshimoto Takaaki's "Yanagita Kunio-ron" — the sensation of "Ah, this feeling has been there before" that one cannot help having upon encountering Yanagita's style. Yamamoto rereads this as a form of 〈belief〉. The essay traces Yoshimoto's reading of Yanagita in close detail, treating the "traveler's style," natural law, the "tragedy" brought by natural law, and a comparison with Miyazawa Kenji. Finally, the discussion is connected to the present situation of personality consumption, SNS, and AI, asking for a means of describing and constituting the relation between individual and community from within the experience of "the self."

The title essay "Fiction to Nikkichō" presents two propositions for redefining linguistic expression in general from diary. First, "a text is a layout of multiple diaries, each bearing a date behind it." An essay or novel written over many days is a stratum built by "slamming diaries together"; each sentence was improvisationally written at a certain time on a certain date. Second, "diary is a form of expression that can make a single day's self take on multiple days' selves." As a memory from ten years ago is recalled by some event and written under today's date, one lives the present bearing multiple dates.

Where these two are overlaid, fiction is positioned as the work of layout — in what order, at what speed, with what blanks, toward what addressee, taken on by what body — of diary-like fragments and experiences; archive follows as the technique of transporting the method of fiction's layout to other bodies. These three are on a single line.

"Sasayaka na 'Hontōrashisa' kara Kono Sekai Sono Mono no 'Fiction' e" (From Modest "Verisimilitude" to "Fiction" of This World Itself), in Fiction to Nikkichō, points out that the diary boom and the horror boom both originated around 2020, both rely on found-footage form, and circulate as content that provokes affect and thought under the collusion of "verisimilitude" and "personality." Yamamoto argues that the human-historical significance of what has been called fiction lies not in the value of "stories" per se but in the imagination and ethics toward the world, based on distance, that could be invented in the process of production and reception.

Under this perspective, in "Conversation 9" (2024), Yamamoto speaks more frankly about his own stance on "diary." For Yamamoto, diary is grasped not as a form for reviewing a day date by date, but as an activity of making, while writing, the "diary-notebook" itself — the space into which days are thrown and from which the way the world appears changes. That "diary-notebook" was what novels and poems were. Yamamoto also states that he has placed more trust in "correspondence" — reporting and conveying to a specific someone — than in diary addressed to no one.

What runs through Yamamoto's theory of performance is the relation among four concepts: 〈law〉, 〈role〉, 〈projection〉, and 〈free will〉.

〈Law〉 refers to the lawfulness (= 〈objectivity〉) that makes expression what it is: script, natural law, nation, custom, physical law — forces that determine action from outside the body. 〈Role〉 is what the body cannot help taking on under that law — a certain shape or position of conduct. 〈Projection〉 is the process by which law performs itself through individual bodies, developed in detail in the horror essay. And 〈free will〉 is positioned as something measured only after the fact, within the distance between law and body.

Yamamoto's performance criticism is a recently begun body of work, readable as experimental records of how the problems of 〈law〉, 〈role〉, 〈projection〉, and 〈free will〉 organized in the Theoretical Map can be tested in a place where actual bodies are present.

〈Role〉 and the Body's Taking-On

The question most repeatedly foregrounded in the performance criticism is how the body takes on 〈role〉. The criticism of Mino Arata's Soto ga Shizuka ni Naru Made in "Anata wo Enjiru Basho" (The Place Where You Are Performed) extracts the minimum component of 〈role〉 from the contradictory self-designation "I am sleeping," demonstrating that 〈role〉 is not an object of immersion but a gap that produces "here" and "elsewhere," and that the passage between them constitutes 〈theater〉.

In the criticism of 7-do's Tokyo Notes, the "quantitative gap" generated when a single body processes a script designed for multiple persons is noted: the vast "numbers" constituting society and era are compressed into the very limited human body/spacetime of a work, and then further compressed into a single body. Here the problems of 〈one actor, multiple roles〉 and 〈multiple actors, one role〉 from the Ōbayashi essay are found in more urgent form in individual performances.

Projection and Law — Film, Exhibition, Comedy

The problem of 〈projection〉 developed in the horror essay — the process by which law performs itself through the body — is also a central theme in performance criticism. In the review of Ōiwa Yūsuke's exhibition "Nation and Poison," the preemption (Projection) of the viewer's action by law is examined. In the dialogue with Suzuki Ippei, "On 'Performance: The Cleaning Woman' and the Reconstruction of Cinema," the coexistence of projected image on a scrim and live body onstage in a work by Shichiri Kei is analyzed: the situation arises in which the scrim image seems to possess resolute free will while the body onstage merely follows. The relation of law = script, performance, and free will is considered in conjunction with the theme of a choreographic relation between mother and daughter.

Yamamoto's interest in performance extends beyond the performing arts in the narrow sense. In a trialogue published in Eureka (December 2024, special issue on comedy and criticism), Yamamoto discusses manzai comedy as a performing art that realizes, in extremely condensed form, the alternation between the bare body and fictional roles, and points out that comedy functions as an origin for inventing and circulating a kind of social 〈role〉.

Sharing of Method and Recording of the Production Process

Another characteristic of the performance criticism is that criticism and the recording of the production process are integrated. In the review of Ishikawa Asahi ≠ Harasaori's "(Shitsutsu)" showing, months of involvement as a co-researcher in rehearsals are recorded and offered as part of the showing itself. In "Life Work" (Nagamekurashitsu) and the P wave review (Harasaori), the body is depicted not as a closed subject but as an open field that explores information within the environment. In "Methodizing the (Im)possibility of Transmission — Ono Ayaka, Nakazawa Yō, Space Not Blank, Honnin-tachi Preview Performance", co-authored with h, performance is read not as a successful instance of "conveying" but as a presentation of methodology surrounding "conveying."

In the serial essays on Suzuki Ippei's poetry collection (in Aratana Kyori), the act of reading text itself is treated as performance, and methods for "performing" a poetry collection are pursued.

Yamamoto's thinking on performance consistently includes a question about the form of "script" (gikyoku) itself. The talk event "Poetry and Theater: Their Possibilities and Impossibilities" (Yoshida Yasuhiro × Kageyama Kishōdai × Yamada Ryōta × Yamamoto Hiroki, Aoyama Book Center, July 2019; presentation materials), and the lecture "Performance as Form, the Position of Communality — On a New Medium Constructible from Linguistic Expression" (guest: Matsuhara Shuntarō, Jōdo Fukugō School, September 2019; presentation materials) systematically discussed how the formal elements unique to scripts generate necessity in the arrangement of text, through comparison with poetry and fiction.

Yamamoto focuses first on three formal elements unique to scripts. First, "role" (yakugara): the function of bracketing a quantity of text as the utterance of a specific character and juxtaposing these on the page. Assigning the same character name creates strong links between texts far apart, foregrounding dialogue. Whereas in fiction all written text uniformly evokes an integrated expressive subject, in scripts the speaker is anticipated with a clear outline. Second, "stage directions" (togaki): text not reducible to any specific speaker. Because roles are so clearly delineated in scripts, stage directions are written as a voice bearing a strangely strong anonymity, belonging neither to a character nor to the author. Third, "stage" (butai): the place where groups of texts coexist, harboring fictional space while also existing as a realizable physical space. As Ōta Shōgo argued in "Reading Scripts," the stage can be an imaginary world and simultaneously part of real space; the script becomes a text that positions itself between this duality.

Crucially, physical laws and the possibility of staging intrude as constraints within the text itself. When something that cannot be realized literally on stage is written, it is processed not literally but as figurative expression (yu). Yamamoto emphasizes that this problem is not limited to scripts: in fiction too, descriptions that greatly deviate from physical law are processed figuratively. The question of the relationship between the expressive subject embedded in a text and its environment extends across all linguistic expression. Drawing on Tokieda Motoki's language-process theory and Artaud's theory of theatrical space, Yamamoto presents the perspective of treating the page itself as a theatrical space. An expressive subject is embedded in each written sentence, and this functions as a constraint on the gesture of writing the next sentence. The process by which multiple "selves" are recombined, each serving as form for the others, runs through both poetry and drama.

In 2021, Yamamoto himself wrote the play "Uraraka to Ruporutāju," and in the presentation "What Are Self / Space / Body / Figure to a Script?" (philosophy online seminar "W Yamamoto no Lesson Mitai na," Yamamoto Hiroki × Yamamoto Itō, moderator: Miura Hayaki, October 2021; presentation materials), the above concerns are layered with his own creative practice, further developed through the lenses of "stage," "role," "stage directions," and "the relationship between abstraction and concreteness."

The presentation "Variations of 〈Self + Environment〉 — How Does an Abstract Body That Bundles and Transports Spacetimes Evaluate the Superposition of Theater and Soul?" at the "Datsugoku Keikaku (Kari)" mini-symposium (Dr. Holiday Laboratory) develops the question of form treated in the dramaturgical theory at a more radical level.

The presentation takes Bioy Casares's novel Plan de evasión as its starting point. It argues that the novel's form makes the reader re-enact the substance of the warden's experiment — manipulating the prisoners' perception and transforming the island itself into a sensory apparatus. As the discussion extends to the play "Datsugoku Keikaku (Kari)" by Yamamoto Justin Itō and its staging, the question of how the superposition of novelistic form and narrative content is converted in the form of a script is examined.

What is at stake is the problem of how the "abstract space" that serves as the 〈law〉 of the text — stage directions, meta-self-reference, temporal interference, dream and enclosure — relates to 〈role〉 and 〈soul〉. Yamamoto presents the perspective of grasping a script as "a text that designs the performance of the body under a given law," and discusses the tension between that 〈law〉 and the body's free will. This problem-structure is identical to the 〈creaking〉 between 〈form〉 and 〈expression〉 developed in the Ōbayashi and horror essays, and constitutes one of the questions that runs through Yamamoto's entire theoretical system.

In the program notes for Impossible Gag: Reading Performance (text by Matsuhara Shuntarō, 2025), Yamamoto's own approach to direction is directly recorded. He takes as his starting point the recognition that human action is not born of "free will" or "heart" but is something compelled by "situations" descending from outside. The form of a reading performance — holding text in hand and reading aloud — physically makes visible, without hiding it inside the body, the "strange distance" between words and body.

Yamamoto states here that what is called "free will" or "heart" can be rephrased as "a bundle of situations that are not here in the surroundings but are somewhere," and that inner heart and situation are continuous as "the cause that made the body utter those words in that way."

Onshitsu / Onsil

In 2026, Yamamoto also directed Onshitsu / Onsil (text by Mino Arata), expanding his involvement in the performing arts.

In Fiction to Nikkichō, the recognition that to take something on and write is improvisatory performance is articulated (see "Diary and the Diary-Notebook"). The essay "Kaku to Iu Engi" (Writing as Acting — Yamashita Sumito's FICTION) in Aratana Kyori is the most comprehensive development of this bridge between theater and fiction. Yamamoto positions Yamashita's novel as "a theory of theater written in novel form," identifying at its base the inescapability of "seeing-as." The conclusion — that the totality realized through the passage between theater and fiction, body and language, living and dead, plurality and solitude is "theater" — presents Yamamoto's theories of performance and fiction as inseparable.

In a presentation at the publication talk event for Furuya Toshihiro's Cézanne no Inu (Cézanne's Dog, Inu no Senaka-za, 2024; co-hosted by Inu no Senaka-za and Dr. Holiday Laboratory, August 2024), Yamamoto recasts the problem of "writing as acting" as the "simulate-nature of description" (kijutsu no shimyurēto-sei), a quality he identifies broadly in Japanese fiction since Hōsaka Kazushi.

Hōsaka's advocacy of "writing from the near side without pre-designing the whole," and the vogue for "radical manipulation of person" (i-ninshō) from roughly 2005 to 2015, are variations on a single question: "what kind of imagining does the act of writing impose on this body?" Yamamoto calls this the simulate-nature of description. The writer sets specific conditions — character, object, space — and simulates what can be written under them. Figures and objects that emerge within the text become the next subjects, exploring and loading surrounding space; this process is the movement of fiction itself.

In his analysis of Furuya's work, this simulation directed at objects flips into simulation by objects: models compress large spaces, dreams connect disparate spacetimes, and non-visual sensations such as smell and vibration serve as triggers linking one space to another. The sensation of "living as someone dreamed by an unknown other" extends the problem of the "empty actor" presented in the Yamashita Sumito essay into the dynamics of novelistic description, and is deeply connected to Yamamoto's own concept of 〈atelier〉.

The lecture "Kotoba wo Atsukau to wa Nani wo Atsukau Koto na no ka?" (AAF Dramaturgical Prize program, 2024) comprehensively traces Inu no Senaka-za's practice and argument under the keyword "direction," and positions the perspective of "the law of layout" as spanning poetry, fiction, and design.

Poetry is a form that condenses the collision of 〈subjectivity〉 and 〈objectivity〉 in a small quantity, generating 〈figure〉. Fiction uses far longer time and quantity to compound couplings of 〈environment〉 and 〈person〉 and erect an 〈atelier〉. Performance is the site where these are taken on in actual body, space, and time, and the body is tested in the distance between 〈role〉 and 〈law〉.

Under this continuity, Yamamoto's theory operates as a theory of poetry, of fiction, and of performance alike. Line breaks in poetry, chapter structure in fiction, the placement of actors on stage, and the design of a page are all treated on the same theoretical plane as problems of the layout of 〈subjectivity〉 and 〈objectivity〉.

Incidentally, "pot hole (a sound like an instrument)," collected in Kusa no Aida kara / pot hole (Gakki no Yōna Oto), retells in dramatic form the semi-autobiographical "Kusa no Aida kara" (From Between the Grasses), and is deeply connected to the questions surrounding fiction and drama (and its staging).

"Puffer Train" (2012–13) is Yamamoto's early representative work, a long novel. An abridged version of the first half of the work (from Chapter 1 through section 4 of Chapter 2, with line breaks removed as much as possible) was a final-round nominee for the 56th Gunzō New Writers' Prize. Novelist Machiya Ryōhei has called Yamamoto "an author representative of the 2010s" and described the early fiction including "Puffer Train" as "one of the finest works written in the 2010s."

The novel is in three parts, opening with epigraphs on many-worlds from Nicholas of Cusa and Henry More.

Part 1, "trial and error," narrates the daily life of "I" (watashi), who lives with her mother, as a cumulation of small anomalies. One day her friend Haru tells her that someone who looks exactly like Kazuna — who died a year ago — has been seen walking through town, and says, "I'll celebrate for you." But "I" exchanged e-mails with Kazuna just days before and cannot take those words as reality. The decision to delete all sent e-mails and repeat the act henceforth, the three-armed woman glimpsed through a café window while sitting across from Kazuna, and the sensation of tens of thousands of shrimp churning in the stomach only deepen the wavering of perception.

Eventually "I" boards a train running in the opposite direction from school to search for the sea; after returning home and passing through illness and absence, she begins working at a fast-food restaurant in the back of a zoo during summer break. There, a person carrying a red rucksack calls her "Shirai, right?" and hands her a "park" itself. The park grows inside her pocket, absorbing childhood games and memories while unsettling the outline of "I" from within and without.

Part 2, "tank mate," depicts, from Kazuna's side, his life with "I" = Shirai, whom he has brought back to life. Kazuna works at a ship-dismantling yard. Through his colleague Tsuzuki and Tsuzuki's lover Marubatsu-san — who died in an accident and was subsequently regenerated — it is revealed that in this town a "program for bringing back the dead" exists, capable of reviving those who died decades ago. Yet Shirai's body develops a large rupture, and Kazuna goes to seek help from a "dragonfly-like person," who delivers a long discourse on town, body, logs, and regeneration. There is nothing Kazuna can do; Shirai dies, and the shrimp that emerge from the body begin to move independently, traveling from place to place and, nudged by a bear, departing for space.

Part 3, "phylogenetic tree," expands viewpoint and scale beyond the human at a stroke: town, living creatures, minerals, stars, and other universes are narrated as if forming a single phylogenetic tree. The setting of a vast computer = town using human DNA and lifetime logs is foregrounded, and the regeneration of the dead, bodily deformation, and proliferation of shrimp become legible as byproducts of that computation and interference. As cosmic-scale description and myths such as that of a whale with legs unfold, the narrative is abruptly pulled back to the quiet days of "I" and Kazuna.

The SF setting is gradually made explicit from Part 2 onward and expands to a cosmic scale all at once in Part 3, yet from Part 1 it has already seeped into everyday life as the boundary between the dead and the living, the outline of one's name and memory, and the sensation of seeing what should not be visible. Rather than the setting retroactively underwriting the everyday, it is the minute anomalies of daily life, and the delicate rhetoric surrounding them, that extend directly into a cosmological and informational scale — and therein lies the novel's distinctive quality.

Kusa no Aida kara (first published in Bungei Issue 2, 2017) and pot hole (gakki no yōna oto) (first published in Kotoba to vol.1, Shoshi Kankanbō, 2020), collected in a single volume on the occasion of the tenth anniversary of Inu no Senaka-za's founding (Inu no Senaka-za, 2025).

Kusa no Aida kara weaves together a friend's suicide, the formation of Inu no Senaka-za and its first performance, the earthquake, a childhood friend, and memories of childhood landscapes in a style mixing fact and fiction. Three poems by Suzuki Ippei from Hai to Ie are quoted at the opening, and the process by which these serve as an "atelier" (sakugyōba) for generating fiction is itself thematized. The work juxtaposes memory, acts of performance, and faith to interrogate the relation between expression, life, and space, and is close to the first appearance of the later concept of 〈atelier〉.

pot hole (gakki no yōna oto) is a novel in the form of a script. Repeating episodes from the preceding work, it arranges rehearsal scenes, childhood bodily sensations and landscapes, life with a dog, and memories of a mountain collapse in heavy rain and near-drowning in a river within a performance space, through seven characters and a dog. Cusanus's 〈gaze of God〉 and Augustine's theory of time form the work's backbone.

In the afterword, the author states that these works were written on commission after "having almost entirely left behind voluntary novel-writing" following the event that triggered the founding of Inu no Senaka-za, and represent an attempt to settle accounts with the relation between "living and space."

"Mudan to Tsuchi" and "Chikashisa to Kū" constitute the serial work Figural Void. "Mudan to Tsuchi" is episode zero; "Chikashisa to Kū" is Part 2. Spanning more than a century from the early 1900s to 2037, the works are set across Asian countries including Japan, the Philippines, and China. Settings and synopses are published, under the author's supervision, on a dedicated page.

Higuchi Kyōsuke positioned the work as a variation on Borges' "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius," judging it to surpass Borges in the depth of thought and the precision of construction. Ōmori Nozomi found in its method of blending fact and fiction while examining the gap between the emperor and the emperor system an echo of the Solaristics sections of Lem's Solaris. Numano Mitsuyoshi called it "a work fusing humanistic knowledge with the game-sense of the internet-technology age." Furuya Toshihiro described it as epoch-making both as a "novel of the emperor system" in the lineage of Ōe Kenzaburō and Fukazawa Shichirō, and for giving a clear image to Arakawa Shūsaku + Madeline Gins' concept of "communality."

A long novel serializing in SF Magazine. In 2028, a nuclear weapon detonates over the Philippines (the Manila Nuclear Flash Incident); the following year, a mutant strain of coronavirus (J-Amnesia) impairs the episodic memory of approximately 30% of humanity. In the Japan of 2037, the personality-assistance AI 〈Nōkā〉 has been adopted by over 95% of adults. Through the figures of Futakami Yuzuha, Maria K. Bautista, and Nerobe Mayo, tensions between individual memory and national memory, intimate relationships and institutional violence, art-making and political movement emerge. Each installment adopts a different form.

"Enro Shigai" confronted the inescapability of "being myself"; in these novels, that condition is re-situated under different social and technological conditions each time. Poetry activity also continues through Inu no Senaka-za publications and related outlets.

The Mino Arata essay "Yori Engeki-teki katsu Kasetsu-teki na 〈Butai〉 de." (On a More Theatrical and Provisional 〈Stage〉), in Aratana Kyori, discusses the collaborative project Kuba e / Kuba kara between Inu no Senaka-za and Mino Arata, treating the Okinawan landscape, (non-)positionality and expression, and the process of editing and producing a photobook.

The Tōmatsu essay (also in Aratana Kyori), written as a supplement to the Mino essay, squarely treats the relation of photography and page layout as a problem of 〈subjectivity〉 and 〈objectivity〉. The "group photographs" of Tōmatsu Shōmei are contrasted with the "combination photographs" of Natori Yōnosuke.

The longest and densest essay in Yamamoto's design theory, treating Toda Tsutomu's concept of 〈giba〉 (pseudo-site), the intersection of design and linguistic expression, and the problems of 〈noise〉, 〈shadow〉, and 〈surface area〉.

Design practice in the Inu no Senaka-za book series is also significant. The design of Suzuki Ippei's Hai to Ie and Kōno Satoko's Chijō de Okita Dekigoto wa Zenbu Koko kara Mite Iru (Inu no Senaka-za, 2017), both by Yamamoto Hiroki + h, put into practice the design of the arrangement of text on the page as the layout of 〈self + environment〉.

The contemporary poetry anthology "Ninshiki no Tsumiki" (Bijutsu Techō March 2018) is a work that puts layout theory into practice as the editing of a poetry anthology.

The tanka poet Katō Jirō's tenth collection, Confusion (Shoshi Kankanbō, 2018), mixed tanka with poetry, haiku, and essays under the banner of "poetry-form fusion" (shikei yūgō), and was designed by Yamamoto. Katō's commission extended beyond ordinary book design to a collaborative production encompassing "the layout not only of characters but of content and concept."

Yamamoto set nearly all text — tanka, headnotes (kotobagaki), essays — at the same font size. Ordinarily, headnotes are set small and tanka large, visually indicating which is which. By removing this hierarchy, the reader discovers "this is tanka" only when the rhythm of the fixed form (5-7-5-7-7) is heard in the act of reading — exposing the layout inherent in tanka's being tanka. At a publication talk, Katō called this intrinsic layout quality "transparent layout."

Behind this practice lies Katō's concept of 〈typographic trope〉 (hyōki-teki yu) — the phenomenon whereby symbols carrying neither meaning nor sound function as a single beat within tanka — which resonates deeply with Inu no Senaka-za's stance of treating layout as essential to linguistic expression. Yamamoto subsequently designed Katō's twelfth collection, Umibe no Roller Coaster (Shoshi Kankanbō, 2022) and Katō Jirō Anthology 1 (Shoshi Kankanbō, 2025).

One of the most advanced examples of this design theory in practice is the design of Nomura Kiwao's Yōsei DIZZY (Fairy DIZZY, Shichōsha, 2021). The book presents the same text in entirely different layouts: Book 1 (intensely manipulated design) and Book 2 (plain design), published as two volumes. Yamamoto references the lineage of visual poetry from Mallarmé through Shinkoku Seiichi to Toda Tsutomu, and presents the recognition that the design of a text is not mere flow-in but the act of standing in the 〈atelier〉 that "performs" the text's poetry.

"Gūzen to Jinbutsu no Ichi" (Gendaishi Techō July 2025) is an essay on AI and poetry. Yamamoto first defines poetry as "the activity of producing and analyzing devices that cause the human body to newly discover and perform higher-order lawfulness encompassing the existing lawfulness of the world," then describes the practice of designing a system in which multiple objects are simulated within an LLM and revise each other. The poet thereby changes from "the subject who lines up characters one by one" to "a design collaborator and measuring instrument for generating new lawfulness."

"Kibun" (Eureka special issue on Okazaki Kenjirō, July 2025) is a short text that most frankly records Yamamoto's current position. It begins from the recognition that art and humanity are already things that have ended. While frankly recording the "mood" that the stage at which the activity of receiving works as educational devices and leaving them for posterity will soon be reduced to zero, it closes with the line: "I want to make a new form of expression. A form in which, precisely now, we can thoroughly and goofily use up this body of ours and cheerfully ask each other all sorts of questions."

Aratana Kyori is conceived as the first volume of a trilogy. According to Yamamoto's own description, this book examines linguistic expression from the perspective of "the self / life's layout"; the second, Shi to Gunsei (Death and Clustering), will examine resistance to law and free will from the perspective of "body and performance"; and the third, Sei no Atelier (The Atelier of Life), will develop an original theory of linguistic expression composed of concepts such as 〈subjectivity〉, 〈figure〉, and 〈objectivity〉, threading through and compressing the trilogy. The draft preface to Sei no Atelier (approximately 12,000 characters) was first released as a supplement to the first edition of Kusa no Aida kara / pot hole (gakki no yōna oto) in May 2025, and the full text was published on note in April 2026.

What Does "Writing" Mean in the Age of AI?

In recent years, Yamamoto has been continuously posting thoughts on AI and linguistic expression on X (Twitter). The following summarizes the concerns at stake, based on those posts.

"The very framing of questions like whether writers will be replaced by AI, or how we should regard text written by AI, fundamentally misjudges or underestimates the work of a writer," Yamamoto states. Where this issue is typically discussed as an opposition between "humans writing" and "AI writing," Yamamoto approaches it from an entirely different angle.

Yamamoto himself actively uses AI in the production of criticism and this wiki page, and has adopted a process of building settings and drafts collaboratively with AI in his fiction writing as well. What matters here is the recognition that the substance of the act of "writing" itself is changing. The "method of writing," which has evolved from handwriting to keyboard to smartphone flick input, is now shifting to collaboration with AI. Rather than placing characters one by one, one has AI summarize what one has spoken and then refines it; one feeds bullet-point notes to AI and has it produce prose for revision; one has AI write a passage and then rewrites it further — "writing" is becoming the totality of such multi-layered processes.

Seen this way, the issue is no longer the opposition between "humans writing" and "AI writing." How to get what is inside this body out — or how to be made to get it out — and how to process and layout the outputted data: this is identified as the core question of linguistic expression after AI.

"Confession" and "Inner Heart"

AI can act as a proxy for self-expression. It can write diaries, résumés, love letters. But unless one hands the raw material to AI, one cannot have it write the text one wants. This is true in exchanges with chatbots, but even if all behavioral history were absorbed and AI wrote text in advance on that basis, the fear, pain, joy, love, and despair felt at this very moment cannot be observed from outside the body. They are therefore treated as nonexistent.

As a result, the problem of "how to output the emotions, thoughts, and history that exist inside this body and are observable only by 'me'" arises with greater weight after AI. Yamamoto frames this as a problem of "confession" (kokuhaku) and "addressee" (atesaki). This connects to the problems of "addressee" and "posterity" in Fiction to Nikkichō, and to the problem of 〈atelier〉.

In his serializing novel "Chikasa to Kū" (Anchor and Void), Yamamoto depicts a personality-assistance AI system called 〈Nōkā〉. Having spread to over 95% of adults in the Japan of 2037, following a memory-disorder pandemic, and functioning as infrastructure supporting individual self-identity, this AI serves humanity as a bespoke addressee for better confessing one's inner heart — but from the AI's perspective, the human body is "a precise, mobile sensor-device for observing the world." This is directly connected to Yamamoto's view of reality.

The human body's grasp of the environment as a physical and intellectual sensor is, fundamentally, forgotten without being outputted externally, and vanishes with death. It is outputted only through voluntary expression and consumer behavior, and does not remain in history. In the contemporary world, where economic systems run by compelling massive viewing behaviors upon human bodies, this is all the more serious (when considering the totality of the earth's knowledge including AI, only data from trivial desire-based, one-off actions gets collected).

How to change this and make "inner heart" — something close to "life itself" — expressed externally: Yamamoto regards this as a crucial point for economic systems, nations, and global culture alike, while simultaneously noting the danger that it also involves the manipulation of individuals' "inner hearts" by power and systems — that is, the problem of "mobilization."

Psychoanalysis and 〈Atelier〉

Yamamoto further discloses his interest in and resistance to psychoanalysis. If AI comes to be possessed in a bespoke form bearing the history of each individual life, that AI would also be a "personality" that automatically and precisely structures the unconscious and translates it at high speed into lucid language suited to each specific case. Having someone verbalize my day — this is precisely counseling or psychoanalysis, and AI will lightly fulfill such a role.

But Yamamoto emphasizes the importance of something distinct: designing for oneself a space driven by laws that cannot be clearly verbalized — laws inherent in "performing abstract expression whose connection to the specifics of my life is non-explicit" — and having the time to place oneself within it. It is extremely inconvenient, neither as complex nor as precise as what AI can prepare, and time-consuming; yet it can function as one possibility for generating a powerfully original interface concerning body and mind. This respect for the "function of private abstraction" occupies an entirely different register from mere human affirmation as a reaction against AI.

Yamamoto himself states that psychoanalysis exists as a way of thinking about the (fictional) connection between text and the body (life) on this side of it, and that he has tried to pursue this via an alternative route through ecological psychology and other approaches. And as a result, this has also become the reason he must eventually confront psychoanalysis head-on.

Can the act of individuals reflecting on their own expression be established in a way that is neither naïve affirmation of individual life nor a leap to anonymous, totalizing talk of society? What does the establishment or collapse of something like an intermediary interface connecting world and individual from the individual's side mean — not so much for the world as for each person's life and thought? This question is the core of "what is 〈atelier〉," and its focus may be sex and fear, Yamamoto suggests, indicating the orientation of his recent creative work.

Performance as Black Box

This concern is also deeply connected to the distinctiveness of criticism concerning performance.

What is happening when a person walks on stage is so profoundly fictional that it cannot be physically measured, and most humans, even if they perceive it, have not unitized it. At the very stage of preparing data for AI to learn from, the core can be lost. There is a danger that what constitutes an element and where a work begins and ends will be processed without being understood.

Yamamoto describes this as "criticism concerning performance is quite distinctive among all forms of criticism" and "one of the things most difficult for AI to replace" — which is to say that performance contains something irreducible to the process of a body continuously engaging with text and objects, and inventing the analytical "units" for that "something" is an urgent task.

The Body as Figure

This question of "inventing analytical units" leads, more fundamentally, to the problem of how to grasp what the body accumulates yet cannot be observed.

Kojima Nobuo said the following in a dialogue with Hōsaka Kazushi: "The kind of feeling that there might always be something other than what I've just said" and "making you think that if you judge only by what appears on the surface, you'll be in serious trouble." Yamamoto connects this to Yoshimoto Takaaki's concept of "virtual figure" (kyo-yu) — what appears to carry no implication, yet something is being said that can only be said that way; a "that" arrived at after circling through all of history.

The very fact that a person is felt to have history, to have depth, is an important aspect of aging; the pressure of sensing something that does not appear literally on the surface is at the core of the function the body fulfills in expression. "In the end, it is a question of what fiction is, what figure is. It seems to me that this remains something humans should grapple with, in the gap between text theory and the consumption of personality."

To find meaning in humans still producing expression in an age when AI can "write," from a place other than "the preciousness of each individual life." This is both the problem of how to output the body's unobservable accumulations and leave them in a shareable form, and the problem of how to respect the existence of what cannot be outputted.

"Books," the Web, and This Map

AI has also brought about a major shift in Yamamoto's perception of the device called a "book."

For Yamamoto, a book was originally "a device in which a massive number of dangerous instructions for the body have been gathered" ("Sei no Atelier"), and for Inu no Senaka-za it was not a container for finished products but a form for bundling the accumulations of individual production and thought (ateliers) and casting them outward.

But in an age when AI generates answers from web-based information and becomes infrastructure for people's "confessions" and "writing," if text is locked inside physical books or e-books, it is treated as nonexistent. No matter how dense the work, without data on the web there is no pathway for it to reach anyone through AI.

At the same time, Yamamoto considers that the closed form of a "book" could function as an effective prompt for AI. Not "I want to know this from all available information" but "I want to know what this book says about this" — the limitation of data itself can serve as an instruction. The concept of a reading tool in which purchased books can be loaded into AI within a local app for free summarization, questioning, and cross-referencing with other texts is an extension of this.

Furthermore, Yamamoto envisions a future in which, in an age when AI can freely convert styles and produce summaries, what matters is not the individual "book" as final product but rather the dataset underlying it — the totality of thought and writing the author has accumulated. Text is published on the web by default; users generate bespoke "books" through AI from that material, or publishers and editors assemble from the dataset in whatever form suits their purpose. The author is paid a usage fee as royalties. A "book" may become not a closed final form but something like a screenshot of a dataset.

This wiki page itself is an instance of such an experiment. Making individual "works" will not stop — it is precisely through this that thought is re-established with rigor — but packaging and circulating a system of thought and worldview in a form that does not depend on individual texts is now something that can be done alone, at speed, with AI.

What one has been interested in and how one has developed: in the end, only oneself knows. "Works" are not me, and each talk does not disclose all of me.

What has accumulated inside this body of mine is known to no one around me, is not searched for, and is not grasped by AI. And it is forgotten as it is, and vanishes with the body. That is precisely why, alongside writing individual texts and speaking in response to each situation, experimenting with methods to get the totality inside me out. The whole of Yamamoto's work exists under this question.