Qiushi Wang

In an antique shop by the sea in Hastings, my gaze was caught by a black-and-white photograph of an Asian man. After speaking with the shopkeeper, I learned that the photo, along with several others, had been acquired from a Japanese individual. Beyond that, nothing more was known. No names, no locations, no context—only a date inscribed on the back hinted at their origin: perhaps from Japan’s Shōwa era.

How did these photographs cross oceans and continents to arrive at this British seaside town? Did they travel with a migrant, or were they abandoned along the way?

Amid these silences and gaps, I turned to the method of W.G. Sebald, weaving a fictional narrative of migration from these lost images. Here, the boundary between memory, image, and history begins to blur. Fiction, perhaps, is not an escape from truth, but a detour through which truth may be approached.