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The images in this photo essay explore a rural Japan that is fast disappearing. Photographer Greg Davis's poetic monochromes depict ordinary people in their everyday lives, following the seasonal rhythms and lifecycle rites that hold the community of Gunma Prefecture (central Honshu) ever more tenuously together. He wields his camera like a social anthropologist, capturing fragments of a way of life that anticipate the changing context, the impending transformation. In some respects this is an elegy to a time already lost, one that has become more ritual than reality. Jeff Kingston's text unravels the complexities of some of these images and shows how they constitute a rich and deftly haunting social commentary.