The third installment of the series Lessons with the Non-human: an auto/ethnography of Entanglements, titled "The Umwelt Mediated by Soil," was published in the March 2026 issue of Sekai (Iwanami Shoten). Drawing on my first experience observing a deer hunt in Tōno, this article reflects on witnessing a dying deer firsthand and the waves of emotion that came and went in that moment. Taking as its threads the work of Aoi Nagasawa—an artist and hunter who makes paints and glue from the blood, bones, and hide of animals—the activities of Hayachinenda, which pulverizes the remains of animals and humans and returns them to the soil, and the "yotsugakari" of the tanefukube and the shishi in Tōno's shishi-odori (deer dance), which memorializes the dead of both animals and humans, it depicts the cycle in which a hunted life returns to the soil and circulates onward into other lives. Exploring a mode of the Umwelt in which humans and other species, the living and the dead, become entangled through the soil, it traces the process by which a sense of obligation to become a participant in the hunt begins to take root within me.
