Portraits of people who live in dwellings on the streets and by the riverside, whom Kengo Noguchi, who travelled around Japan from his teens staying in cheap inns and sleeping rough, came to call people of the hermitage rather than homeless people. In the gaps of the city and on riverbanks, in corners of landscapes that belong to no one, small shelters built like bricolage from huts, blue tarps and tents stand where ideas of the public, freedom, reputation and common sense have been hollowed out. Furniture gathered from the discards of consumer society, roofs and posts of scrap: structures that look improvised yet keep an arrangement, an order of their own and traces of optimisation sustained for years. Some people are there for economic reasons, others by choice, and Noguchi kept returning to talk and photograph, asking what kind of life and freedom each human being desires.