“Nature heals me with a mysterious power,” the photographer Yoshinori Mizutani recently wrote to me in an e-mail. Born in the countryside, surrounded by mountains, Mizutani told me that shinrin-yoku has always been a part of his daily life. In Tokyo, where he now lives and works, he takes his camera to the city’s parks and engages in a kind of photographic forest-bathing practice. In a new series of kaleidoscopic images created for The New Yorker, his communion with nature starts at an almost cellular level. In one photo, a spindly blade of grass splits lengthwise, exposing its green connective fibres like vertebrae; in another, a marigold-colored caterpillar dangles, visible in minute detail against a smear of green leaves. Throughout the series, Mizutani’s abstracted use of blur cushions his subjects, painting a simultaneously idyllic and voyeuristic scene. The viewer takes on the role of the forest itself, and of the creatures that live in it: we peer from behind, or from within, a bush as an oblivious couple strolls by, and we dip over a man’s shoulder as birds gather around his weathered palm.