Watch how a Japanese villager is replacing the dead with real-life NPCs

Take a moment and watch this micro-documentary on a 64-year-old Japanese woman who is sewing elaborate dolls, leaving them in the place of departed neighbors from her dying village in the valley of Shikoku.

For the past decade, Ayano Tsukimi has been repopulating the remote village of Nagoro with arts-and-crafts people, sewing buttons on their eyes and coiffing their hair with yarn, because her home is becoming a ghost town. Why? Well, because, as we learn in the video, her village has dwindled down to 36 residents and doesn’t even have a general store or local school, though at one point it was a thriving manufacturing town. It’s kind of heartbreaking, but awesome too.