Hitsuda, who originally studied painting and has a continuing reverence for the Rimpa School and Heian Period Buddhist paintings, refers to her own process as installation- and painting-like rather than photographic. Hitsuda habitually carries a camera with her to better capture images of her daily encounters—“like sketching something,” as she describes. She later pulls from her immense stock of photographs to create her monumental collages, which can sometimes measure 20 meters in length. Though her source images are commonplace views of nature or objects, her eventual works have fantastical narratives involving sacred animals, flowers that bloom forever, and mythical fountains.