Rough Ground, Soft Voices.

Over 300,000 years of restless fire have carved Aso’s caldera—Heian scribes marveled at distant smoke, Edo-era chronicles recorded the Tenmei eruption, and modern seismographs still chart Nakadake’s low rumble. On a Golden Week morning, I boarded the first bus from Aso Station under a sky that felt older than memory. Steam curled from the diesel engine as if the mountain itself were breathing.

Inside, families argued over snacks; a photographer balanced a tripod; and then a married couple from New York squeezed in beside me. He was a journalist—pen poised above a small notebook—while she, a crossword expert, tapped clues about ash and wind. Their silent choreography: when he paused to capture a view, she slid her pencil across so he could whisper a hint; when she hesitated over a riddle, his voice was soft as dusk guiding her to the next letter. Golden Week had already turned timetables into polite suggestions, and with one shared laugh at the driver’s delay, we slipped into companionable quiet.

Three hours on winding asphalt past emerald paddies and lichen-clad waymarkers, the bus hissed at the trailhead. Volcanic ash sifted through our boots like sand through an hourglass. At a lone stall, bitter tea laced with smoke was poured from a battered thermos—a reminder that fire still lived beneath our feet. Higher up, jagged boulders jutted like fractured memories of past eruptions. At Nakadake’s rim, steam billowed against a bruised-purple sky. The journalist fetched a small speaker and pressed play: Ryo Fukui’s piano drifted over the crater, each note soft as ash settling on green fields below. We shared water and a rice ball in reverent silence, letting the melody become part of the mountain’s slow exhale.

Shadows lengthened on the descent as we retraced our steps past moss-clad relics and shuttered stalls. I turned to them: “I wanted to remember what it feels like to start from scratch—climb something older than myself.” The journalist closed his notebook and nodded gently. “Sounds like the real ascent.” Back on the bus beneath a rose-tinged sky, our shared silence felt more enduring than any summit.

Wabi-Sabi in Impermanent Connections

Mount Aso teaches that beauty often hides in the cracks—the ash, the steam, the unspoken moments between strangers. Like a crossword missing its final clue or a notebook half-filled with observations, our journeys remain inherently unfinished. True wabi-sabi emerges when we embrace impermanence: accepting that each eruption, every passing conversation, and every drifting note of jazz is fleeting and imperfect, yet charged with an undeniable vitality.