夜が溶け
朝のくちびる
霧に触れ
Night dissolves—
and morning’s lips
kiss the mist.
I was staying in a small apartment in Kōenji when I started waking up before dawn.
It was winter, I think. Or close to it.
The kind of cold that isn’t just temperature, but an attitude. A certain silence in the walls.
The apartment was on the second floor of a building that used to be a bathhouse, or so the old man downstairs claimed. He ran a record shop that never opened before noon and played only jazz pressed before 1968.
He didn’t sell anything, as far as I could tell.
He just liked having the records near him.
We never exchanged names.
Still, every morning when I passed his open door, he nodded once.
It was enough.
At some point, without deciding to, I began going to sleep earlier.
Not like clockwork.
Not like some resolution on a wall.
It just started happening.
The light would fade, and something in my body—some ancient bird—would fold its wings and say, that’s enough for today.
And when I began waking before the city did—before even the vending machines hummed their full song—I felt something loosen.
As if I’d stumbled into a version of Tokyo that most people never get to see.
A softer one. A little threadbare at the edges, like an old coat.
I’d pull on my jacket, still holding the warmth of sleep, and walk.
No destination. No headphones. Just air.
The kind of air that carries secrets but doesn’t tell them.
I’d stop by a convenience store—FamilyMart, usually—and buy a black coffee in a paper cup.
Sometimes a boiled egg.
Sometimes a chocolate chip melon pan that left sugar in my pocket lint.
Then I’d find a place to stand.
A bridge. A corner. A rooftop if I could sneak one.
I liked watching how the mist settled between buildings.
How even the crows seemed gentler in the morning, their cries slower, more drawn out.
There was a dog I used to see, a Shiba with a crooked ear.
He walked his owner more than the other way around.
We nodded at each other too.
I don’t know if he remembered me.
But I remembered him.
People say evenings are magical.
But that’s because they’ve never listened to a morning.
Mornings are quiet, yes, but not empty.
They’re full—
of things returning.
Light. Breath. Thought. Birds.
Even your own name sounds different in the morning.
She was staying with me for a few nights.
A translator from Kyoto.
She liked whiskey and didn’t believe in dreams.
Slept with her socks on and kept a small wooden owl in her bag for reasons she wouldn’t explain.
“You get up early,” she said one morning, watching me boil water.
“Do you always?”
“Only when I’m not trying to,” I said.
She blinked, then wrapped the blanket tighter around her.
There was something in the way she looked at me—like she was trying to place a melody she almost remembered.
She didn’t ask anything else.
In my twenties, I didn’t care much about sleep.
I treated it like a coin I could toss away.
Nights were for pacing, for unfinished thoughts and half-written emails.
Sleep came when it came—fragmented, rushed, often beside someone I didn’t know well enough to be dreaming near.
But somewhere along the way, I realized something:
sleep isn’t what you do after the day is done.
It’s what allows the day to begin at all.
The body reconstructs in the dark.
Not metaphorically.
Literally.
Cells repair. Memory reorders. Feelings unclench.
Sleep is the factory.
Everything else is just packaging.
“I don’t trust mornings,” she said, a few days later.
“They’re too quiet. Like they’re hiding something.”
“Maybe they are,” I said.
“But so are we.”
She smiled, but didn’t answer.
That was the last morning we shared.
Wabi-sabi lesson:
You don’t have to chase stillness.
It finds you.
In early light.
In cracked sidewalks.
In mist that doesn’t explain itself.
Sleep more.
Not as escape, but as return.
To the parts of you that keep breathing,
even when you’re not watching.
When the city is still folded,
and the sky hasn’t decided its color yet,
there’s a window.
A kind of music.
And if you’re lucky,
you’ll be awake enough to hear it.
life 
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