くちない
すぎたこと
のこるみず
undecayed things / things of the past / water that remains
The rain on Yakushima is not a simple phenomenon. It is an ocean of fine, suspended mist that seems less like falling water and more like the constant, tired exhalation of the ancient world. It clings to everything—to the moss, to the cedar, to the edges of memory—saturating the air until even the light feels heavy. We were the only ones left awake in the common room of a cheap hostel near Miyanoura, the kind of place where the silence between conversations felt sharper than any noise.
The light came from a single, naked bulb hanging by a fraying cord, illuminating a small circle of damp plywood table. On the wall opposite, a framed poster advertised a 1980s jazz festival in Kobe.
Kento, the photographer, was conducting his nightly ritual—the meditative, painstaking cleaning of his primary lens. His movements were precise, suggesting a mind that needed order to survive the surrounding chaos.
He was the one who broke the silence, pushing a profound question into the humid air like a stone dropped into a dry well.
“Do you trust your instincts, Hideki?”
Hideki, the single father, a man whose quiet existence felt molded by exhaustion, didn’t look up from his coffee. It was lukewarm now, and bitter. He stirred it slowly, using a heavy steel spoon that seemed too large for the porcelain mug, the edge making a faint, persistent clink-clink-clink. He had the distant, careful eyes of someone who knew the exact difference between a feeling and a fact.
“That’s a big question for a Tuesday afternoon, Kento. Or perhaps Wednesday. I can’t tell, not with this rain.”
“It’s Wednesday,” Kento confirmed, holding the polished glass up to the light. “I was reviewing the photos from today.” He tapped the camera screen, showing a shot of a path disappearing into the moss forest, a world of deep, silent green. “I took this because my gut screamed at me to step five feet off the known trail, right into that patch of dense shadow. Logically, it was a wasted minute. But the light found the angle I needed. The instinct for the photograph was perfect. I trust the eye. I don’t know if I trust the heart’s instinct.”
Hideki finally set the spoon down. The sound of steel on porcelain was instantly absorbed by the room’s atmosphere.
“That’s the exact difference, Kento. The eye just has to recognize a pattern in light. The heart has to recognize the pattern of suffering. And yes, I trust my instincts. But they had to be learned, the good way and the bad way. The bad way was the only way it became permanent.”
The Geometry of Heat and the Record That Stopped
He lifted the mug, the ceramic worn smooth from years of use.
“When I was younger, instinct felt like a flash of heat. It was a beautiful, dangerous geometry. It told me to pursue the things that demanded immediate energy. It was that heat that told me to quit my accounting job for a band that went nowhere but left me with a stack of poorly mastered vinyl records and a severe lack of savings. It was that heat that convinced me my ex-wife and I were a beautiful, unstoppable storm that would simply consume all obstacles.”
Kento nodded slowly, his fingers tracing the contour of his lens barrel. The click was crisp and deliberate.
“And the storm broke?”
“It evaporated. Like steam. She left, saying I was too much of a dreamer, too disconnected from the practical ground. I remember standing in the doorway after she packed her last bag—a blue suitcase with a broken latch. And my instinct was a cold, pure panic. It told me to beg, to promise things I knew, even then, I couldn’t deliver—a new life, a new direction. That was the bad way of learning. I followed the frantic instinct, and it only led to deeper water, more noise. I learned that pure, emotional instinct, when it hasn’t been tested, is nothing more than panic or desire wearing the noble mask of intuition.”
The Ledger of Scars and the Scent of Dish Soap
Kento placed the lens cap back on, securing the delicate glass, a gesture of finality. “So, what is the structure of the learned instinct? How do you recognize it?”
Hideki leaned forward, resting his elbows on his knees, his gaze fixed on the frayed edge of the jazz poster.
“It’s not a flash anymore, Kento. It’s the absolute opposite. It’s the deep, pervasive quiet that settles after the initial noise has faded. Now, when I have to make a choice—about the loan, about my daughter’s new school, about sending that message you wrote late at night—I wait. I wait for the screaming to stop, like waiting for the needle drop on a B-side.”
He explained that the instincts he trusted now weren’t a gift; they were earned.
“They were purchased at a very high price: the loss of that beautiful, terrible storm, the decade of exhaustion, the quiet, persistent reality of raising a child alone. My gut isn’t an oracle that speaks divine truth. It is a ledger of scars. And because I know every entry in that ledger, every mistake, every moment I failed to listen before, that ledger is reliable.”
“And what does that ledger tell you, finally?” Kento asked.
“It tells me to prioritize the quiet things,” Hideki said softly. “It tells me which battles are just ego-noise, and which silence is worth defending. It tells me to go home tonight and teach my daughter how to make rice properly, measuring the water with her finger, because that small, perfect ritual is more real, more trustworthy, than any burning passion or grand plan I ever conceived.”
He looked down at his hands, which were rough and bore the faint, clean scent of the hostel’s dish soap.
“The truth is, Kento, the instincts of the heart have to be broken and repaired, over and over, before they become something truly trustworthy. Like an old cedar tree, you learn to trust its direction not by its height, but by how many thousand years it’s spent in the rain, surviving the typhoon. The learned instinct tells you where the true roots are, where the water is retained beneath the moss. And you can build a life on that.”
The light bulb above them gave one final, almost imperceptible hiccup, and the small corner of the room was consumed by the deep, water-logged gray of the Yakushima dawn.
life 