In the darkness beyond kyomu — yabo and shitsubo hang like fog. The jigoku no monban takes a sidelong stance. Silver ash stirs — dissolving into the night. The exhaled smoke carries the zanzo of the past. The heat of uragiri, sealed inside the lungs. The weight of lives placed on a scale. Staring into a darkness that gives no answer. The night is deep — the ash is cold. At the end of the road one chose — the gate raises a quiet creak. Aa (nageki) — the writhing goka is the shirushi of shuen. The heat remaining in the fingertips — former eiko, or burned-out kaikon? At the kyokaisen where the demon gatekeeper looks down, the man entrusts his outline to the smoke he exhales. Beyond the sidelong gaze, vanishing into the night mist: the golden dream that slipped away, and the mountain of accumulated ash. Words are no longer needed. Only the smoldering silver ash — dissolving into the darkness as proof that he lived there. Aimai naru wa — rinkaku of shiko. Hidai shita — zangai of yabo. Kuraitukushita — sokonashi no shitsubo. The dry wind sweeps away memory. Only shadow fills the empty vessel. Prayer has long since returned to sand. Only silence mocks the heartbeat. What fell through the gaps between fingers — was tomorrow, in the form of a nightmare that will not end. Aimai naru wa — rinkaku of shiko. The eyes that once looked toward the sun now drink the poison named silence. Words stripped of meaning drift through cold memory, tracing a labyrinth with no exit. But — when despair has drunk everything dry, in the bottom of the empty vessel, a faint trembling will stir. It resembles prayer — the first cry of a nameless existence. The jiga, losing its form. Connected to rebirth from zetsubo. Silence from the perfect mu. The vessel once called "watashi" — shatters, crumbles, disperses as particles of light. The outline dissolves, the skin merges with the night's darkness, releasing from the weight of shuchaku. The zetsubo that lay at the bottom of the abyss becomes fertile soil, embracing roots, calling back to the withered branch-tips the trembling of a nameless "sei." Watashi dissolves into what is not watashi, rebound by invisible threads with the twinkling of distant stars, the breath of unknown others — a vast tsuranari that transcends the solitary individual. When all sounds complete their purpose, when the armor called meaning falls away, "Mu" — with deep itsukushimi — suffuses watashi. What exists there is not frozen emptiness. Everything — michitarite. Just, quietly, being there —” eternal in its equivalence — Ogon no Chinmoku.
