As if wrapped in a lapis lazuli singing voice.

I felt as if I had heard a clear voice saying, "I am here."

It was a blue cover that reminded me of the ocean, standing on the shelf of a bookstore filled with silence.
It was the moment I saw the twinkling of a silver star shining on it.

As I opened the page and read aloud in my heart the words that looked like a two-line poem written at the beginning of the book, I thought, I am glad I met this book.
When I held the book in both hands as if to confirm its weight, a melody like the sound of the tide echoing from afar was calling me.

In this collection of essays titled "Star Sand," the words spun by musician Ichiko Aoba play a colorful melody, like musical notes smiling on a staff.

The foundation of that melody is the scene she encounters in her dreams every night, like the swimming of stars.
At the moment when consciousness fades and I fall asleep, I am gently led by the hand, and we go out together from the sandy beach to the open sea.

A school of Dall's porpoises that have lost their pigment and turned pure white.
A voice heard upon waking from sleep in a coral reef.
A Western-style house on a hill where light scatters when the reflection from the ocean enters.

Is it a dream, or is it reality? I cannot tell.
As I hummed the old poem and touched the scenery reflected in her eyes with my fingertips, my own existence felt like it was unraveling and crumbling, becoming something very ambiguous.

Come to think of it, I suddenly realized that although I often watched the sea in my dreams when I was a child, it had become less frequent as I grew up.

The waves and the timbre of the sea breeze. The breathing of living things overlapping with that timbre.
The scent of the rocky shore drifting so thickly that I feel like I might get drunk even though I am on land.
When I thought about those things that resonate with the water circulating inside my body, memories of a distant day floated up among the waves.

Inside my grandmother's house in a small seaside town in Kyushu.
One day after the middle of August, when I said I wanted to swim in the sea, I was admonished that it was not allowed to swim after the Obon festival.
The words my grandmother returned to me when I asked for the reason still echo in my ears.

"Because after Obon, the dead pull you away."

Ever since I heard these words, every time I experienced the sensation of my feet sinking into the sand as the waves receded, I thought that one day I too would return to the other side of these waves.
That a day would come when a part of my soul, having become a small fragment, would be dyed blue in the place where the sky and the sea melt together.

The abyss of life and death, the root of existence.
The more you stare at it, the more things that should be invisible and things that should be unfelt crystallize and become light that overflows from the depths of the heart into the atmosphere.
Grains of light reflecting diffusely line up on the staff, changing shape into a melody that shakes the air, and the pain and sadness that seem to bleed, carved into the rhythm, pierce straight through the chest of the listener.

What can be seen with the naked eye is only a small part of the surface of reality.
As I turned the pages, my vision gradually began to moisten.
The question that arose as I felt the film of water become a drop.
Iris, vitreous body, crystalline lens.
Why is it that the names of the organs of our eyeballs are imbued with a poetic quality?


In this world where there is no turning back once you are born, whenever you ask the meaning of existence and are about to be tripped up by the darkness, surely people are saved by holding the star-candy-like brilliance in their palms and gazing at it.

I sometimes imagine the day when my last breath will spill out, like the orange fireball of a sparkler that has disappeared into the twilight of the wharf.
Thinking about that moment, which I do not know when it will arrive, sometimes makes me feel dizzy, but once I accepted it as such, I began to feel that the daily life that continues without interruption is actually more mysterious.

When urged to "let us know your schedule," I make an appointment for several months ahead at the clinic's reception, but the thought that I cannot guarantee that I will exist on that day flashes through my mind.

Like the changing and circulating seasons, countless lives visit this planet and eventually leave.

As I walked on the asphalt that had fully absorbed the heat of the sun and looked at the distant mountain range, the deep green ridgeline, which I had seen many times, was clearly drawn against the clear sky, so beautiful that I couldn't help but be captivated by it.

Things that have form are fleeting and fragile.
And yet, precisely because of that.
I close my eyes. When I taste the sunlight that seems to soak into my capillaries through my thin eyelids, a lapis lazuli voice shakes my heart.

The music, words, and colors that have been brought forth sparkle and flow down like stars.
May the light of such stars always be by your side.
In the days spent walking toward the time of departing this land, that is all I wish for.