Twilight in Japanese literature: kuregata — when the world loses its sharpness, and the human being their illusions

Twilight in Japanese literature as kuregata (暮れ方): a time of passage, when the world loses its sharpness—and the human being their illusions. From Heian and Sei Shōnagon to “Konjaku” and Akutagawa—how half-light shapes narrative, emotion, and the truth about its characters.

死にもせぬ　旅寝の果よ　秋の暮
(Shini mo senu / tabine no hate yo / aki no kure)

"And yet I did not die —

here is the end of my lodging on the road:

an autumn twilight at the end of the journey."

— 松尾芭蕉 (Matsuo Bashō), Ōgaki, 1684

Twilight in Japanese literature is rarely just a “pretty backdrop.” In Japanese, kuregata (暮れ方 — literally “the direction in which the day burns down”) is not a boundary between day and night, but rather a stretch of time in which the day loses its confidence: outlines soften, colors retreat, and things that at noon seem self-evident suddenly become “worth thinking through once again.” Old texts, with surprising frequency, begin by setting the scene at dusk: “once, as the day was dying…”—as if in the evening it were easier to stumble upon an encounter, a mistake, memory and unease, and sometimes also solace—even contact with the supernatural. Kuregata, then, is not an hour. It is a transitional state that enters a person just as it enters the landscape.

In the Heian period, among curtains, half-shadows, and corridors, that transition was a daily ritual of perception. When Sei Shōnagon writes that “autumn is twilight,” she hits the moment when sight ceases to be the tyrant of the senses, and the world begins to speak through sound: wind, insects, distant footsteps, hushed conversations, the creak of floorboards. In Murasaki Shikibu, that same half-darkness already works like a psychological mechanism—the sudden chill of dusk can trigger longing, push a person onto the road, open the door to a conversation that would never have happened in daylight. Twilight there is not background, but a lever: it slightly shifts the heart, and suddenly you can see what in it is sincere and what is false.

And then comes narrative literature: “Konjaku,” later Edo, finally Akutagawa—and you can see that kuregata is also a narrative technique, because it is the time when realism loses its monopoly. Not because magic happens, but because in half-light a person trusts appearances more quickly, yet at the same time becomes quiet enough to hear themselves. Today’s text will be precisely about that: about twilight, kuregata—and its role across the centuries in Japanese literature. That is why it is worth looking at it closely—because in Japanese literature it is most often kuregata that reveals who a person is when no one is watching.

What does “kuregata” mean

夏は、夜。月の頃はさらなり。闇もなほ。螢の多く飛び違ひたる。また、ただ一つ二つなど、ほのかにうち光りて行くも、をかし。雨など降るも、をかし。
(Natsu wa yoru. Tsuki no koro wa sarinari. Yami mo nao. Hotaru no ōku tobi-chigaitaru. Mata, tada hitotsu futatsu nado, honoka ni uchi-hikarite yuku mo, okashi. Ame nado furu mo, okashi.)

"Summer — is night. A moonlit night, of course — but even darkness itself is good. When fireflies cross in flight in great numbers; and also when only one or two drift along, barely glowing, through the gloom — that, too, has its charm. Even when it rains — that is good as well."

— Sei Shōnagon (清少納言), "Makura no sōshi" (枕草子),
the first paragraph (“Spring is dawn…” / “Summer is twilight…”),
990–1002, Heian-kyō (the court of Empress Teishi).

“Kuregata” is most often written as 暮れ方. The word does not describe a point on a clock face, but a certain phase—a moment when the day begins to fold up, like paper losing its tension; when the light has not yet disappeared completely, but it is no longer confident. In the Japanese understanding, “kuregata” is therefore not merely a time of day: it is a moment of transition in which visible things become a little less obvious.

You can see it even in the construction of the characters. The first—暮 (kure, the verb 暮れる)—means “to fall” (of the day), “to grow dark,” but also “to complete itself” and “to end”: a day can end, a year can “twilight,” and in the language of literature and essay the same word can touch matters far more personal. In the character 暮 itself it is easy to notice that it is visually “dense”: it contains a repeated element of “sun,” and that impression is not accidental—this character has long carried the image of light that gets stuck, that vanishes into something that covers it.

The second character—方 (kata / hō, and in compounds often -gata)—is “side,” “direction,” “method,” but also “vicinity,” “time”: it does not say “when exactly,” but “in which direction” and “in which region of time” we are moving. From this a very subtle sense arises: 暮れ方 is not so much “evening” as “that time when it is moving toward dusk.”

It is also interesting that Japanese linguistic tradition likes to describe twilight not with a single word, but with an entire range of shades—and only within that network does “kuregata” find its place. In studies of classical poetry it is clear that the anthologies themselves know many “twilight” formulas: 夕されば (“when it becomes evening”), 夕暮 (“evening dusk”), 夕べ, as well as compounds that capture not only time but also its atmosphere: 夕月夜 (evening moonlight), 夕霧 (evening mist), 夕闇 (evening darkness), and dozens of others. Yet something even more telling appears here: the spelling 暮れ方 occurs… rarely—statistically—only symbolically. This paradox says more about Japanese sensibility than many declarations: for centuries the culture preferred to break twilight down into images and components (wind, mist, moon, birds’ voices, the cooling of skin) rather than stick a single label on it. Twilight here is more a phenomenon that “spreads” through the world than a named point.

Moreover, even closely related words—夕暮れ (yūgure) and 日暮れ (higure)—though usually translated similarly, carry different accents. One more clearly contains “evening,” the other “the closing of the day,” the dimming. Significantly, linguists note that dictionaries often treat both almost as synonyms, and the difference appears only as a “technical addendum”: next to 日暮れ there can even be an astronomical specification of the moment when the sun is already a certain distance below the horizon.

A detail, apparently—yet in reality the key to our topic: for long centuries Japan thought about time as if it were a phenomenon in space—dependent on air, clouds, the shape of terrain, on whether you are between mountains or by the sea. And precisely for that reason “kuregata” does not want to be a specific hour on a smartphone screen.

This way of thinking is most visible in old systems of measuring the day. Let me only remind: in Japan before the modern clock an unequal day existed—time was divided separately into day and night, and their “units” changed length depending on the season (in detail about the Tokugawa system of measuring time I write here: The Hour of the Rat, the Koku of the Tiger – How Was Time Measured in Shogunate-Era Japan?). What is even more interesting: the boundary between day and night was marked not by the horizon line itself, but by 薄明—a zone of half-light. In Japan the points of transition were recognized as 曙 (about half an hour before sunrise) and 黄昏 (about half an hour after sunset).

That is: in the traditional experience of the day, twilight was not an add-on to day—it was its gate. And thus we have almost arrived at a definition of “kuregata.”

Because half-light is hard to “measure,” the old Japanese tried to describe it as precisely as possible. A certain astronomer* from the end of the Edo period admits that 明暮の六つ (akekure no muttsu — the boundary moment of day and night) is difficult to determine, and describes it practically—as the moment when individual stars are already visible, and on the palm of your hand you can distinguish only the thicker lines, while the thin ones disappear.

*Ogawa Tomotada (小川友忠), this and many other interesting observations in: "Seiyō jishingi teikoku katsusoku" (『西洋時辰儀定刻活測』), 1838.

This is poetics disguised as instruction: a definition of time based on how one can feel the lack of light. And precisely in such a world “kuregata” becomes something more than “evening”: it is the experience of contours gradually loosening—of the world and of the human being.

No wonder literature so willingly begins at that threshold. For example: in Akutagawa Ryūnosuke (one of the most important Japanese writers of the 20th century) “twilight” appears obsessively, because it is an excellent method of constructing an “event” in which people meet and enter the night—with a mixture of unease and expectation. And there returns a sentence that in Japanese prose is like opening a door into half-darkness: 「或日の暮方の事である」 — “It was one day at twilight.”

Here “kuregata” is not background. It is a mechanism: a wide gate. The light is no longer daytime, but not yet nighttime, so reality becomes susceptible to what would not happen in full light.

And if we return to the classics—to that famous canon from "Makura no sōshi"—「秋は夕暮」 (“autumn is twilight”)—we see that it is not only an aesthetic aphorism, but a description of a certain perception: the setting sun, crows hurrying to their nests, and then the moment when “the day has already set” and mainly sounds remain—wind, insects, distant resonances. Twilight in this view is the world processed by sensitivity: less sight, more hearing; less certainty, more resonance. And “kuregata” is precisely the name of that moment when this transformation begins.

So when we ask “what does kuregata mean,” the answer is not: “twilight.” It is rather: the time when day becomes ambiguous and its rules withdraw, while the reign of night has not yet arrived—a time of suspension. A word that leads us from kanji—speaking of falling and “direction”—to literature in which twilight is the best place for a person to stop trying, for a moment, to control everything. From such a threshold we will be able to go further: into “tasogare,” into “yūgure,” into “mono no aware” at a concrete time of day—and into that quiet, Japanese consent to the fact that boundaries are most true precisely when they blur. So let us go further.

Kuregate in Heian

秋は夕暮れ。夕日のさして山の端いと近うなりたるに、烏の寝どころへ行くとて…
(Aki wa yūgure. Yūhi no sashite yama no ha ito kō naritaru ni, karasu no nedokoro e yuku tote…)

"Autumn — is twilight.

The sun already lies close to the ridge of the mountains,

and crows hurry back to their roosting places…"

— Sei Shōnagon, "Makura no sōshi" (枕草子),
the beginning of the section “Shiki wa…”; ca. 995–1002, Heian-kyō.

If we want to understand kuregata as a state, not as a time of day, we must step for a moment into Heian—not in the sense of a museum reconstruction, but in the sense of a daily practice of looking, cultivated by the people of the Heian-kyō court, enclosed in a world of curtains, corridors, and half-shadows. It was a court that loved subtlety, but not because it was “delicate.” Rather because it knew: the most important things rarely allow themselves to be grasped in full light.

Sei Shōnagon in "Makura no sōshi" established the canon we have already mentioned: 「秋は夕暮」 — “autumn is twilight.” Except that in her view twilight is not a “sunset” like a postcard, but a precisely composed arrangement of stimuli: light, birds, sounds, air, and finally the moment when the image ends and only the world’s resonance remains. That Heian yūgure (夕暮れ — evening sinking into half-darkness) is observational twilight, filtered through the sensitivity of young Sei Shōnagon—attentive to detail, to impression, to shifts of tone, yet also characterized by that specific sense of safety, coziness. It is not a twilight in which one goes out into the city and falls into a whirl of events; rather, it is a twilight watched as if from the window of the world—where drama does not enter through the door, but stands somewhere far away like a shadow.

There is something here worth recovering in practice today. Because “autumn is twilight” does not have to be an aphorism about melancholy—it can be an exercise: notice that with the end of the day the hierarchy of the senses changes. At a certain moment, as Shōnagon writes, “the day has already set,” and then “the wind and the voices of insects” become so intense that “one listens, enchanted.” This is Heian at its best: not “pretty pictures,” but the recognition that twilight is a boundary on which the world ceases to be “eye-centric,” and a person begins to receive reality more with the whole body.

But precisely here the second truth begins: Heian does not stop at “okashi” and “aware” as aesthetic politeness. Shōnagon’s colleague (perhaps more her rival)—Shikibu Murasaki in "Genji monogatari"—shows that twilight can be a tool—a psychological mechanism of the scene that leads a person inward. In one scene Emperor Kiritsubo remembers his deceased beloved more than usual because it is “a sudden, chilly afternoon at twilight” (にはかに肌寒き夕暮). And this is not ornament. That sudden chill triggers a chain of events: sending a messenger to the old house, a journey through a space where only “the moonlight, penetrating even through dense weeds” is visible (月影ばかりぞ、八重葎にもさはらずさし入りたる), and then a conversation that inevitably slides into mourning—into what the author calls “the night of the darkness of the heart” (心の闇).

This is extremely interesting, because it shows that twilight in Heian is not only “pretty.” It is functional. It brings one into a state in which memories have easier access to a person; in which what in daylight pretends to be ordered begins in the evening to come apart. That is how kuregata works as a psychological state: the world “loses hardness,” and with it the ego loses hardness too. A person becomes more permeable—and that can be both soothing and dangerous.

In "Genji" the purest example of this dangerous beauty appears in the chapter "Yūgao" (about which we write more here: Genji and Yugao – The Secrets of the Moonflower in a Millennium-Old Tale of Desire and Loss). Here something stands out that is easy to miss if one reads "Genji" as a romance: half-darkness is not the backdrop of a love scene, but it filters beauty and at the same time makes it dangerous. First there is still lightness: flowers on a fence, an exchange of poems, handwriting, a face that in half-light seems “even more beautiful.” Then comes the full night, the ambiguous luxury of the meeting, and then the passage into an abandoned residence—and finally that moment: an “incomparably quiet twilight,” a thin zone of half-darkness.

Except that in this scene, from the beginning, a second rhythm pulses: ito osoroshi—“strangely frightening.” Even old commentaries on the Japanese classic "Genji" regarded a love night at the time of the full moon as a bad omen; and the tale itself leads to tragedy: Yūgao is killed by a mononoke (or onryō), and the beauty of twilight turns out to be an entrance into a night of terror. And this is precisely twilight kuregata—one that cannot be exhausted by the words “aware” and “okashi.” It is not only “moving” or “charming.” It is kuregata as a gate to drama: to encounter, to mystery, to death—to those registers that Heian knew very well, even if it liked to speak in whispers.

What does this tell us today? That “kuregata” is not a poetic luxury for people who had time to look at the sky. It is a real psychological time that returns in every life, even the most modern: after work, after training, between obligations, in the moment when the day still lasts but is already weakening. Heian teaches that in this time two things happen at once. On the one hand the world becomes gentler: fewer sharp edges, more half-tones, a greater readiness for reconciliation. On the other—what is unresolved, unfinished, unfastened to the end grows: memory, regret, longing, unease. Twilight draws out of a person what in daylight can be kept in check.

And perhaps that is precisely why Heian literature so often chooses twilight as a turning point: because it is the hour in which a person becomes more true, precisely because for a moment they are less sure of themselves. Shōnagon shows us the beauty of transition; "Genji" shows its mechanics—how cooler skin leads to a darker heart, and how the beauty of a face in half-light can already be the shadow of catastrophe. Japanese twilight—kuregata—is here a space in which the world and the human being begin to speak more quietly—but for that very reason they say things more important.

"Konjaku monogatari" and the logic of twilight: the time of encounter, the time of transformation

夕暮方に、其の居たる後の方に有ける妻戸を、俄に内より押開ければ。
(Yūgure-gata ni, sono itaru ushiro no kata ni arikeru tsuma-do o, niwaka ni uchi yori oshi-akereba.)

"When the day tipped toward twilight, he hurried back

—yet only at the threshold of the western part of the capital did night catch him."

— (anonymous), 今昔物語集 ("Konjaku Monogatarishū"),
a 12th-century compilation, Heian-kyō

In Japanese storytelling, twilight is very rarely neutral. It is not “nice light for describing a landscape,” but a threshold on which the world suddenly ceases to be unambiguous—as if realism, until now confident, had to step back and give way to a second layer. Researchers of medieval literature note that, for instance, in "Konjaku monogatari" (今昔物語, a collection of over 1,000 tales compiled in the 12th century) stories that begin “from twilight,” or include twilight as a scene-setting, are surprisingly frequent—and that this motif is so vivid that it could be absorbed by later literature as a ready-made narrative technique.

The aesthetics of kuregata very often carries “unexpected encounters,” and encounters “from another order.” It is not that at this time something supernatural always happens. It is that twilight is the ideal time for a meeting that seems ordinary at first, and after a moment turns into something inexplicable.

Take a story from volume 17 of "Konjaku": a man in Heian-kyō, whose wife went to the market to take care of certain matters, waits for her return. The woman comes back only when it becomes dark “at twilight” (夕暮方に暗き程に). Then she goes out. A moment passes—and she returns a second time. Two identical faces, the same behavior, no “difference at first glance.” Only later does it come to light that the first one was a fox. And the key detail is not that “a fox can transform,” but that the culture locates this event precisely at the time when more and more details escape our eyes—when a person more easily accepts obviousness, because “it is more convenient that way.”

Another story from "Konjaku": a traveler crosses the bridge at Seta (瀬田). There is no rain, but it begins to get dark—it is higure, the day burning down—so the man chooses lodging in a large, abandoned house. This is a pragmatic decision. Twilight here is the moment when reason begins to act “economically”: you want a roof over your head; you do not want to go farther into the dark. Only inside does what gives a shiver appear: a strange sound by the fire, the growing suspicion “it must be a demon,” the escape, hiding under the bridge—and one more, almost theatrical: someone answers a question, but nothing can be seen.

There are more such examples—and it is worth keeping them in mind, because they show a repeatable schema: twilight does not create the monster, but it creates conditions for a boundary event. There is a whole series of “day-burning-down” episodes in "Konjaku": the encounter with the fox-wife, the encounter with an oni in an empty house, a messenger in a field, a man who at twilight enters a hut, another who enters a grave-pit, and so on.

This is, in my opinion, the hardest, least sentimental core of “kuregata” in literature: twilight as the time when realism loses exclusivity. It does not “lose,” it does not “disappear”—it simply ceases to be the only interpretation. In half-light it is easier to make a mistake, easier to project, easier to fall into what we would today call perceptual autopilot—and old storytelling called it a fox, a demon, a shadow, a chance encounter that after a moment is no longer chance.

Waka: the poetics of twilight as its own genre of mood

心なき身にもあはれは知られけり　鴫立つ沢の秋の夕暮れ
(Kokoro naki mi ni mo aware wa shirarekeri / shigi tatsu sawa no / aki no yūgure)

"Even I—

with a heart as if cut off from the world—

suddenly understand what “being moved” is:

when snipes rise from the marshes

in an autumn twilight."

— Saigyō Hōshi (西行法師), "Shin Kokin Wakashū" (新古今和歌集),
巻四「秋上」, Ōiso, 1186.

When we move from narrative prose to waka, the mechanism changes, but “kuregata” remains. Here it is not about an “event,” but about the density of the moment—about the fact that twilight is a time that in itself evokes the need to speak. And this can be shown not by metaphor, but by number.

Before we say “this is a poem about kuregata,” we must define criteria. Because twilight in waka is signaled in different ways. Sometimes directly, through forms such as 夕暮 (“twilight”), 夕 (“evening” seen from the perspective of night), or fixed phrases 夕されば / 夕さらば (“when evening comes”). And sometimes indirectly—through images of the “evening sun” (夕日), the “evening wind” (夕風), the “evening mist” (夕霧)—that is, through compound nouns in which 夕 attaches itself to phenomena and shifts them into twilight.

There is an even subtler level: sometimes twilight does not appear in the poem’s text itself, but in the kotobagaki (詞書)—the description of the circumstances of composition. Then twilight works as a psychological background that need not clearly identify itself in order to function.

From the "Man’yōshū" (the oldest anthology of Japanese narrative, from the 8th century) one can extract 124 “twilight poems,” and from eight imperial anthologies—383. It is also interesting what words are used to name the time: in the "Man’yōshū" the simplest formula 夕されば (yū sareba—“when evening falls”) appears very often: 16 occurrences, but later it clearly weakens—as if the language shifted from a simple “when evening comes” toward more imagistic, noun-based captures.

By contrast 夕暮 (yūgure, “evening dusk”) grows and becomes the dominant word in later anthologies, especially in the "Shin Kokinshū," where the author counts as many as 57 examples—a jump difficult to dismiss as coincidence. Twilight begins to function like a ready-made, elevated aesthetic form: not only a time of day, but an idiom of beauty. In the same set you can also see how the formula 秋の夕暮 (“autumn twilight”) is born and strengthens—the famous idiom in which “autumn” and “twilight” are not a “middle” of time, but a kind of aesthetic.

Against this background it is easy to understand why the so-called “three evenings” (三夕) from the "Shin Kokinshū" became fixed in culture: the poems of Jakkuren, Saigyō, and Teika, which directly crystallize “autumn twilight” as a pure aesthetic experience. “Loneliness is not in the color…” says Jakkuren; “even to a heart without a heart sorrow is revealed…” replies Saigyō; “I look—and there are neither flowers nor crimson leaves…” closes Teika. This three-voice chorus is like a definition: twilight does not need decoration, because it itself is the decoration of a world withdrawing.

And here we reach an interesting conclusion: in prose like "Konjaku," twilight is a gate to an event; in waka—a gate to a mood. But in both cases the same intuition works: at twilight the human being and the world are less sure of themselves. And Japanese literature—instead of covering it up—turns it into a tool.

Edo: twilight as a narrative technique

枯朶に烏のとまりけり　秋の暮
(Kare eda ni / karasu no tomarikeri / aki no kure)

"On a dry branch

a crow has perched—

autumn twilight."

— Matsuo Bashō (松尾芭蕉), hokku tanzaku;

1680 (Enpō 8), Fukagawa in Edo.

If in Heian twilight could be “the world’s garment”—something that changes the color of the air and human sensitivity—then in the Edo period we gain an additional point: twilight becomes a tool of order. Not only poetic, but practical. Daily life under the Tokugawa took place within a time system that was not indifferent to the seasons. Day and night were counted separately, and the “unit of time” (いっとき, ittoki) was flexible; what was called the beginning of night—暮六ツ—shifted through the year, because the boundary of light itself shifted.

And precisely here lies the key to Edo-period literature: if for the entire culture the threshold between day and night was something real and “weighted”—morally, socially, sensually—then it is no wonder that prose and tale began to use it as an ignition point of events. Twilight is the perfect moment for narrative, because it combines two energies at once: unease (because the world loses confidence) and expectation (because in half-light anything can be expected). Hiraoka Toshio (a well-known scholar of literature from the University of Tsukuba) describes this mixture directly: “evening twilight has a peculiar charm, because as it moves from brightness to darkness it mixes within itself fuan and kitai—fear and hope—and precisely for that reason it endures in the tradition of Japanese literature.”*

*Hiraoka Toshio (平岡敏夫), 「王朝の〈夕暮れ〉—芥川龍之介『羅生門』を視点として」 (a lecture at the International Symposium on Japanese Literature Studies, 1996)

Modernity: kuregata as a stage tool

殊に門の上の空が、夕焼けであかくなる時には、それが胡麻をまいたようにはっきり見えた。
(Koto ni kado no ue no sora ga, yūyake de akaku naru toki ni wa, sore ga goma o maita yō ni hakkiri mieta.)

"Especially when the sky above the gate reddened with sunset, it could be seen clearly—like someone had scattered sesame seeds across it."

— Akutagawa Ryūnosuke, "Rashōmon" (羅生門),

first publication: magazine 『帝国文学』, 1915 (the November issue), Tokyo.

The most interesting thing is that when we enter “modernity,” this old mechanism does not disappear at all. On the contrary: someone takes it and begins to use it consciously, almost like a stage tool. That someone is Akutagawa Ryūnosuke. Hiraoka shows that Akutagawa—though he was a writer of the 20th century—kept within himself an obsession with “tales that begin at twilight,” and treated twilight as a method of constructing an event: people meet and “enter the night.” It is not that he liked “pretty sunsets.” It is that he understood the technique: twilight immediately sets the world into a transitional state, where decisions are more naked and conscience less comfortable.

You can see it in "Rashōmon." This story—set in Heian, but written in the 20th century—begins with the sentence: 「或日の暮方の事である。」 (“It was once, at twilight.”). And then Akutagawa does something ruthlessly concrete: he removes people from the space. Under the gate, where there “should” be a few passersby, there is no one; there is only a servant and… a grasshopper on a great pillar. This is not decoration. This is the setting of moral conditions: emptiness makes a person more susceptible to choice and downfall, because no one is watching, no one is stopping them, no one is “keeping the world in check.”

A curiosity: Akutagawa did not originally begin with twilight. In the first draft he wrote simply about a man sitting on the steps of Rashōmon, without specifying the time. Then he tried to add “in the rain that fell at twilight,” after which he crossed it out. Later he returned to it, wrote “once, at dusk,” until finally he found the ultimate formula: 「暮方の事である」. That is: twilight is not accidental here. It is a discovered and chosen instrument. And this choice—Akutagawa, as Hiraoka emphasizes in his lecture—has its roots in his deep reading of the classics: "Konjaku monogatari" and tales of “strange encounters at twilight,” as well as in Heian patterns of 「夕暮れと奇遇」 (twilight and an unexpected encounter).

And once we see this mechanism in "Rashōmon," we begin to see it everywhere else. Akutagawa repeats this setting with almost stubborn consistency: twilight + empty space + encounter. Hiraoka notes that in the story "Mikan" (蜜柑) the narrative begins in the “winter burning-down (twilight) of the day” (冬の日暮), in an empty train car, on an almost empty platform—with one small barking dog. This is no longer Heian and no longer Edo; it is rail and modernity. And yet the same thing works: kuregata as a filter that makes a chance meeting become an event, and an event—a moral test.

More: with Akutagawa this technique begins at a certain point to work not only on the level of story, but on the level of life. In 「或阿呆の一生」 ("Aru ahō no isshō" — "The Life of a Certain Fool") twilight ceases to be the boundary between day and night, and becomes the boundary between life and death—“a person walking alone on the ‘road of the day that burns down’.” Hiraoka writes about it directly: Akutagawa shifts his focus from the passage of day into night to the passage of life into nothingness. And that is precisely the moment when “kuregata” reveals its most serious face: not as romantic half-light, but as a conscious threshold in which everything—landscape, language, literature, and psyche—begins to say: “this is ending; and since it is ending, look at what will truly remain at the end.”

In this sense, when we “move to Edo,” it is not only a change of period. It is something deeper: the fact that in a culture that for centuries learned to understand time as a moving landscape, twilight became not only a phenomenon, but a form of thinking. And that is why it could pass through centuries into 20th-century prose—still working as the simplest and most effective narrative technique: set the world on the border of light, and a person will show who they are.

When the world goes dark…

黄昏（たそがれ）の光の中に、蹌踉（そうろう）たる歩みを運んで行く。
(Tasogare no hikari no naka ni, sōrō taru ayumi o hakonde yuku.)

“In the light of twilight they go on—carrying an unsteady, faltering step.”

— Akutagawa Ryūnosuke, “或阿呆の一生” (Aru ahō no isshō),

first publication: 『改造』, 1927 (October), Tokyo

You can pass through your entire life treating twilight as a mechanical consequence of the Earth’s rotation. And you can also—as Japanese literature, from Heian all the way to the twentieth century, keeps suggesting—treat it as a brief, everyday lesson: one that explains nothing directly, yet subtly rearranges something inside a person. Kuregata then becomes more than a time of day: it turns into a state in which the world, for a moment, relinquishes its sharpness—and we relinquish our need for control.

The experience is surprisingly concrete. First, something purely physical happens: contrast drops. Outlines cease to be hard, colors lose their confidence, half-tones begin to dominate. Vision—which for the whole day behaves like a tyrant—suddenly loses its monopoly, and then other senses “step forward”: the sound of a distant train, the rustle of leaves, footsteps in the stairwell, the quieter conversation of neighbors. In Heian, Sei Shōnagon could describe this moment as though it were an arrangement of instruments in an orchestra: when the day closes, you suddenly hear the world differently. In “Genji,” the same half-darkness activates not only the senses but also memory: “the sudden chill of twilight” opens a path into recollection, and then into something deeper and less comfortable—into the darkness of the heart.

Yet the most important thing happens not in books, but in us. The end of the day is a small ritual—often unnoticed—in which we set our roles down. We stop speaking the language of tasks, emails, plans; the tension of I must slips off the body. And then a space appears for emotions that, in the hard light of day, are too awkward or too “unproductive”: a gentle melancholy, gratitude, a soft remembrance. This is not sentimentality. It is simply that kuregata allows the “I” to loosen for a moment. In that sense, twilight is a practice, not a metaphor.

This is precisely where two notions intertwine—ones we like to invoke, yet which become truly sharp only at a particular time of day. Mono no aware is not a theory of sadness. It is the experience of an “ending in progress”: you watch the light leave, the day withdraw, life fold its chapter without fanfare. What departs is still present, but differently—and in that “differently” resides the whole tenderness of transient things.

And perhaps that is why Japanese literature returns to twilight so stubbornly: because it is a time that does not pretend everything can be neatly closed, or that every question has an answer. Kuregata does not solve the riddle of life. It quiets it for a moment, the way the world quiets itself before night. One moment is enough—unspectacular, yet faithful—for a person to see that outlines do not always have to be sharp, and the “I” does not always have to stand guard. And if there is any practical lesson twilight offers—from Shōnagon to Akutagawa—it is simply this: do not fear the moment when the world goes dark. It is often the only time you can truly see it.

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