Ōmagatoki: chasing the twilight hour

I started this series chasing twenty minutes of dusk, and kept finding them at noon and at midnight.

Ōmagatoki is written 逢魔時, the hour of meeting spirits: the moment at dusk when familiar streets stop being familiar. That is where this series started. I went out at the end of the day, on foot, trying to catch the twenty minutes when the light gives up its colours.

Then the frames stopped cooperating. The ones that held the feeling kept arriving at the wrong times: a shopping arcade at noon, a convenience store at midnight, a train platform in the flat light of the afternoon. The hour I was chasing turned out not to be an hour at all.

What the word actually names, I think, is a threshold. A doorway, a tunnel mouth, the end of a platform: the places where one world touches another and you can stand in both for a moment without belonging to either. Dusk is just the hour when the whole city becomes one.

So the discipline changed. Still on foot, still no lights and no setups, but at every hour now, anywhere the seam shows. Most days produce nothing. The series is growing slowly, and the walking season is year-round.