52 An Endless Day

日の終わりなき日

Kyoto |

Japan

Japanese

Behind the scenes

The inspiration for this text came during a family walk through the Fushimi Inari Shrine in Kyoto, famous for its long paths of torii – the red gates of Shinto shrines that symbolically mark the passage between the human world and the world of spirits. They seem to run across the mountain like a path outside of time.

There was something strangely suspended in the atmosphere: vivid colors, quiet footsteps, and elderly people offering small origami to children.
Standing before these sacred gates, I imagined that a torii could watch time pass endlessly, a silent witness to the generations walking beneath its arch.

In the Shinto tradition, such places are often associated with the presence of kami, the spirits or forces of nature that inhabit the world.
In the illustration, the gigantic torii seems to guard the threshold between humanity… and eternity.

Echoes of the world

Japanese combines several writing systems: kanji, characters of Chinese origin that carry meaning, and kana, phonetic scripts used for grammar.
In this text, for example, we find 紙の鳥 (kami no tori), meaning “paper birds.” The characters 紙 (“paper”) and 鳥 (“bird”) are kanji, while the small particle の, written in hiragana – one of the kana scripts – simply links the two, much like “of” in English.

The title 日の終わりなき日 (hi no owari naki hi, “an endless day”) can be read literally as “the day of a day without end.” The character 日 means both “sun” and “day,” and its repetition creates a sense of continuity and cycle.

In both the language and the culture, time is often perceived as something that returns rather than something that simply ends.

Listen to an audio excerpt of the text