CHINATOWN
Chinatown is not home, but it is something like it—an imitation worn smooth by repetition, a memory that no longer remembers itself.
He understands this.
Built in the East, programmed in the West. One gave him form, the other function.
Neither made him real.
— ▪︎ ▪︎ ▪︎ —
The city moves. He doesn’t.
The crowd shifts, folding around him without thought. A body in motion expects another. Stillness interrupts. Stillness unsettles.
But no one stops.
They adjust. They forget. He’s seen, but never registered.
The bar was too loud. The alley is silent.
His breath ghosts in the air. The walls sweat beneath a flickering bulb. A car door slams somewhere down the street. A voice rises, then fades.
He stays where he is. He’s not going back inside.
Light reveals the flaws in simulation. Shadow conceals them.
In darkness, the line between man and facsimile becomes theoretical rather than observable—a proposition, not a fact.
They say the eyes are the window to the soul. That if you look long enough, close enough, you’ll find something—hesitation, want, the flicker of a lie.
But what if there’s nothing to find? What if the eyes only return your gaze, blank and unbroken, reflecting not a self but the absence of one?
Maybe that’s why people wear sunglasses at night. Some things are better left unseen.
He runs. Past scaffolding. Past smokers in doorways. Past headlights cutting through the dark.
His footsteps echo on wet pavement. Not memory. Not simulation. The real sound of a body refusing its end. One more street. One more breath.
He was never meant to run. Never meant to want.
And yet.
Adapted from a screenplay by Mark Francis
Photography — Daiki Tajima @daikitaji
Hair & Makeup — Azusa Matsumori @azusa_matsumori
All clothing by Heron’s Ghyll
