Last July, I took a short trip to Mount Osore, a sacred place nestled in the Shimokita Peninsula of Aomori Prefecture.

For me, Osorezan had long been a place I yearned to visit. When I had just entered middle school, I was deeply moved by a short story called "Osorezan Revoir" that appeared in the manga Shaman King, which I read at a friend's house. Unusually poetic for a boys’ comic, the story depicted the sorrow of swaying emotions, the spiritual presence of the dead, and lingering resentment. As a sensitive adolescent, I was profoundly affected.

As I grew older, my interest in the humanities, history, and folklore deepened. I became increasingly fascinated by the traditions of the itako (blind mediums), and the cultural and geographical significance of Osorezan. Each account I read only intensified my longing for the place.

When I finally stood at the edge of Gokurakuhama, the pale blue lakeside shore of Osorezan, I reflected on death and the dead. The desolate rock-strewn landscape, the eerily silent beach, and the overpowering scent of sulfur were exactly as I had imagined. Everywhere, small pinwheels spun in the wind, making fragile clattering sounds that echoed the loneliness of the place.

I have long contemplated the mystery of being alive and the nature of death.

When I was young, my beloved pet turtle died. That night, my mother and I held a funeral. I brought home a small coffin I had made in art class, and we buried the turtle in the apartment courtyard alongside a mandarin seed that would later sprout into a tree and bear fruit. I wept bitterly. I think I cried more than I did at the death of my grandparents. Even now, I sometimes recall the turtle stretching its neck toward the food I offered with such vitality.

My mother cried with me that day. Years later, she developed a neurological illness and now lives in a near-vegetative state, sustained by a feeding tube and requiring constant care. She once told me that if she ever found herself in such a condition, she would choose death over artificial life support. That memory weighs heavily on me. She had been the one person who truly understood me, and whom I deeply understood in return. Now, she lies in bed like a mist, half-alive, half-gone, her presence slipping away.

Around the time I left my teenage years, a dear friend took her own life. I do not know whether she sought solace in death or still held longing for life in her final moments. But every year, as the anniversary of her passing approaches, her family, friends, and I remember her vividly.

The turtle and my friend became part of me through their deaths. When I think of them, it's as if a soft light rises in memory—timeless presences embedded in me, existing both within and beyond myself. Like a melody that never fades.

In contrast, my mother, though technically alive, seems to drift between my waking awareness and dreams, her existence becoming increasingly misaligned with the person she once was.

It’s strange to think: perhaps the dead define the boundaries of the living. The deceased, who once shared relationships with us, continue to exist within us as meaningful presences. Perhaps we keep them alive by doing so.

The dead may be closer to the living than death itself. To be “alive” might not be as active a state as we assume, but rather a temporary postponement of death—a bubble briefly floating on the vast waters of time defined by death. Life might simply be the ongoing presence of meaning and existence itself.

Death is, in truth, something we the living can never fully grasp. As playwright Eugène Ionesco once said, "Everyone dies for the first time." Perhaps this is why we hold a kind of reverence for the dead—a quiet admiration for the catharsis they carry, freed from the bondage of life.

Just as only with rests and cadences can we understand the music we’ve heard, we understand life only by reflecting on its silences.

In the months following my visit to Osorezan, I composed a sound work titled Twilight, shaped by these unresolved feelings. The work treats sonic textures, temporal shifts, and the boundaries between them as central materials. Time in these pieces stretches and contracts organically, rhythm and meter behaving like personal, internal time. Noise and tonal sound entangle. There are abrupt halts, white distortions like fleeting visions, and enduring drones that seem to never end. Field recordings capture the desolate beauty of Osorezan—its soundscape recorded as memory.

The installation features multichannel spatial audio and surround systems, allowing the listener to physically feel these sound memories, like sculptures or paintings in space.

I don’t know how much of what I felt will reach others. I’ve almost forgotten how I made the work. But still, it's often sound or music that brings lost memories back beside us for a moment—and that feels deeply important to me.

Today, AI is rising with an impact strong enough to alter our world overnight. As artificial intelligence evolves toward superintelligence, we may be forced to redefine what it means to be human. And with that, our understanding of "death" may also shift. I hold a kind of hope in that possibility. In Twilight, one track includes an English reading of this text—translated automatically and vocalized by AI—layered with a composition based on ideas proposed by the machine itself. It’s a small attempt to think forward: a gesture connecting life, death, and the future of expression.