6:20 a.m., Willow-Well Lodging House 🔍

At 6:20 a.m. in my small room at Willow-Well Lodging House, I packed a bamboo pen, folded paper, and yesterday’s borrowed reader into my patched cloth satchel. Steam from barley rice and soybean broth clouded the paper door while Mother pressed a five-jeon coin into my palm for the midday meal. I had never awakened in this year before, yet the scratch of a broom in the courtyard and the warm floor beneath my socks made the morning stubbornly ordinary. Outside, men in pale summer robes shared the lane with students in dark jackets, and an electric tram bell rang beyond the tiled roofs.

7:10 p.m., Back Room of Pine Bridge Bookstall 🔍

At 7:10 p.m. in the back room of Pine Bridge Bookstall, I sat beneath a smoking oil lamp and copied the day’s reading notes while the shopkeeper tied bundles of thin books with twine. A classmate leaned over the low table and asked to borrow my clean copy tomorrow, so I promised to finish it before the first lesson. Cheap printed pamphlets were passing quickly among students, but I kept my coin and accepted half of his barley cake instead. When the tram wheels screeched along the distant avenue, I tucked the unfinished pages inside my jacket and walked home through air smelling of dust, lamp oil, and late-summer rain.