Yabun — Meitei (2018)
Eighteen minutes from the small hours of Kyoto — the record where the lost Japanese mood begins.
By Rafi Mercer
There is a point in the evening when a city stops performing. The last of the noise leaves. What remains isn't silence — it's the sound of a place with nobody watching it. Water somewhere. A shutter. The particular hum a room makes when it has finally been left alone.
Japanese has a word for that portion of the night. Yabun. The small hours. Late, but not romantically so — the ordinary, unglamorous middle of the night, when things are simply going on without you.
Meitei released a record with that name in early 2018. Five pieces. Eighteen minutes. Self-issued, no label behind it, no press campaign, no expectation. It arrived before Kwaidan, before Pitchfork, before any of it. Almost nobody heard it at the time.
He was Daisuke Fujita then, as he is now. Born in Hiroshima. Living in Kyoto. The track titles read like a walk rather than a tracklist: Ike, a pond. Chōchin, a paper lantern. Utano, a district out in the west of the city. Nami, a wave. Ensō, the Zen circle drawn in one unbroken breath — complete and unfinished at the same time.
That last one tells you what the record is doing.
Nothing here was borrowed. He has been explicit about it since: through this period, not a single sample came from another artist's work. Everything was built from sounds he had caught himself and carried home. The sampling of old Japanese vinyl — the deliberate, slightly cool-eyed technique that would later define the Kofū records — comes much further down the road. Yabun is internal. It's a man in a room with what he found outside.
And it's all been put through tape.
This is the part that does the work. Tape takes the top off a sound. It softens the attack, adds a floor of hiss, lets the pitch drift by a fraction of nothing. The ear reads sharp edges as nearness — remove them and everything steps back. Back in space, then back in time. The pond isn't a pond you're standing at. It's a pond you're remembering standing at.
Nothing resolves. Pieces begin, hold a shape for two or three minutes, and stop. There's no arrival, so there's nothing to grip. It stays where ambient music is supposed to stay — available, not demanding.
There is no lyric to quote. There isn't a voice in the ordinary sense at all.
Which makes it a strange fit for a bar, and a perfect one for a room. Eighteen minutes is a side. It suits the hour when a listening room has emptied to four or five people and the volume has come down by a notch without anyone deciding to do it. Jazz kissa built their whole culture on the assumption that a record could be the reason to be somewhere. Yabun asks less than that. It asks to be the last thing on before the lights.
What came after is well documented. Kwaidan landed later the same year and did what debuts almost never do, taking Japanese folklore — the ghost story, the withering mood inside it — and turning it into something the ambient world had to reckon with. Komachi followed. Then the Kofū trilogy, opening in 2020 and closing in 2023, which is where the touring and the international audience arrived. He calls the whole project the lost Japanese mood: an era and an aesthetic drifting out of the collective consciousness with each passing generation.
Yabun stayed small. It's the seed, and it sounds like a seed — smaller in scale, unprotected, made without any idea that anyone would come looking for it later.
But the method is already complete. He isn't reconstructing old Japan. He's reconstructing the condition of it being half-lost, which is a different task and a harder one. The degradation isn't a filter laid over the material. It is the material. Memory is out of tune with the thing it remembers, and the tape knows it.
Play it at eight in the morning and it still works, though the name will quietly correct you. It belongs to the hour when a pond is a pond and there's no one at the edge of it.
The circle closes and doesn't.
Quick Questions
What does Yabun mean?
夜分 — the small hours. The ordinary middle of the night, rather than a poetic idea of it.
Should I start here or with Kwaidan?
Most people arrive through Kwaidan, and it's the fuller statement. Start with Yabun if you want to hear the method before it was refined — the same approach at a smaller scale and with nothing to lose.
How is it best listened to?
As one side, at low volume, in a quiet room. It's over in eighteen minutes and it doesn't reward being checked on.
Rafi Mercer writes about the spaces where music matters. For more stories from Tracks & Tales, subscribe, or click here to read more.
