In the damp haze of a Tokyo caught between two centuries, Pepe walks slowly through a Shinbashi street, one of the emblematic districts of Meiji urban transformation. The entire scene is submerged in a blue-grey nocturne, pierced only by the warm glow of newly installed gas lamps, a Western invention that forever changed the rhythm and the imagination of the Japanese night. His face, sheltered under a woven kasa yet marked by a quiet melancholy, seems to absorb the full weight of an era in suspension. Around him, indistinct figures drift through the rain, silhouettes wrapped in haori and oiled coats, moving like modern phantoms unsure of how to inhabit their freshly redefined identities. The wet cobblestones glisten, turning the street into a mirror where lamplight, telegraph wires, and wooden façades overlap, an urban palimpsest in which the old and the new coexist without yet blending. Artificial light begins to draw a new visual grammar for the capital, while the steam rising from the ground hints at a Japan already leaning toward industry and infrastructure, yet still unwilling to relinquish its memory. Pepe becomes the solitary walker of Japanese modernity: not a Baudelairean flâneur, but a liminal observer, a figure moving between eras, witnessing a modernization he never chose, silent, contemplative, and gently out of step with the pace of progress unfolding under the rain, the shadows, and the lingering scent of nostalgia.