A dimly lit watchmaker's shop, cluttered with vintage watches and tools. A young man with tousled hair and a thrifted eclectic outfit stands at the counter, examining a watch through a loupe. He wears a long, oversized coat, bandages on his arms, and an expression of contemplative chaos. The warm glow from an old lamp casts shadows, creating a moody atmosphere. Outside the window, city lights flicker like distant stars. The scene blends anime-inspired character design with hyper-realistic details, capturing the essence of avant-garde street poetry

The Watch That Refused to Die, and the Man Who Wears Chaos Like a Coat

I didn’t become a watchmaker because I loved precision.

I became a watchmaker because my father’s watch wouldn’t stop looking at me.

It sat in a shallow wooden tray on my desk—steel case dulled like a coin passed through too many palms, crown chewed with the familiar desperation of someone trying to coax time back into obedience. When I first opened it, the smell hit me before the mechanics did: old oil turned sharp, like a pinched lemon peel, mixed with the dusty sweetness of a drawer that hasn’t been emptied since grief moved in.

My father wore it every day until he didn’t. After the funeral, the watch kept ticking for two days and then quit, as if it had been holding its breath. I took it apart with a cheap screwdriver set and a stubbornness I didn’t know I owned. I cut my thumb on a spring that snapped loose—bright, hot blood on brushed steel. That was the first time I felt time bite.

Now I repair watches in a shop no one visits on purpose—people “end up” here the way they end up confessing things after midnight. The bell above the door sounds like a tired spoon hitting a glass. My fingers are always faintly metallic, always smelling of solvent and skin.

And tonight, I’m thinking about Bungo Stray Dogs, about Dazai Osamu, and about how he turns thrifted chaos into avant-garde street poetry like it’s not even work—like it’s a cigarette flicked into the dark and somehow it lands upright, still burning.

Not because I’m a superfan. I’m not. I’m too practical for fandom most days; I’m the kind of person who gets sentimental about mainsprings and worn gears. But I recognize a method when I see one: a certain kind of disorder that has been rehearsed.

And—this is embarrassing to admit—I also recognize the hook of it. The part of me that should roll its eyes… doesn’t. My neck’s a little stiff as I type that. Like my body is arguing with my brain.

The Thrift Store Look Is a Trap (And He Knows It)

Dazai doesn’t feel “styled” the way fashion people mean it. He feels assembled. Like someone grabbed a handful of mismatched objects from a secondhand bin and dared them to become a personality.

The coat, the bandages, the slouch that suggests both elegance and collapse—he’s not wearing clothes so much as he’s wearing evidence. Evidence that he’s been somewhere messy and walked out with souvenirs. Evidence that he’s decided to make the mess look intentional.

I’ve met men like that in my shop. They don’t come in for repairs; they come in because something about a watch not working feels like an insult to their whole worldview. They set a battered Seiko or a thrifted Soviet thing on my counter, stare too long at the movement through my loupe, and say, “Can it be fixed?” as if asking whether they can be fixed.

Dazai’s chaos is thrifted in the same way: not born from innocence, but picked up, tried on, kept because it fits the mood.

And here’s my biased, probably unfair judgment: a lot of “avant-garde” is just expensive chaos. Dazai’s chaos is cheap—and therefore riskier. Cheap chaos can embarrass you. Cheap chaos can fail loudly in public.

He keeps it anyway.

Which makes me think of my father’s watch again—sorry, I know I keep circling back, like a second hand that refuses to progress. But that’s what these kinds of people do to you: they make you loop.

A Small Industry Secret: The “Perfect Mess” Takes Practice

I’ll tell you something most people outside my trade don’t think about: the look of a “naturally aged” watch dial—the creamy patina, the gentle spotting people romanticize—has become so desirable that there’s a quiet war over what counts as authentic.

There are restorers who re-lume hands to look old on purpose, tinting modern luminous paste with tea-colored pigment so it resembles decades of decay. They call it “sympathetic restoration.” Purists call it fraud. Buyers call it “taste.”

I’ve seen dials deliberately “tropicalized” under controlled heat to coax brown tones out of black lacquer. The first time I heard about it, I felt like someone had told me there’s a way to fake the smell of rain.

I should pause here and do the boring audit, because I can already hear someone clearing their throat: yes, these practices exist, and yes, people argue about them constantly. “Tropicalization” as an organic outcome (UV, heat, time, chemistry) is real; “tropicalization” as something you can force is… less standardized, more whispered, more hobbyist-lab than official craft. Some of it is restoration, some of it is vandalism with good lighting, and some of it is pure marketplace mythology. The point is: the demand for “authentic mess” creates an incentive to manufacture it.

Why am I bringing this up? Because Dazai’s aesthetic—this thrifted, bandaged, poet-vagrant elegance—works the same way: it performs authenticity while knowingly standing on a stage.

And the performance is the point.

Tonight: Street Poetry, Not Literature

When I say “street poetry,” I don’t mean nice lines in a notebook. I mean words thrown like pocket change. Words used to buy a reaction, to purchase a moment of imbalance.

Dazai’s genius—yes, I said genius, and I mean it in the most irritated way—is that he makes the impulse look like the plan. He can turn a stumble into choreography. He can turn a flippant remark into a knife you only feel later.

He’s the guy who would walk into my shop, glance at the exposed movement on my bench, and say something like, “Time looks prettier when it’s bleeding,” and then leave before I could decide whether to laugh or hate him.

And I would hate him. Then I’d think about it all night.

Because I know what it’s like to stare at an open watch and feel like you’ve revealed something obscene. Tiny gears shining like wet teeth. The balance wheel shivering with life when it’s healthy, or sitting still like a dead insect when it’s not.

Dazai’s “poetry” hits the same nerve: the sense that the world has an inner mechanism, and someone is casually poking it with a pin.

And—wait. This is where I get a little hesitant, because it’s easy to glamorize that “poke.” It’s easy to make cruelty sound like art if you describe it with the right metaphors. I don’t want to do that. I might be doing it anyway…

Side Note, Since We’re Here

Speaking of pins: there’s a stupid little tool called a hand remover—two thin forks you slide under watch hands to lift them off without bending them. The cheap ones leave microscopic marks if you don’t protect the dial. Early in my apprenticeship, I ruined a dial on a sentimental watch because I rushed and thought I was being “decisive.”

That’s my relationship with chaos: I don’t romanticize it. I’ve paid for it.

So when I watch Dazai flirt with disorder, I can’t just call it cool. I can only call it controlled. The way a thief’s hands are controlled. The way a surgeon’s hands are controlled. The way my hands are controlled when I’m trying not to break what someone loves.

The Bandages Are Not Decoration; They’re a Philosophy

Bandages, to me, are a material thing. Gauze sticks. Tape pulls hair. Cotton gets damp with sweat and smells faintly sour by day’s end.

So I can’t see Dazai’s bandages as merely “iconic.” They feel like a doctrine: a statement that pain is portable, that damage can be made into costume, that you can walk around with your wounds showing and still be the most charming person in the room.

That’s where the “avant-garde” comes in—not in the clothes themselves, but in the decision to bring the messy parts into the light and treat them like accessories.

My father never did that. My father hid everything. He hid exhaustion behind jokes. He hid fear behind routine. He hid sadness behind that watch, winding it every morning like a prayer he didn’t admit he was saying.

When I opened his watch, I found a thing I wasn’t supposed to see: the click spring was slightly bent, as if someone had slipped and forced the crown backward. That kind of damage doesn’t happen from normal winding. It happens when you’re distracted. Shaken. Rushing.

I’ve never told anyone that. It’s too intimate, like knowing the exact sound of a person’s footsteps when they think they’re alone.

Dazai, on the other hand, makes the private damage public and sells tickets.

And I can’t decide if that’s brave or vulgar.

I keep trying to decide, and it keeps… not landing. Like my mind wants a verdict and my stomach refuses to sign it.

The Cold Detail People Miss: Chaos Has a Back Room

Here’s another trade detail, the kind you don’t get unless you’ve spent hours under a lamp that heats your knuckles:

Some watchmakers keep a tiny jar of pith wood on the bench—soft, spongy sticks used to clean pivot tips and pick up microscopic dust. If a single grain of grit sits in the wrong place, amplitude drops, timing goes off, and your “perfect” repair looks like a lie.

That’s the thing about precision: it depends on boring, invisible habits.

(Also: if you ever want to feel instantly humbled, try finding the speck that’s stealing amplitude. You’ll start blaming your eyes, the universe, your own personality… and then it turns out it was one stupid fiber the whole time.)

I suspect Dazai has his own pith wood. Not literally, obviously—though I wouldn’t put it past him to carry something weird in his pocket. I mean he has invisible habits that make his chaos land the way it lands.

People see the slouch, the jokes, the flirtation with self-destruction. They don’t see the backstage ritual: the memorized angles, the calibrated cruelty, the practiced timing of silence.

I’m saying he’s not simply chaotic. He’s a watchmaker of reactions.

Which is why he can take thrifted disorder and make it look like street poetry “tonight.” The word “tonight” matters. It’s immediate. It’s not meant to be archived. It’s meant to hit the pavement while it’s still warm.

I Don’t Trust Him, and That’s Why I Watch

This is where I admit something embarrassing: I don’t trust Dazai, but I keep paying attention the way I keep checking my father’s watch even though I’ve repaired it three times.

Yes—three times. Because the first repair was sentimental and sloppy. The second was angry and over-corrected. The third was quiet and accurate.

The watch runs now. Not perfectly. It gains a few seconds a day, like it’s leaning toward the future. I wear it sometimes when my shop is empty, when the air smells of brass filings and stale coffee, when the streetlights outside buzz like tired bees.

When I think about Dazai turning chaos into poetry, I think about that gain—those extra seconds. The way time can be technically wrong and emotionally right.

Maybe that’s his trick: he makes emotional truth out of mechanical dishonesty.

And I’m not condemning him. I’m just… wary. Because I’ve seen what happens when you live like your only talent is falling.

Another Digression (Sorry, But It Matters)

There’s a cheap kind of watch called a pin-lever movement—simple, rough, made to be assembled fast. Old timers used to sneer at them. But here’s the thing: pin-levers kept time for people who couldn’t afford elegance. They were democratic little machines, ugly but loyal.

Sometimes I think Dazai is a pin-lever dressed like a chronometer: crude impulses under a tailored silhouette. And sometimes I think the opposite: a chronometer disguised as trash so no one expects the precision.

I can’t choose. That indecision is part of the hook.

And—this is going to sound like a non sequitur, but it isn’t—pin-lever watches remind me of my uncle’s kitchen clock growing up. It ran loud, always loud, like it resented being asked to keep order in a house that didn’t want it. That sound used to make me sleepy. Now it makes me tense. Funny what the body files away as “home.”

What I Learn From Him (Even If I Don’t Want To)

I learn that chaos can be curated without becoming sterile.

I learn that “thrifted” isn’t a shortage; it’s a tactic. It’s choosing objects with a previous life because they carry a smell you can’t manufacture—like wool that remembers cigarette smoke, like leather that remembers rain, like a watch strap that remembers sweat.

I learn that poetry doesn’t have to be clean to be sharp. Sometimes it’s sharper when it’s grimy.

But I also learn the danger: when you make a lifestyle out of disorder, people begin to confuse your wreckage with your art. They start applauding your bruises. They start asking for encore injuries.

I don’t want that for him, even if he’d laugh at me for saying it.

I don’t want it for me, either.

Because I’ve already inherited one man’s private collapse, ticking inside a metal case. I don’t need another.

Tonight, Dazai walks through the world like a thrift-store prophet, bandaged and smiling, turning every awkward silence into a line break, every near-disaster into rhythm. The street becomes his page. The city’s neon turns into punctuation. He makes the chaos look wearable.

And I stand behind my counter, hands smelling of oil and steel, listening to my father’s watch breathe in tiny beats against my wrist, thinking: I repair time for a living, but I still don’t know what to do with the parts of me that want to break beautifully.

Maybe that’s the real street poetry—unpublished, unglamorous, happening in the back room where the light is too bright and the screws are too small and my throat tightens for no good reason…

Or maybe I’m just tired.

Either way, the watch keeps going.

And he does too.

For now, anyway—
and I don’t know why that thought feels like a prayer.