A bustling street market scene, vibrant colors and dynamic shadows. A girl in oversized avant-garde streetwear, black asymmetric jacket, white pleated skirt, heavy shoes, layered fabrics. Tofu stall with silken douhua and soybeans, warm lighting creating a cozy atmosphere. A smiling vendor, “Tofu Socrates,” with hands in motion, surrounded by textures of cotton cloth and glossy soy products. Elements of anime style blended with realism, capturing the essence of Kousei Arima and Kaori's connection through music, layering, and emotion. Soft focus on the girl’s thoughtful expression, a moment of contemplation amidst the lively market

I sell tofu where the market is loudest—right beside the fishmonger who slaps silver bodies onto a board as if punctuation could be made of scales. My stall is a small white island: stacked douhua trembling in their bowls, firm tofu sweating through cotton cloth, yuba folded like pale parchment. The air here is never neutral. It is ginger’s sting, scallion’s green bite, diesel from the delivery trikes, and—if you lean close—fresh soy that smells like rain on warm stone.

People still call me “Tofu Socrates,” though I haven’t stood at a university lectern in years. It began as a joke when I used to answer questions while sorting soybeans: picking out split skins and tiny stones, saying, “If you can’t tell what doesn’t belong, how will you know what to keep?” Now it’s a habit: aunties come for tofu and leave with a thought they didn’t plan to carry home.

Today the questions arrive dressed in fabric.

A girl in an oversized black jacket steps up first, sleeves swallowing her hands. The jacket is cut long on one side, cropped on the other; it looks like it was designed during an argument. Beneath it, a white pleated skirt flashes and disappears like a page being turned too fast. Around her neck: a thin ribbon, almost classical, almost childish. Her shoes are heavy, street-level, practical. The whole look is a collision—avant-garde streetwear styling and bold layering—yet it hangs together like a chord that shouldn’t resolve but somehow does.

She points at the silken douhua. “Uncle,” she says, “how do you make something this soft without it falling apart?”

I lift a handful of soybeans from the basket. They are pale, matte, unglamorous—small moons with a seam. I let them run through my fingers; they click softly like teeth. “Softness,” I say, “is not the absence of structure. It’s structure that knows when to stop.”

As I speak, I think of Kousei Arima from Your Lie in April—hands trained to obey, fingers made into metronomes, a boy whose world was measured in clean beats and correct notes. And then Kaori, the bright disturbance, the improvisation that arrives with wind in her hair and reckless tempo in her bow. That story is not only a romance; it is a tutorial in layering: discipline under spontaneity, grief under brightness, silence under sound.

Streetwear, when it is honest, does the same. It stacks opposites until they confess a third thing… and that confession is never as tidy as people pretend.

I scoop soybeans into a bowl of water. They sink, then slowly swell. “First you soak,” I tell the girl, “and you wait. Not the lazy kind of waiting. The kind that listens.” The beans drink until their skins loosen. The market roars on, but in the bowl there is a private, quiet expansion.

“Layering,” I continue, “is like soaking. You don’t throw everything on at once and call it art. You let the base take in enough to hold the rest.”

A middle-aged woman beside her—hair pinned, cheeks flushed from bargaining—snorts. She wears a bright orange windbreaker over a patterned blouse, then a knitted vest on top as if daring weather to argue. “My son layers like that,” she says, “but he looks like a laundry basket.”

I rinse the swollen beans, rub them between my palms. Skins slip off like excuses. “If your son’s layers don’t speak to each other,” I say, “they become noise. But if each layer knows why it’s there, then even asymmetry becomes a sentence—if you’re honest about what you’re trying to say.

I grind the beans on my stone mill, the old kind with a wooden handle polished by years of palms. The sound is wet and steady: shrr, shrr, like rain dragged across a drum. Soy slurry thickens, warm from friction. The smell rises—sweet, green, almost grassy—sticky in the back of the throat. This is where I always remember Kousei: practice that bruises the wrists, repetition that turns flesh into habit. He was ground by expectation the way beans are ground by stone.

But Kaori—Kaori is the moment you decide to add a layer you’re “not supposed” to wear. A sheer top under a structured vest. A bright scarf on an otherwise black silhouette. A skirt over cargo pants. The point isn’t shock. The point is breath.

An old man limps up as I pour the slurry into a cloth bag to strain. He watches with narrowed eyes. He never buys much; he mostly watches, as if the act of watching is a bargain. Today he says, “Young people dress like they’re hiding. Is that courage, or cowardice?”

The cloth twists; hot soy milk streams out, pale as diluted sunlight. My hands feel the heat through the fabric. “Sometimes,” I say, “hiding is a rehearsal for revealing.” And sometimes it’s just… a way to get through a day without being pierced by other people’s eyes.

Kousei hid behind correctness. Kaori hid behind brightness. Both were costumes. Both were armor. Streetwear is often armor too—oversized cuts, hoods, layers that thicken the boundary between skin and gaze. But avant-garde styling, the truly bold kind, is not only armor; it’s confession disguised as design. It admits: I am complicated. I contain seasons. It also admits something else, quieter—maybe: I’m scared.

I bring the soy milk to a boil. It shudders, rises, threatens to spill. The surface wrinkles like skin in hot water. I skim foam, stir, control it without choking it. This, too, is styling: letting the silhouette rise, then guiding it before it becomes a mess.

Here is a detail most people in this market don’t know: once a month, long after the stalls close, a man in a clean, logo-less tracksuit comes to my place behind the vegetable sheds with a small digital scale and the kind of eyes that count everything. He’s an efficiency-obsessed investor—used to shaving seconds off processes, turning time into profit. He asked me to “optimize” my tofu yield, to standardize my curdling like a factory line. He offered a partnership, a sleek brand concept, QR codes on every block of tofu.

I told him: “A cow can be efficient. A machine can be efficient. But a person cannot live as a spreadsheet.”

He didn’t leave. He stood there for three hours watching me add coagulant—just a whisper of gypsum dissolved in water—watching the soy milk turn from liquid certainty into trembling doubt, then into curds. In the end, he said quietly, “My wife used to play piano. I used to tell her to practice with a timer.”

We didn’t talk about her again. He still comes. He never brings a timer now.

When the curds form, I stop stirring. I let the pot settle. That pause is where texture is born. If you rush it, you get grainy tofu; if you coddle it too much, it won’t set. People come to me with the same mistake: they either push their lives too hard or refuse to touch them at all. Kousei was pushed until sound turned into water in his ears—until he couldn’t hear his own playing. Kaori pushed herself the other way: she played as if tomorrow was a rumor. Both were responses to fear.

Bold layering looks are a response to fear too. Fear of being seen plainly. Fear of being read too quickly. So you add a panel, a strap, a hanging pocket, a second sleeve, a half-skirt. You make your body a paragraph instead of a headline.

The girl in the asymmetrical jacket watches me ladle curds into the mold. The wood creaks. The tofu press sits like a quiet judgment. I place the weight on top—firm but not cruel. The curds sigh as water drains away. The block becomes itself.

“Isn’t it heavy?” she asks.

I nod. “Everything that becomes itself carries weight.” And—this is the part people skip—most of us aren’t sure we deserve that weight.

Another detail, colder and stranger: last winter, a streetwear designer—famous for deconstructed jackets with brutal seams—came to my stall not for tofu, but for yuba skins. She didn’t say why at first. She just asked for the thinnest sheets, the kind that tear if you breathe wrong. Weeks later, I learned she had been experimenting with soy-protein film as a temporary interfacing for garments—something that stiffens fabric during construction, then dissolves with steam. It’s the sort of knowledge you get only by standing behind someone’s studio door long enough to hear the machines stop. (And yes—this might be half rumor. Markets live on rumor as much as they live on cash.)

When she returned, she said, “Your yuba has tension. It holds and yields. It’s like a good silhouette.”

I wanted to tell her that yuba is born from patience: you wait for a skin to form, then lift it with chopsticks, delicate as lifting a memory. But I only said, “Don’t confuse stiffness with strength.”

Because I’ve seen strength in the softest things: in douhua that holds together under a spoon, in Kaori’s laugh that hides a hospital smell, in Kousei’s trembling hands that still reach for the keys even when sound betrays him.

The old man with the limp taps the counter. “And what about the kids who dress loud?” he asks. “Chains, neon, layers on layers. They look like they want trouble.”

I hand him a small cup of warm soy milk. It fogs the air. “Some people dress loud,” I say, “because no one listened when they spoke softly.”

He takes a sip. His face changes, just a millimeter—like a note tuning into place. Warmth spreads into his palms around the cup.

In Your Lie in April, there is a cruelty in beauty: the brighter the performance, the more it reveals what can’t be kept. Fashion has that cruelty too. A bold look can’t save you, not really. A perfect asymmetrical coat won’t stop grief. A masterful stack of textures—nylon, wool, mesh, leather—won’t fix a broken home. But a look can do something smaller and more human: it can give you a way to walk through the day without flinching at your own reflection…

When I cut the tofu block, the knife slides with a soft resistance, like cutting fresh cake. The interior is smooth, clean, faintly shining. I wrap it. Paper sticks slightly to damp edges. It feels alive in my hands—cooling, settling.

The girl pays and hesitates. “If Kousei could dress,” she says, half-laughing, “what would he wear?”

I think of him in a black turtleneck, yes—simple, controlled. But I also think of the moment he finally plays like he’s speaking rather than reciting. So I answer: “He’d start with something strict. Then he’d add one reckless thing. A scarf the color of a violin case. A jacket that doesn’t match. A layer that says, ‘I’m not only what trained me.’”

She nods as if that sentence has weight in her pocket now.

As she leaves, a motorbike backfires. A vendor shouts. A child cries over a dropped sesame bun. The market continues its bright chaos. I rinse my hands in a bucket; the water turns faintly milky, slips between my fingers.

Philosophy, I’ve learned, isn’t a clean lecture hall. It’s a wet apron. It’s the smell of soy on your wrists. It’s standing in noise and still being able to hear the small thing underneath—the way a person wants to be understood, the way a boy wants to hear his own music again, the way a girl wants to wear her contradictions without apology.

If you want avant-garde streetwear styling that meets Your Lie in April, don’t chase the costume of rebellion. Chase the truth of layering: discipline as your base, tenderness as your lining, grief as your hidden pocket, and one bright, impossible accent—worn not to impress, but to remind your body it is still here, still warm, still capable of sound…

And when the market finally quiets—when even the fishmonger stops slapping punctuation into the day—I sometimes wonder: if all these layers come off, who will we be willing to let see us? Or do we only ever learn to be brave in cloth and steam?