A vivid street market scene with Izuku Midoriya in avant-garde streetwear, featuring bold layering: an asymmetrical deconstructed hoodie, a cropped utility vest with pockets, and a technical undershirt. Surround him with bustling stalls—fishmonger, pickled mustard greens, and soybeans soaking in water. Capture the morning light casting warm shadows, highlighting textures of fabric and fresh produce. Blend anime style with realistic details, emphasizing nervous courage and the weight of personal expression in fashion, set against the backdrop of a vibrant community atmosphere

Morning always begins with sound before thought. The market wakes like a throat clearing: cleavers on bone, scooter horns, a radio coughing out old pop songs. My stall is wedged between a fishmonger who swears at ice and a woman who sells pickled mustard greens from a barrel that smells like rain trapped in wood. I lay out tofu the way I once laid out seminar questions—clean edges, a calm surface, the quiet dare of softness. The neighborhood calls me “Tofu Socrates,” as if asking why life hurts is less embarrassing when done over bean curd.

I used to teach philosophy at a university with fluorescent hallways and coffee that tasted like burnt paper. Now my lectures are measured in ladles. The chalk is soy pulp on my knuckles. People come for dougan, tofu knots, dried bean curd strips; they stay because they have a sentence stuck in their chest and need it loosened.

Today the first question arrives with a paper bag.

A boy in green comes in my mind first—Izuku Midoriya, the earnest kind of hero who bows too many times and carries notebooks like they’re life vests. In the anime he is all clean lines and hopeful grit; in my market corner, he steps closer as a style idea, not a cartoon: a nervous courage learning how to take up space.

Avant-garde streetwear loves that kind of courage. It doesn’t flatter; it argues. It doesn’t whisper “you look good”; it asks “what are you willing to carry, and where will you hide the weight?”

I scoop soybeans from a sack. They sound like small pebbles, dry and impatient. The beans are wrinkled, pale as old teeth. I pick through them, thumb and forefinger working like a metronome. This is the first lesson of layering: not everything deserves to be part of the look. There are beans with hairline cracks, beans with moth bites—things that will sour the whole pot if you pretend not to see them.

Midoriya’s bold layering starts here: selection. A base layer that isn’t pretty but is honest. Think of a long, technical undershirt with a tight neck, the kind that holds heat the way a secret holds heat. Over it, a deconstructed hoodie—one sleeve slightly longer than the other, a seam displaced like a thought you can’t stop returning to. Then a cropped utility vest, pockets arranged asymmetrically as if the body is admitting: my needs are not symmetrical. One side carries notebooks, the other carries bandages.

A housewife I know—Auntie Lan, who buys tofu skin every Wednesday—once asked me, “Teacher Su, why does my son dress like he’s escaping a fire?”

I told her: because some clothes are exits. Some clothes are shields. Some clothes are questions worn loudly so you don’t have to ask them with your mouth.

The soybeans go into water. The basin fills; the beans darken and swell, drinking their future. When they soak, they become heavier without becoming harder. That’s the second lesson: bold layering isn’t piling on. It’s letting each layer absorb the body’s story until the outfit has weight that moves with you.

The market air is damp; it clings to my forearms. I lean over the grinder. The machine hums low, a throat sound. When I pour in the soaked beans, the first froth rises, pale and fragrant. Soy milk smells like warm grain and clean earth. There’s always a moment—half a second—when the liquid looks like it might become something else entirely, like fog deciding it is rain.

Midoriya, meeting avant-garde streetwear, should smell like this: earnestness heated, then aerated, then forced through a blade until it becomes smooth enough to drink. A bold look that still has a student’s sincerity, but cut with the sharpness of survival.

I imagine him in a long, asymmetric coat that swings like a cape but refuses the neat superhero silhouette. One lapel higher, one pocket stitched shut on purpose. Under it, wide-leg trousers with panels—one matte, one slightly reflective—so the legs catch light like passing street signs. A belt system that loops twice, not because it’s necessary, but because it tells the truth: I have tied myself down before; I am learning to tie myself differently.

Someone will say, “Too much.” Someone always says that when a person stops apologizing for existing.

A man who sells bicycle parts nearby used to say it too. He is older, palms blackened with grease. Two winters ago, he stopped coming. Not because business was bad—people always need bolts—but because the last small parts factory on the outskirts shut its doors, and the supply line he depended on snapped like a tendon. Outsiders never noticed; they still rode their bikes, still complained about traffic. But in our little ecosystem, the disappearance was a quiet extinction. When the old system collapses like that—when the last factory gate closes and stays closed—what does a person choose? He didn’t become poetic about it. He simply sold his tools for scrap and took a job watching the night shift at a warehouse. He traded making for guarding. His body learned a new boredom.

That is the third lesson of layering: sometimes you don’t add. Sometimes you replace. Sometimes you let a layer die because the world has already killed it, and you refuse to pretend.

I heat the soy milk. The pot trembles at the edge of boiling. Steam rises in sheets, wetting my eyelashes. This part is always a test of attention; if you look away, the milk foams over like panic. I stir with a long paddle, scraping the bottom in slow circles. The smell thickens, sweet and faintly nutty, like toasted bread without salt.

A woman with cracked hands stands at the counter. She asks me in a voice that tries to be casual, “If what I’ve guarded for years turns out to be meaningless, what then?”

I think of Midoriya again—how he began quirkless, how his worth was questioned not gently but brutally. The most direct doubt is always the most humiliating: you are not built for this. You are not part of the story. The world says it with a straight face.

So I answer her with the only honest method I know: coagulation.

I turn off the heat. I pour the soy milk into a bucket, and I measure the nigari. The coagulant looks like cloudy water, innocent as a lie. You add it, and the entire liquid has to decide what it will become. It’s not a dramatic decision; it’s a surrender to chemistry. Curds form in slow, pale clouds, separating from whey as if the milk is choosing its own bones.

When meaning collapses, you either keep swirling forever—trying to return to the old smoothness—or you accept the split and shape it. You press it. You let the excess drain. You take what remains and call it a new form.

In styling, that moment is when you stop dressing to be understood and start dressing to be true. Midoriya’s bold layering, worn in a city that doesn’t care, could be a manifesto made of fabric: oversized knit sleeves peeking from under a sharp-shouldered blazer, a skirt-panel over trousers, a harness over a soft tee—tenderness and armor, not reconciled, only coexisting.

There are details outsiders don’t see, the kind you only learn by staying in one place long enough to watch the corners fray. Like the unspoken rule among market vendors: when someone’s stall goes dark because they’ve been hospitalized, we keep their spot “warm” by placing a crate there, as if a small barrier can hold a life in place until it returns. It’s not in any contract. It’s just a mercy practiced quietly, the way you keep soy milk from scorching by stirring even when your wrist aches.

Or like the fact that I still receive emails from a former student who, after my resignation, keeps sending me scanned pages of our old reading list. On the margins, she writes what she couldn’t say back then: that when her father lost his job and her family’s certainty evaporated, she stopped believing in “career” and started believing in “making something people can touch.” She now repairs shoes in a tiny shop near the river. She tells me leather smells like patience. Outsiders assume the transition was a failure. They don’t know how steady her hands have become.

I pour the curds into a cloth-lined mold. The cloth is damp and rough, like an old towel warmed by sun. I fold it over, then press. The weight goes on top—heavy, blunt, unquestioning. Whey drips out in a thin stream, tapping the basin like a slow clock.

Streetwear is also a press. Every layer you add is a weight you choose. The body underneath is the mold. The city is the impatient hand that wants you to harden quickly.

But the best bold layering looks are not only loud. They are structured tenderness. They let the body breathe while still declaring shape. They allow awkwardness—the way Midoriya’s shoulders are never fully relaxed—to become part of the silhouette rather than something to hide.

When the tofu is set, I cut it. The knife slides through with a clean sigh. The interior is smooth, steaming faintly. I hand a block to Auntie Lan. She squeezes it lightly through the plastic bag, testing firmness the way people test promises.

“Teacher Su,” she says, “your tofu is soft but it doesn’t fall apart.”

I nod. “Because it’s been pressed.”

Outside, the market keeps shouting. A motorbike backfires; a vendor laughs too loudly; someone bargains as if the price is a personal insult. In my mind, Midoriya walks through this noise dressed in brave asymmetry: layers that don’t match perfectly because life doesn’t match perfectly, bold shapes that refuse to shrink, textures that remember both struggle and care. The outfit doesn’t ask for approval. It simply moves forward, the way a hero does when the old map burns and the street still needs crossing.

And in this corner of the market, with soy on my hands and steam in my lungs, I keep doing what I’ve always done: listening to questions, stirring the pot, letting the curds form, and reminding anyone who will hear it—sometimes the most radical style is to keep your softness, even when the world insists you should be hard.