Webcam feed, Saitama-shi, Japan

After seven, this street is burned white by billboard light. A naked thing, it is never to be seen alone, and everybody here walks in twos or more. A woman walks with a friend arm in arm, swinging her purse in time with her steps. One-two! One-two! They stop, laughing, tottering behind a parked car. An office worker, already in shirtsleeves, marches on with suitcase and wife in tow. Three-four! A young couple with plastic bags in hand who stop for a moment in the thick of it all, marvelling at the light, at something just off the street, or simply at the marvel of it all: that all the world is a stage and tonight is the place where the spotlight never ends. Salarymen! A whole troupe, their steps in perfect unison. One-two! There is a beat here, unheard but not unseen, in these rhythms of feet and swinging bags and the side-to-side sway of headlamped bikes, or even in the ebb and flow of the crowd itself as it peaks and wanes in troughs. Even the ones who stop are part of the pattern, in the swagger of a hip, kick of a leg, turning-around on their heels, keeping time to the street's silent song, three-four three four. I wonder if you could pick the street up like the arm of a record player and set it down slow and throbbing against the soft underbelly of the earth, preserving this song for all eternity, and you will find in it a fingerprint of the city like no other, in the great valleys and peaks of meandering bike wheels and trundling luggage tracks, creased leather shoes and plodding suede flats, sprightly lovers' steps and riverine drunkard trails; all adding together into a single unbroken line. Pull on that line like a thread and you will separate the salarymen and their suits, unthread friends into their parting ways, disentangle the spooning lovers, rend the very pavement itself, leaving naught but the street, no light but the burning, no people except the crowd, no movement except the one-two beat, and no night except the great bright moonless night -- that which, as all the best dreams do, exists not just in being, but in the witnessing, two by two, hand in hand forever.