To this city, where around 30,000 "moratorium people" bearing the title of "student" arrive each year, I too arrived as one of them. Living alone brings freedom. Yet, I had not yet found my own place—neither at the university nor in the city. One day, I happened to wander into a nearby public bath called Asahiyu. An elderly woman sat at the bandai counter, watching television. Neighbors who had likely been coming here for years went about their routines. Their respective conversations, bathing rituals, and facial expressions merged together with the steam inside the bathhouse. There was a side of people's lives that I had never known before. I discovered other public baths as well: Goshikiyu, Imomatsu Onsen, and Ebisuyu. Each bathhouse possessed its own unique rhythm of daily life. Soaking in the same tub, I felt as if I had slipped effortlessly and dissolved into a part of the city of Kyoto. Later, I was invited to work a part-time shift at the bandai counter of Sakurayu in Kamishichiken. The shifts were being covered by members of the "Kyoto Sento (Public Bath) Club." Surrounded by these charming members in their twenties—seniors such as someone working at a miso shop, a budding architect, and someone living in an old apartment building named ○○-so—I was taught all sorts of things about Kyoto. And, of course, their recommended public baths. Through the Sakurayu bandai members, I learned about the ways of life of the adults who had come to Kyoto and truly settled into the city. I was looking at the backs of adults who had either moved past their moratorium or were living in a semi-moratorium state. Sakurayu has since gone out of business and is now a bicycle parking lot. Looking back, I was living inside the illusion called a moratorium. The public bath that once stood in that neighborhood has vanished. Yet, the me of today has, beyond a shadow of a doubt, dissolved into Kyoto.