そらるThere is a word in the title of this song that you will not find in any dictionary. 夕溜まり — yudamari — is a term Soraru appears to have coined himself, fusing 夕 (yuu, evening) with 溜まり (tamari, a pooling or gathering). Picture the way late afternoon light collects in certain places — between buildings, in the wells of old stairways, at the edge of a schoolyard — and holds there for a few suspended minutes before dusk swallows it. That is a yudamari: a pocket of golden-orange light that exists only briefly, only in transition. Add しおり (shiori — a bookmark), and you have the title of both this song and Soraru’s second full-length album: a marker slipped into the pages of a story still being written, at the exact moment when the light is the warmest.
Soraru is a utaite — literally “a person who sings” — a term that emerged from the Japanese video-sharing platform Niconico in the late 2000s. Unlike conventional J-POP artists who come through record label auditions or talent agencies, utaite built their audiences by uploading cover performances of Vocaloid songs (tracks composed for the singing synthesizer software Hatsune Miku and others). If you are unfamiliar with this world, think of it as a sprawling, anonymous indie-music ecosystem that eventually produced some of Japan’s biggest mainstream acts, including YOASOBI and Kenshi Yonezu. Soraru, born in 1988 in Miyagi Prefecture, has been part of this scene since 2008 — long before it crossed over into mainstream visibility. His voice is often described as low, breathy, and gently husky, with a warmth that fans liken to being spoken to by someone just on the edge of sleep. He is also a trained audio engineer who mixes and masters his own recordings, and he forms one half of After the Rain alongside fellow utaite Mafumafu. By 2015, when this album dropped and peaked at number ten on the Oricon Weekly chart, Soraru was seven years deep into a career that had started with a guitar borrowed from his father and a webcam pointed at his bedroom wall.
All of which makes “Yudamari no Shiori” an unusually personal document. Soraru wrote both the lyrics and the melody himself — one of only two self-penned tracks on an album otherwise built from contributions by prominent Vocaloid producers like Neru, Mafumafu, and Last Note. Placed as the final song on the tracklist, it functions as both a closing statement and a mirror. The album’s promotional tagline reads: “Past and future — the sky at dusk, reflecting the present.” This song is that reflection.
“A Worn-Out Magic Sword” and the RPG of Starting Out
The song opens not with a love confession or a dramatic scene, but with a quiet paradox:
君が知らないいつかの僕になりたくて
Kimi ga shiranai itsuka no boku ni naritakute
I wanted to become a version of me that you don’t know yet僕が忘れたあの日の君に会ったんだ
Boku ga wasureta ano hi no kimi ni attanda
And I met the you from that day I’d forgotten
The pronoun 僕 (boku) — the softer, slightly vulnerable form of the masculine “I” in Japanese, as opposed to the more assertive 俺 (ore) — sets the emotional register for everything that follows. This is not bravado. This is someone looking backward and forward at the same time, caught in a strange temporal loop where “you” and “I” are arguably the same person at different stages. The 君 (kimi) here does not seem to be a lover or a friend. It reads more like the self that once sat in front of a computer and pressed “upload” for the first time.
Then the metaphor shifts to something unexpectedly playful:
何も知らず手に入れたボロの魔法の剣
Nani mo shirazu te ni ireta boro no mahou no ken
Not knowing anything, I picked up a beat-up magic swordそれでも輝いて見えた初めての冒険だ
Soredemo kagayaite mieta hajimete no bouken da
And still, it looked radiant — my very first adventure
ボロ (boro) means worn-out, tattered, falling apart. A ボロの魔法の剣 is not Excalibur. It is the rusty blade you find in a chest at the very start of a role-playing game — barely functional, laughably weak, but yours. For a generation of utaite who grew up on Dragon Quest and Final Fantasy (Soraru has cited Dragon Quest as one of his great loves), this metaphor lands with a specific weight. The “adventure” is not just metaphorical. It maps directly onto the experience of entering the Niconico ecosystem as a complete unknown, equipped with nothing but a microphone and a half-learned cover song. The word 冒険 (bouken — adventure) shares the kanji 冒 (bou), meaning to risk or dare, and 険 (ken), meaning danger or steep terrain. An adventure, in Japanese, is etymologically a risky traversal of dangerous ground. Soraru chose the word precisely because it carries that weight — this was not a hobby. It was a leap.
The Orange That Watches
The chorus introduces the song’s central image:
あの日と同じオレンジが僕を見てるから
Ano hi to onaji orenji ga boku wo miteru kara
Because the same orange from that day is watching over meそれだけで大丈夫 そう思えるんだ
Sore dake de daijoubu sou omoerunda
That alone is enough — I can believe that
The orange is never explained. It does not need to be. In the context of the title — the pooled light of dusk — it is the color of sunset, the warm amber that fills those brief minutes between afternoon and evening. But there is something striking about the way Soraru personifies it: the orange is not simply there. It is 見てる (miteru) — watching, keeping its eyes on him. The gaze goes one way. The light from the past is actively witnessing the present.
This is where I found myself most drawn in. Soraru could have written 照らしてる (terashiteru — shining on, illuminating), which would make the orange a source of guidance. Instead, he chose 見てる — just watching. Not guiding. Not protecting. Seeing. The difference matters. A light that illuminates you tells you where to go. A light that watches you is a witness to the fact that you are going at all. The comfort in the chorus is not “I know the way.” It is: someone — or something, or some version of me — saw me start, and sees me now.
“Pretty Satisfied, Actually” — The Anti-Heroic Middle
The second verse has a quality rare in J-POP: it is genuinely, almost stubbornly casual.
もちろん失敗することだってあったけど
Mochiron shippai suru koto datte atta kedo
Of course there were failures too結構満足さ僕のほんの一ページ
Kekkou manzoku sa boku no hon no ichi peeji
But I’m pretty satisfied — just one page of my story
結構満足さ (kekkou manzoku sa) is so conversational it almost shrugs. 結構 means “reasonably” or “pretty much” — it is the word you use when someone asks if your meal was good and it was fine, genuinely fine, not spectacular but not a disappointment either. In a genre that tends toward grand emotional declarations — “I will never forget you,” “you are my everything” — Soraru says: yeah, I’m pretty satisfied. It is a small sentence with enormous honesty in it.
And ほんの一ページ (hon no ichi peeji — just one page) extends the “bookmark” motif from the title without ever becoming heavy-handed. Your entire life so far, all those stumbling early steps, the friends made along the way, the failures — that is one page. Not the whole book. Not even a chapter. A page. The diminutive is not self-deprecating. It is liberating: there are so many pages left.
そんなときは開いてよ — “Open It Up, Won’t You?”
The bridge arrives with a directness that catches you off guard:
失敗ばかりなんだ 前なんて向けないよ
Shippai bakari nanda mae nante mukenai yo
It’s nothing but failure — I can’t even face forwardそういう日もいつか来るだろうけど
Sou iu hi mo itsuka kuru darou kedo
Days like that will probably come too, butほら そんなときは開いてよ ねえ
Hora sonna toki wa hiraite yo nee
Hey, look — when that happens, open it up, okay?
開いてよ (hiraite yo) — open it. Open what? The song never says explicitly, but the title tells us: the bookmark. Open the book to the page where you left your marker, and look at where you were. The ねえ (nee) at the end — a soft, almost pleading “hey” or “won’t you?” — gives the line a tenderness that formal language could never achieve. It is the voice of someone nudging a future version of themselves the way you would nudge a friend who has gone quiet at a party. Hey. Look. You’re still here.
The ほら (hora — look, see, come on) that precedes it is worth noting too. ほら is one of those Japanese words with no clean English equivalent. It carries a gentle insistence — part “look,” part “see? I told you,” part “come on, pay attention.” It is what a parent says when pointing at a rainbow. It is what Soraru says to himself when pointing at the proof that he has survived.
Two Choruses, One Shift
The song’s most revealing move happens between its repeated choruses. The first time:
あの日と同じオレンジが僕を見てるから
Ano hi to onaji orenji ga boku wo miteru kara
The same orange from that day is watching meそれだけで大丈夫 そう思えるんだ
Sore dake de daijoubu sou omoerunda
That alone is enough — I can believe that
The final time:
あの日と同じオレンジが僕を見てるから
Ano hi to onaji orenji ga boku wo miteru kara
The same orange from that day is watching meそれだけで大丈夫 今日も歩いてく
Sore dake de daijoubu kyou mo aruiteku
That alone is enough — today, too, I keep walking
The anchor line is identical. What changes is the response. そう思えるんだ (I can believe that) becomes 今日も歩いてく (today, too, I keep walking). Belief becomes action. The shift from 思える (omoeru — to be able to think/believe) to 歩いてく (aruiteku — to go on walking) is the emotional arc of the entire song compressed into a single word swap. Early in the song, the comfort of the orange light is enough to sustain a feeling. By the end, it is enough to sustain a step. Feeling has become movement.
There is also a crucial pivot in the middle section, where the watcher changes identity:
あの日に泣いた君がね 僕を見てるから
Ano hi ni naita kimi ga ne boku wo miteru kara
Because the you who cried that day is watching me
Here it is not the orange light but 君 — the past self — who is doing the watching. The two images merge: the orange of dusk and the crying child are both bearing witness to the present. And the word 紡ぐ (tsumugu — to spin, as in spinning thread) appears for the first time:
僕がここから未来に紡ぐ一ページ
Boku ga koko kara mirai ni tsumugu ichi peeji
A single page I spin from here into the future
紡ぐ is not the same as 書く (kaku — to write). Writing a page implies putting pen to paper. Spinning a page implies pulling thread from raw material and weaving it into fabric. Soraru does not write his story — he spins it, the way a silkworm produces silk from its own body. The distinction carries a particular resonance for a utaite: these are artists who built careers not from industry infrastructure but from their own voices, their own bedroom setups, their own stubborn refusal to stop uploading.
夕溜まりを覚えていて
The song ends on a single line, separated from the final chorus like a postscript:
夕溜まりを覚えていて
Yudamari wo oboeteite
Remember the pool of dusk light
覚えていて (oboeteite) is the te-form of 覚えている — not a command so much as a request that stretches into the future. Remember. Keep remembering. Don’t stop. The te-form in Japanese carries an ongoing quality, a gentle persistence: not “remember this once” but “hold onto it.” And what is being remembered is not a person, not an event, not even a feeling — but a quality of light. A light that exists only in transition, only in the brief space between day and night, only at the exact moment when things are changing.
For an artist whose career has been defined by transitions — from anonymous uploader to concert headliner, from cover singer to songwriter, from Niconico to mainstream — this final request is both a creative statement and a survival strategy. The dusk is not the destination. The dusk is the proof that you moved between one thing and the next, and there was beauty in the crossing.
The album’s own tagline said it: “Past and future, the sky at dusk, reflecting the present.” Soraru’s name itself comes from 空 (sora — sky). The sky at dusk. The songwriter at the threshold. The bookmark slipped in to say: I was here.
Soraru, known for his gentle, slightly husky vocal delivery — a voice that reviewers have described as having a warmth and a softness more felt than heard — sings this song at a mid-tempo pace. CDジャーナル described the album’s overall sound as driven by “swift, gallant male vocals and up-tempo, sensational synth tones.” As the album’s closing track, this song likely settles into something quieter and more reflective, the sort of track that wraps an album not with a bang but with a long exhale.
There is another way to hear this song entirely: not as autobiography but as a direct address to the listener. In that reading, 君 is you — the fan who first discovered Soraru’s music — and the song is thanking you for watching, for bearing witness, for being the orange light. The evidence is there: the opening line, “I wanted to become a version of me you don’t know yet,” works as a promise from artist to audience. And “open it up” could mean “open this album again.” For a song called “Bookmark,” the dual reading feels less like an accident and more like a door left deliberately ajar.
📖 Read the full lyrics with English translation and romaji → /en/artists/soraru/lyrics/yudamarinoshinori/
📝 Learn the Japanese in this song → Coming soon
Song Information
- Title: Yudamari no Shiori (夕溜まりのしおり)
- Artist: Soraru (そらる)
- Lyrics: Soraru
- Music: Soraru
- Arrangement: Suzumu (スズム) per official site / Fukino Kuwagata (吹野クワガタ) per distribution credits
- Release: 2015-04-22
- Album/Single: 夕溜まりのしおり (2nd Album, Track 15)
- Tie-in: None
