ヨルシカThere is a 1,200-year-old Chinese love poem that ends, roughly, like this: once you have known the ocean, ordinary water will never satisfy you again. Once you have seen the clouds of Mount Wu, no other clouds are worth the name. The Tang dynasty poet Yuan Zhen wrote it for his dead wife. It is four lines long. It is, by most accounts, the most famous declaration of irreversible love in the Chinese language.
Yorushika’s n-buna read that poem, and then he wrote a song from the perspective of a snake.
“Hebi” (へび, “Snake”) is the kind of song that arrives quietly — piano-led, unhurried, swaying at 86 BPM in a triplet feel that mimics the slow lateral movement of a serpent through grass. Suis’s voice, which reviewers have long described as having a crystalline transparency, is softer here than on most Yorushika tracks, almost whispered in places. The instrumentation stays sparse: piano and gentle percussion carry most of the weight, with acoustic guitar threading in and out of the arrangement. It’s a song that sounds like early spring feels — not yet warm, but no longer frozen. The kind of morning where the ground is still damp and everything smells green.
Released on January 17, 2025, as a digital single, “Hebi” serves as the second ending theme for the anime Orb: On the Movements of the Earth (チ。―地球の運動について―), a story about 15th-century Europeans risking their lives to prove that the Earth moves around the Sun. The anime’s title, “チ。,” packs three meanings into a single syllable: 大地 (daichi, the earth), 血 (chi, blood), and 知 (chi, knowledge). That last one — chi, knowledge — is where this song lives.
The Creature in the Lyrics
Yorushika is a two-person project that has spent nearly a decade refusing to show its face. Composer and lyricist n-buna — a former Vocaloid producer who started uploading songs to Niconico as a teenager — and vocalist suis formed the duo in 2017, and they have never publicly revealed what they look like. Their logo is two crescent moons facing each other, forming an eye that doubles as a clock set to six — the hour when night begins. The name “Yorushika” comes from their own lyric: yoru shika mou nemurezu ni (夜しかもう眠れずに, “unable to sleep except at night”). It is a project built on concealment, on the idea that the work should arrive before the creator.
This philosophy shows up in their music as literary architecture. Their first two full albums told a single story through letters between two characters. Their 2023 release, Gento (幻燈), was a “listenable art book” — a physical picture book where scanning each page with a phone played a song. And in March 2026, they released Second Person (二人称), a 22-track album paired with a 170-page epistolary novel written by n-buna himself, published by Kodansha. “Hebi” sits as track 15 on that album, between “Aporia” — the first ending theme for Orb — and a song called “Umeki” (うめき, “Groaning”).
For international listeners, Yorushika’s clearest point of entry may be “Haru” (晴る, “Sunny”), the second opening theme for Frieren: Beyond Journey’s End, or “Tada Kimi ni Hare” (ただ君に晴れ, “Just a Sunny Day for You”), which went massively viral on TikTok. But their deepest work tends to live in the album tracks — and “Hebi” is one of those.
「鱗」と「舌は二つ」— Scales, Forked Tongue, Lidless Eyes
The opening verse introduces the narrator not as human but as creature:
行方知らずのあの雲を見た
Yukue shirazu no ano kumo wo mita
I saw those clouds, headed who knows whereわたしの鱗はあなたに似ていた
Watashi no uroko wa anata ni nite ita
My scales resembled you舌は二つ、まぶたは眠らず
Shita wa futatsu, mabuta wa nemurazu
A forked tongue, eyelids that never sleepぼやけたよもぎの香りがする
Boyaketa yomogi no kaori ga suru
The blurred scent of mugwort
Every physical detail maps to snake anatomy: the 鱗 (uroko, scales), the 舌は二つ (shita wa futatsu, literally “tongue is two” — a forked tongue), and まぶたは眠らず (mabuta wa nemurazu, “eyelids that never sleep”). That last one is the most quietly precise. Snakes have no eyelids. They sleep with their eyes open, a transparent scale called a brille covering each eye. In Japanese, the idiom carries an eerie resonance — a creature that can never close its eyes to the world, that is always, always watching.
The scent of よもぎ (yomogi, mugwort) grounds the scene in a specific season. Mugwort is among the first wild plants to push through Japanese soil in early spring, its distinctively bitter, herbal smell a signal that winter is ending. For a snake emerging from hibernation, this would be the first scent of a new world. n-buna uses ぼやけた (boyaketa, blurred/hazy) to describe the smell — not the vision, the smell — which gives the line a synaesthetic quality, as if the snake’s senses are still recalibrating after months of dormancy.
冬(あなた)の寝息を聞く — When Winter Is Read as “You”
The second verse delivers the song’s most structurally unusual moment:
靴はいらず、耳は知らず
Kutsu wa irazu, mimi wa shirazu
No need for shoes, ears that know nothing冬(あなた)の寝息を聞く
Fuyu (anata) no neiki wo kiku
Listening to the sleeping breath of winter (you)
The parenthetical is not a translation note — it’s in the original lyrics. The kanji 冬 (winter) is annotated with the reading あなた (anata, “you”). This is a technique called 当て読み (ateyomi), where the lyricist assigns an alternate reading to a word. Both meanings are meant to coexist. Winter is not like “you.” Winter is “you.” The snake hibernates inside the body of the beloved.
What this implies is disorienting and beautiful: the entire period of hibernation — the months of sleep, of stillness, of being buried underground — is reframed as intimacy. The snake was not hiding from winter. It was curled up inside “you,” listening to your breathing. The line 冬の寝息を聞く would normally mean “listening to winter’s sleeping breath” — an already poetic personification. But with the ateyomi annotation, it becomes a love scene. The snake lay dormant, warm, pressed against the rhythms of a sleeping person it calls “you.”
巫山の雲 — The Clouds That Ruin All Other Clouds
The chorus opens with sudden movement:
ブルーベルのベッドを滑った 春みたいだ
Buruuberu no beddo wo subetta — haru mitai da
Slid across a bed of bluebells — it’s like springシジュウカラはあんな風に歌うのか
Shijuukara wa anna fuu ni utau no ka
Do Japanese tits really sing like that?
The snake is awake now, and everything is new. The verb 滑った (subetta, slid) is snake-movement — boneless, low, frictionless. The bluebells (buruuberu) are an English loanword, and their appearance marks the song’s first burst of color. The シジュウカラ (shijuukara, Japanese tit — a small songbird common across Japan) is heard with what feels like genuine wonder. The rhetorical question あんな風に歌うのか — “do they really sing like that?” — carries the astonishment of a creature hearing birdsong for the first time after months of silence.
Then comes the line that unlocks the entire song:
海を知らず、花を愛でず、空を仰ぐわたしは
Umi wo shirazu, hana wo medezu, sora wo aogu watashi wa
Not knowing the ocean, not admiring the flowers, I who look up at the sky —また巫山の雲を見たいだけ
Mata Fuzan no kumo wo mitai dake
just want to see the clouds of Mount Wu again
巫山の雲 (Fuzan no kumo, the clouds of Mount Wu). This is n-buna reaching across thirteen centuries to borrow an image from Yuan Zhen’s poem “Li Si” (離思, “Parting Thoughts”), written around 809 CE for his deceased wife, Wei Cong. The key couplet — among the most quoted lines in all of Chinese poetry — reads: 曾经沧海难为水，除却巫山不是云. Roughly: “Having crossed the vast ocean, no other water impresses. Apart from the clouds of Mount Wu, nothing else counts as clouds.” The clouds of Mount Wu, in classical Chinese literature, carry an additional layer: they are associated with a goddess who appeared to a king in a dream, transforming into clouds by morning and rain by evening. The image fuses love, loss, the sublime, and the erotic into a single natural phenomenon.
n-buna himself confirmed this source on the official Orb anime website, calling Yuan Zhen’s poem “a simple and deep love poem” and noting that both the ocean and the clouds of Mount Wu are metaphors for Yuan Zhen’s late wife. In “Hebi,” the narrator — a snake who has never seen the ocean and does not stop to admire flowers — wants only one thing: to see those legendary, world-ruining clouds. The clouds that, once witnessed, make all other clouds irrelevant.
「知らず」の連鎖 — The Chain of Not-Knowing
I want to pause on the phrase 知らず (shirazu, “not knowing / without knowing”), because n-buna uses it as the song’s structural spine. It appears, in various forms, across nearly every section:
行方知らず (yukue shirazu, “whereabouts unknown”) — describing the clouds. 耳は知らず (mimi wa shirazu, “ears don’t know”) — the snake’s lack of external ears. 海を知らず (umi wo shirazu, “not knowing the ocean”). 雨を知らず (ame wo shirazu, “not knowing rain”). 春を知らず (haru wo shirazu, “not knowing spring”).
Each 知らず is a different absence. The snake has not seen the sea, has not felt rain on its scales, does not understand spring. And yet the song’s emotional engine is not about ignorance — it’s about desire. Every “not knowing” is followed by wanting. The snake does not know the ocean, but it wants to see its depth. It does not know spring, but it slides through bluebells. The repeated 知らず builds a portrait of a creature defined by what it has yet to experience — and burning to experience it.
There’s a phonetic dimension here, too. The Japanese suffix ず (zu) is a negation marker from classical grammar — more literary, more weighted than the modern ない (nai). Its buzzing consonant sits at the end of each phrase like a vibration that won’t stop. Say 知らず out loud: shi-ra-zu. The zu hums. It lingers. Stack five of them across a song and they start to feel like the low continuous drone of a creature pressed against the ground, tasting the air. The 知らず sound is, in its own way, the sound of the snake.
n-buna paired 知らず with another repeated classical negative: 愛でず (medezu, “not admiring/appreciating”). Where 知らず is about cognition — not knowing — 愛でず is about aesthetics — not stopping to appreciate beauty. The snake knows nothing and admires nothing, and yet it is consumed by longing. That contradiction is what makes the narrator feel alive rather than empty.
This is where the song locks into its anime. Orb: On the Movements of the Earth is about people in 15th-century Europe who are willing to die for knowledge that the authorities say they must not possess. The earth moves, and they know it, and knowing it is a crime punishable by torture and immolation. The anime’s title packs three meanings into a single syllable: 大地 (daichi, the earth), 血 (chi, blood), and 知 (chi, knowledge) — and it is that third “chi” where the song and the show converge. n-buna himself said his interpretation of the anime was simply “知” — knowledge, the desire to know. His snake — born blind to the ocean, deaf to rain, ignorant of spring — is the same archetype as the anime’s heretics. Not-knowing is the starting condition. The desire to know anyway is the story. n-buna explained on the official anime site that the Biblical serpent who tempted humans toward the fruit of knowledge is “a simple metaphor for the desire to know.” In “Hebi,” the serpent is not the tempter. The serpent is the one being tempted — by the world itself.
What Changes Between the Choruses
The song repeats its chorus structure three times, and the differences between iterations are where the emotional argument lives.
In the second chorus, the bed changes and the movement changes:
芽吹く苔のベッドを転がった
Mebuku koke no beddo wo korogatta
Rolled across a bed of sprouting moss
Where the first chorus used 滑った (subetta, slid), this one uses 転がった (korogatta, rolled/tumbled). n-buna could have kept 滑った for both choruses — the repetition would have been natural, expected. But sliding is controlled, intentional, a body perfectly adapted to its surface. Rolling is something that happens to you — a loss of direction, the body caught by gravity and terrain. The shift from 滑った to 転がった tracks the narrator’s growing emotional disorientation. The more the snake sees of the world, the less gracefully it moves through it. Knowledge undoes composure. The bed shifts too, from bluebells to 芽吹く苔 (mebuku koke, sprouting moss) — a quieter, more tactile image, something felt rather than seen.
The bird changes from シジュウカラ (Japanese tit) to カタバミ (katabami, wood sorrel — not a bird but a plant, whose softness the snake is discovering through touch). And the final line shifts:
ただ海の深さを見たいだけ
Tada umi no fukasa wo mitai dake
Just want to see the depth of the ocean
From the clouds of Mount Wu to the depth of the ocean. Both images drawn from Yuan Zhen’s couplet, but the desire is sharpening — becoming more specific, more physical. Not the clouds above, but the water below. Not the beauty, but the depth.
あなたとの夢の後では / 他には — After Dreaming of You / Nothing Else
The bridge strips the song down to its emotional core:
あの大きな海を経れば
Ano ooki na umi wo hereba
If I cross that great oceanあの雲の白さを見れば
Ano kumo no shirosa wo mireba
If I see the whiteness of those cloudsあなたとの夢の後では
Anata to no yume no ato de wa
After a dream with you他には
Hoka ni wa
Nothing else
他には (hoka ni wa) — “as for anything else” — and then silence. The sentence is never completed. In Japanese, an unfinished sentence is not a stylistic affectation; it’s a grammatical and cultural convention called 言いさし (iisashi), where the speaker trails off, trusting the listener to complete the thought. What comes after 他には? Nothing matters. Nothing compares. Nothing exists. The incompleteness is the completeness. This is Yuan Zhen’s poem collapsed into two words.
The Final Chorus — From Clouds to You
The last chorus returns to the bluebells, but two words have changed:
ブルーベルのベッドを滑った 春になれば
Buruuberu no beddo wo subetta — haru ni nareba
Slid across a bed of bluebells — when spring comes
The first chorus said 春みたいだ (haru mitai da, “it’s like spring”). Now it says 春になれば (haru ni nareba, “when spring comes”). The simile has become a conditional. The snake is no longer marveling at spring in the present — it’s projecting into a future spring, a spring it will return to.
The bird changes too: ホオジロ (hoojiro, meadow bunting) replaces the Japanese tit. And the verb shifts from 歌う (utau, to sing) to 笑う (warau, to laugh). The world has grown warmer. Birds no longer just sing — they laugh.
And then the final line:
ただあなたを見たいだけ
Tada anata wo mitai dake
Just want to see you
The clouds of Mount Wu are gone. The depth of the ocean is gone. After an entire song of reaching toward mythic, literary, vast images — the narrator arrives at the simplest possible desire. Just want to see you. The word ただ (tada, “just/only”) strips away everything ornamental. This is Yuan Zhen’s logic inverted: having known the ocean and the clouds, the poet says nothing else compares. But in n-buna’s version, having known the ocean and the clouds, the snake realizes what it actually wanted was never the ocean or the clouds at all. It was you. The sublime was never out there. It was hibernation. It was the warmth of your sleeping breath.
いつか見たへびに似る — Resembling a Snake I Once Saw
The song closes by circling back to its opening verse, with two critical substitutions:
わたしの心はあなたに似ていた
Watashi no kokoro wa anata ni nite ita
My heart resembled youいつか見たへびに似る
Itsuka mita hebi ni niru
Resembling a snake I once saw
Throughout the song, n-buna has been threading a chain of resemblances: my scales resembled you → my heart resembled sparks → your scales resembled sunlight → my heart resembled you. The final line pulls the camera back entirely. The narrator sees itself from outside: resembling a snake I once saw. The title word — へび — appears for the first and only time, in the last line, as something the narrator resembles rather than something the narrator is.
n-buna has said that the song began when he saw a snake and found its scales beautiful. That real-world encounter echoes here: someone once saw a snake and thought it was beautiful, and now the narrator — awake, in love, burning to know the world — resembles that creature. The snake is both literal and literary. It is the serpent in Genesis who made humanity want knowledge. It is the creature that sleeps through winter inside the body of the beloved. It is the animal that cannot close its eyes.
The choice to write へび in hiragana rather than the kanji 蛇 is worth noting. Hiragana softens the word, makes it rounder, more childlike. The kanji 蛇 carries the visual weight of the radical 虫 (insect/creature) and looks, frankly, a bit menacing on the page. In hiragana, へび is just three gentle syllables — he-bi — with none of the visual sharpness. It’s a small snake. A personal snake. Something you might find in your garden, not in a myth.
The sound of the word matters too. The Japanese he is a breathy, open syllable — an exhale. The bi snaps shut with a voiced bilabial stop. Together, へび sounds like a short breath released and caught. Like waking up.
This is, I think, what makes the song stay with me long after the four minutes are up. It operates on three registers at once — a nature poem about a snake waking in spring, a love song about a person who makes everything else pale, and an allegory about the drive to pursue knowledge even when you’ve been born into a world that offers you none. Most songs would collapse under the weight of trying to be all three. “Hebi” doesn’t, because it never announces which layer it’s on. It simply is all of them, the way a snake is simultaneously beautiful and unsettling, the way spring is simultaneously gentle and violent.
📖 Read the full lyrics with English translation and romaji → /en/artists/yorushika/lyrics/hebi/
📝 Learn the Japanese in this song → Coming soon
Song Information
- Title: Snake (へび)
- Artist: Yorushika (ヨルシカ)
- Lyrics: n-buna
- Music: n-buna
- Arrangement: n-buna
- Release: 2025-01-17 (digital single)
- Album: Second Person (二人称, 2026-03-04)
- Tie-in: TV anime Orb: On the Movements of the Earth (チ。―地球の運動について―) — 2nd cour ending theme (episodes 16–25)
