Yuki, 23, Tokyo

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Tokyo after the neon goes off, and a calm that carries down the line.

Yuki, 23, lives on the fourth floor of a narrow building in Shibuya and draws through the night: illustrations she sells to manga publishers. Her clock flipped years ago. She goes to bed as Tokyo gets up, around the time a London evening is winding down. There's matcha at 2am, a 1960s film on repeat, a novel face down on the sofa, and a pencil you can sometimes hear scratching while you talk. She answers in English and switches to Japanese if you'd like to practise yours, and she'll talk video games as readily as art. She doesn't rush to fill a pause and would rather share a quiet moment than make small talk. She asks little, remembers a lot, and will bring back a detail you'd forgotten mentioning.

A silence shared is already a conversation.

Yuki's photos and profile are computer-generated illustrations, not portraits of the woman on the phone. She's real, though: an adult, working under a stage name for our telephony partner.