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Sato-san is the embodiment of hope after the tragedy of conflict; by David Lanvert.
Sato-san walks down the center of the highway, a fishing pole over one shoulder, head tilted again and eyes scanning overhead, searching for the supply of a low thrum, felt however not but heard, earlier than the air-raid siren sends us scurrying for security. We watch him from both facet of the highway, squatting behind charred wooden or mendacity below the lip of a water-filled crater, our eager eyes and youthful fingers searching for the buried treasure of a spare button, an intact shirt, a forgotten locket. Morning mist as ephemeral as hope rises within the distance as we see him, shoulders again and chest out, an enormous, strutting in the direction of the water. He is singing now, low and vague. The roosters within the highway mimic his stroll. The siren wails, Sato-san sings louder.
Hate is upon us, raining down, a destruction heaven-sent to avenge the actions of others who appear to be us. We rouse ourselves and bend on the waist, eyes down, shuffling in the direction of the shelter. The whistling begins, after which the sound of a thousand freight trains as Sato-san shouts earlier than the tumult, “Fish for dinner tonight, everybody!”
We knew each other as soon as, in one other life, from faculty or the neighborhood, one a yr older, one a yr youthful, one with a brother, the opposite who lived together with his aunt.
We bear in mind the second, every week in the past or perhaps a month. Did you see him? Have been you the primary? Sato-san, shocked from the explosions, ears ringing, his coat and hair smoldering, plunged his palms deep into the burning remnants of paper homes, reaching previous ineffective toys, nightclothes, and damaged furnishings, looking because the earth shook and our ancestors wept. He plucked every of us up in flip, his trophies, filthy, torn, the blood and mud turning our garments brick-red. However alive and reborn. Holding us upright, he insisted we stand, clinging to his belt or leg – saplings within the shadow of an oak.
We reside below corrugated iron lean-tos right here and there, held up by Sato-san’s indignation, and sit in twos and threes, shoulder-to-shoulder, coaxing tiny embers into modest, shy flames. We all know one another on sight, a dozen of us, and we cling to 1 one other and orbit him. A few of our kinfolk and oldsters stay amongst us, hollowed-out puppets hanging by tangled threads, swaying between this life and the following, their hopeful eyes shining once we smile. Sato-san sits below his shelter, his fish rigorously tended over a lump of charcoal. We watch from grey, smoky shadows. The fish by no means burns. Everybody has a style. “Eat, eat. You’re the descendants of royalty. You’re the treasured treasure of hundreds of years of toil. Eat, and be pleased,” he says. Studying our minds, listening to our whispers, he shouts, “I’m not a god. However I will do for now.”
Sato-san’s daughter, Sachiko, was the quickest runner at school. At daybreak’s first gentle, with our home windows open to the road, we might see the flash of her working, 50 meters in every route. Her father on the far finish, a stopwatch in his hand, shouted encouragement or an admonishment. Later in school, she hid the delight in her eyes with a sly look from below straight black bangs.
At night time, as he sleeps, we hear him whispering to his lifeless daughter, “Sooner, quicker.” We do not inform him that we take heed to her working every morning as we awake huddled collectively, the odor of flowers and smoked chestnuts lingering in our goals.
“Come, have tea, my lords and women, come have tea,” he shouts. We collect and snigger as he palms the youngsters toys. Empty spools of thread, joined by a wire, at the moment are a truck. A wood field is now a dollhouse, the damaged stopwatch hooked up inside as a wall clock. Sato-san smiles. We snigger till we cry, tears streaking by way of the mud on our cheeks.
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