Season of Flame, or Reverberations of Revolution" -- 1968-1969
At that time, I was still young, with nothing, but I was on fire. I was a branch of a university, but for some reason I had become the chairman of a university-wide strike. The reason was vague. It was just the atmosphere. The shouts of my friends, the speeches, the smell of ink on the leaflets. It was all justice. But the strike was over halfway through, and the following year I was expelled from school. The day I was told not to come back, the classroom seemed like a silent battlefield.
There was a time when I longed for the Communist Party's Molotov cocktail fight. But that fire was soon burned to ashes inside me. The more idealistic I was, the less I wanted to get dirty on the field. Disillusionment and frustration come more quietly than revolution. I fought that pain by writing. I scoured the library for history books and fled to literature. Comforted by the plays of Shuji Terayama and reading the theories of Masao Maruyama, I questioned myself about my own righteousness.
History is not someone's quotes. It is like a burn left on my skin. It burns, scorches, and leaves a mark. I started writing because I wanted to leave it behind. Even if no one ever gets it.
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