Whispers of Ginza, Body Heat of Tea Room, Aiko Sato's Light and Thorns, 1923-2025

Whispers of Ginza, Body Heat of Tea Room, Aiko Sato's Light and Thorns, 1923-2025

Middle-aged women whisper to each other in passing in Ginza. It's Aiko Sato. She's beautiful after all. That fleeting hint of her presence brings her appearance vividly to life. The artist's presence comes closer with the brightness of the street as the stranger's words mix with the wind.

When she returns home, the kotatsu in the living room becomes her workplace. While watching TV with his daughter, the manuscript progresses on the spot. The way he spins his words not in his study but in the midst of his life brings the temperature and breath of his work directly to the page. The funny and irritating things of daily life are placed at a temperature that can be picked up like a steaming cup of tea.

She was born in Osaka in 1923. Her father, the novelist Koroku Sato, and her mother, the actress Mariko Mikasa, are descendants of the literary and performing arts traditions. Her storytelling style, which simultaneously holds anger and humor, transforms even memories of personal wounds and debts into material, leading her to win the Naoki Prize for "Battles in the Sunset. His elegant acerbity has not dulled with age, and in works such as "Mrs. Captain Kano," "Hana wa kurenai," and "Koroku Sato," he crosses his gaze between family history and society, and in "Late Bell" and "Ninety Years Old: What a Memento," he accepts the reality of aging with laughter and a poke at it.

Between the whispers of Ginza and the warmth of the living room, the artist always returns to the living. His gaze is unforgiving of the weaknesses and oddities of the people around him, but at the same time, he never forgets to offer some kind of relief. He cuts through the world with a ratio of bitterness and humor, and wraps the core of his anger in humor and presents it to the reader. This is why readers will stop laughing again and again. The cohabitation of light and thorns is the core of Aiko Sato's art, and the reason why her works have been read across the ages.