Soul Lanterns by Shaw Kuzki

Author:Shaw Kuzki [Kuzki, Shaw]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House Children's Books
Published: 2021-03-16T00:00:00+00:00

Kozo was surprised when Nozomi started crying on the way home from the sanitarium. But when he heard Mr. Yoshioka’s story from Shun, he felt like crying, too.

He remembered the buzz that had gone through the room when he had started middle school and Mr. Yoshioka had walked into the classroom. Kozo was stunned, too. Mr. Yoshioka was unlike any teacher he’d had in elementary school.

The first surprise was his casual appearance. And the way his writing looked on the blackboard, more like pictures he had drawn than characters (putting it generously), was also a shock. All the teachers he’d had up to that point wrote exactly like the examples in their penmanship textbooks.

When they voted on their class representatives, Mr. Yoshioka had mostly stared out the window, occasionally yawning. Every time one of the more serious girls asked him something, he replied, “You guys can decide.”

Kozo thought maybe he was a bit of a slacker for a teacher until one day the boys who had gone to Nishimachi Elementary and the boys who had gone to Higashimachi got in a fight. Mr. Yoshioka said, “If you have to fight, can you at least do it one-on-one? I’ll be the referee,” and instead of breaking up the fight, he pulled a chair over and sat in front of them. His expression was the same placid one he had when he gazed out the window. Kozo thought it looked like he might yawn at any moment.

Once the bite had gone out of the boys, he really did yawn and then went away.

Shun Nakamura seemed to have been observing their teacher, same as Kozo. “He’s always alert when he’s painting,” the boy said. Kozo asked and found out that Shun was in the art club, so he saw Mr. Yoshioka after school, too.

“And he’s always so lax.”

“Yeah, he lets anything go.”

“I don’t really get it, but…”

By the end of the first month, Kozo had learned that Mr. Yoshioka didn’t like putting restraints on students or giving orders. He probably also hated the idea of just setting an example to be copied.

“He’s different from the others because he’s an art teacher. He doesn’t seem worried about grades or class ranks,” one boy had said, as if he knew everything. “Will he be able to write a proper letter of recommendation when we need one?”

That didn’t feel right to Kozo. And he’d heard a story from Shun about a third-year girl who used to have Mr. Yoshioka. When the girl had been fighting with her parents about the high school she wanted to go to, Mr. Yoshioka rode his bicycle over to their house and bowed repeatedly, saying, “Please, please understand.” That shut the parents up.

“All he did was beg. He didn’t use any logic or anything. Total persuasive power: zero.”

“But the parents gave in.”

Kozo thought it was a very Mr. Yoshioka story—although he wasn’t sure himself what made it “very.”

When Mr. Yoshioka was coming toward him, Kozo felt like it was a faint wind walking over.

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