The Three Sages and "Me and the Girl in the Midst of the Meiji Restoration"

The girl's name was—"Fumi."
She was a girl born in a thatched-roof house in a small farming village.

Her brother was conscripted, her father gasped under heavy taxes, and her mother worked from before the sun rose.
Fumi knew nothing of academics.
She simply looked up at the sky and thought.

"Is living painful?"

As if responding to Fumi's thoughts, three shadows appeared from the vortex of time.

Elizabeth I:
"Oh, this girl... the curtain has fallen before she could even stand on the stage.
In that case, I shall be her audience."

Napoleon:
"Hmm. History praises the hero, but who gathers the tears of the people?
Come, use your sword to cut open that voice."

Frederick the Great:
"Ideals become systems, and systems become numbers.
But happiness is something that cannot be measured. Her story is the key to filling the gaps in history."

"Fumi is nowhere in history. But she must have been 'there' all the same."

Napoleon's question: "Who records the sacrifices of those who do not fight?"

"Fumi's brother went to the battlefield. 'For the sake of the nation.'
But what of Fumi, who protected the home? The girl who plowed the fields in her father's stead and grew up without ever knowing how to read or write?"

"I led tens of thousands of soldiers, but there is nothing heavier than the sacrifice of a single nameless village girl.
History is something that sometimes forces 'silence' upon us."

Elizabeth I's question: "What becomes of the dreams that were never told?"

"Fumi knew neither how to write nor how to read.
Yet she had poetry in her heart. Thinking of her mother's hands, thinking of her brother's back, she simply looked at the sky.
Even I, a queen, bow before such quiet 'sensibility'."

"To whom do dreams belong? The nation? Men?
...No, dreams are the only things that can be free when you close your eyes."

Frederick's question: "What did the nation give to those outside the system?"

"Civilization and enlightenment, compulsory education, conscription. The nation certainly 'modernized'.
But at that time, was what it gave to people like Fumi not a 'wall of systems'?"

"When the net of law is cast, there is a 'breath of the people' that becomes even harder to see.
Fumi chose to live outside the system to survive.
Did the nation truly have the magnanimity to allow that?"

I stood in the dirt floor of Fumi's house.

Her hands were chapped, her voice was never recorded, and her name remained on no stone monument.

Yet they say that on that day, she danced in the rain.
Alone, seen by no one.
Stepping on the sky reflected in a puddle—they say she laughed.

"I am here."

"I don't want to make someone like Fumi just one of the 'crowd.' Perhaps I could have been one of them myself."

Then, Elizabeth quietly removed her crown.

"That is how a story moves. Only those who can hear the 'poetry of the people' create history."

Napoleon thrust his sword into the ground.

"Your words might save Fumi's voice. A revolution without force begins with 'memory.'"

Friedrich held out a small book.

"A life that does not follow the system illuminates the essence of the era. Now, write. Write the 'story that no one else has ever seen.'"