A story with rival gangs in Japan amid the beauty of Hokkaido.
The Sun ascended slowly above the land of the rising Sun. The sky was ice crystal clear and the low Sun was so red that it looked as if it escaped from a Japanese flag. The last few hours were dead quiet in the frozen Tokachi wheat fields, in Hokkaido; a male barn owl just finished hunting rodents hiding among the wheat fields and the snow.
The owl caught two red squirrels, a crying rabbit and a small snow-white lizuma weasel; it caught its last prey despite having hidden perfectly in the thick snow and barely making a sound. It stood no chance against the barn owl's acute hearing though. It was a good night’s harvest for the male owl, his mate and their four fledglings.
Yet as the snowed wheat-fields started to be illuminated by sunlight another picture started to develop. The whiteness of the snow was broken at multiple spots by red splatters. It looked like red syrup on shaved ice, which the Japanese people are particularly fond of. Like that ice-sweet treat much of that red liquid was diffused into the snow.
However, on closer look, as the Sun shed more light into the fields, one could see that they were full of bodies. The bodies were of men wearing suits. There were eight clusters of them with each cluster consisting of nine to ten bodies. 76 men in total.
Some were face down; the frozen eyes of others were staring at the blue sky; some were on a kneeling position holding a katana, which lay either on their side or was in their gut; five men had even misplaced their heads. There were also many who appeared to have died from bullet wounds, and quite a few machine guns were scattered around the frozen wheat field.
Everyone was dead. Did anyone survive this carnage? Was there a last man standing -or crawling- who could at least explain what happened in that field? Or was our feathered predator the sole witness?
***
If you liked the intro and you'd like to read the rest of the story it is freely available here:
https://medium.com/illumination/the-field-of-ice-and-blood-5a678be3d617