WeTried Translations
Translator/Editor: Natty
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◈ How to Rewrite Ghost Stories ◈
Episode 41: Jangsalgot Submerged Site (3)
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‘Something about this scenery feels nostalgic.’
As I walked along the new road, the whole village came into view beyond the rice paddies lining either side.
Maybe because it was the countryside, it felt closer to the 1970s, when the New Village Movement was in full swing, than the 1980s. Recently laid green slate roofs gleamed brightly, and there were not many thatched houses left.
I might as well think of it as a folk village experience I could not buy at any price.
Despite the rain that had poured down earlier, the dirt was dry and powdery. From the remaining traditional hearths came the mingled smells of burning coal and rice straw.
“Damn it, those bastard government workers are back again.”
“You Seoul fellow, go home already!”
The moment I rounded a corner hidden by low mud walls, harsh shouts hit my ears. Several elderly people sitting on a raised porch with a Go board between them pointed long-stemmed pipes at me.
Their wary gazes were unmistakably hostile. Even an idiot could tell.
“...I’m not a government worker.”
It sounded awkward even to me. The elderly villagers still mostly wore plain white hanbok, while I was dressed in fitted 2020s suit slacks and a jumper with an event safety-management emblem printed across the back.
Anyone would take me for some suited bureaucrat from Seoul. Still, I could not just agree with them, so I put on a gentle city-slicker smile.
“Oh, sir, it’s true that I’m from Seoul, but I really am not a government worker.”
“Don’t lie to us. Whether they’re from the district office or city hall, every suited bastard who comes here is the same kind of thief!”
“They always come in groups, babbling only with the young folks and never listening to us old people!”
Even the old woman beside him grumbled angrily. Something felt strange. Of course, being forced to leave your hometown overnight, especially when that hometown would be submerged forever, was enough to make anyone furious.
But this felt slightly different.
‘Some sort of village folk belief?’
“This is no place for water to fill! We’re still here, wide awake and holding on, so what damned dam are you talking about!”
“These young people, honestly. They think the whole world opens up before them the moment they go to Seoul! Hmph!”
This would not do. At this rate, I would get beaten up just trying to say a word.
“Another slick bastard just like you came by earlier and acted exactly the same! Get out! Get out!”
Oh. That was probably the person I needed to find. If he looked like a slick bastard, there was a good chance it was Lee Gangrim.
“I’ll go! I’ll go! Um, where did that person go earlier?”
Only then did one elderly man, who had been silently smoking his pipe, point down one of the roads. I bowed several times, folding myself nearly in half, and hurried away.
The road led away from the new road and deeper into the village. Before long, a one-story building stood in an open space.
The South Korean flag and a New Village Movement flag fluttered from a tall flagpole. There was even a proper-looking platform off to one side, so it seemed to serve as a school, hall, or community center.
A boxy Pony was parked nearby, and shadows of people clustered around it.
“Ahaha! That’s right, brothers! You’re absolutely right!”
I heard a familiar voice, along with the loud laughter of several men.
“This fellow knows a thing or two!”
“Oh, I know, I know. We had no choice but to come down here because the higher-ups ordered it, but honestly, it’s been driving us completely crazy too.”
A tall delinquent-looking man blended naturally into a group of country youths who could probably catch foxes with all the cigarette smoke around them.
He had tied his black fieldwork jacket loosely around his waist, hiding his baton and radios beneath it. He looked like a public official, but not a suspicious one.
“Oh! Our youngest!”
Lee Gangrim sensed my approach, turned his head, and his eyes lit up.
“Where have you been? I was just about to come find you after three more cigarettes.”
Waving smoothly to the young men, Lee Gangrim strode over and caught my arm.
“Brothers, let’s finish talking later. I’ll go take care of our youngest.”
“If you need somewhere to sleep, come to my place!”
“And no food for us? I was going to bring you a Seoul cloud.”
“Ahem. Why don’t you eat over at Chilsong’s place?”
“We’ll gratefully accept our youngest’s share too.”
In the blink of an eye, Lee Gangrim had secured us both food and a place to sleep, then pulled me quickly away. Only once we reached a corner behind a wall with no one around did the pleasant smile fade from his delinquent-looking face.
“Where’s Seongun?”
“I haven’t seen him. He wasn’t on the boat earlier. What happened?”
“When I came to, I was standing in the middle of that road over there. Where’s the boat?”
“In a rice paddy. It was stuck too firmly to move unless the water rose.”
Lee Gangrim scratched his head hard.
“Are there any further instructions?”
“Hm? No, not really. This kind of Distortion was never one where following a manual would keep you alive.”
That was true enough.
“More importantly, how old are you, Jaehyeon?”
“Pardon?”
“I mean, if you’re younger than me, I was wondering if I could speak more casually.”
“Oh, I don’t mind. I’m more comfortable this way.”
“Thanks. You’re a smart kid.”
He had not exactly been speaking formally before. Lee Gangrim immediately dropped the honorifics, taking on a sly, easygoing tone. Somehow, he adapted so well and looked so calm that it put me at ease too.
“Have you met many people?”
“I met some of the elderly residents. They opposed the submergence. It seemed like they were worried about something beyond simply losing their homes.”
“Did they bury treasure here or something?”
Instead of a cigarette, Lee Gangrim popped a piece of candy into his mouth and tilted his head from side to side. Dates and incidents spilled from his lips in a murmured stream, like an encyclopedia.
“Not March 1980. July 1978... no. Jangsalgot. Jangsalgot. There’s no data before the fifties. Is the region called something different from the village?”
“...Do you memorize land registers?”
“Just what I need at the time. Tell me anything you remember about dam submergence.”
I was not that kind of monster. I opened my blog, my external memory drive, and began searching for #Jangsalgot.
“It is known that the dam began filling in 1983. The final clearance is recorded as May 1981.”
“Going by the timing, this is probably the last place to be cleared.”
“There are records saying the last village was bitterly divided into factions over protests against the submergence and the land-compensation plan.”
“What, they didn’t pay them?”
“No. It seemed to be related to local folk belief. The elderly people earlier kept saying that water must not fill Jangsalgot. There were no related folktales, though.”
Lee Gangrim crunched down on the candy, swallowed it, and brushed off his hands.
“If we couldn’t find it, then we can ask. Poke around the village a little. And find Choi Seongun and our Section Chief too.”
“I think we’ll get beaten up. You seemed to get along well with the younger residents earlier, but...”
“It’s fine, it’s fine. There’s always a way. Just trust me and follow.”
Lee Gangrim boldly led the way, and I followed. We made a full circuit of the village.
The elderly residents shut their gates the moment they saw us, or chased us off as if they were ready to throw salt. Someone actually threw a fire poker at us once.
The younger residents, meanwhile, mostly seemed to think that the flooding could not be undone anyway, so they should at least get their compensation. It seemed one of those educated types, someone who had done well in school and even gone to university, had been going around stirring them up.
“The money issue is easy, which means it probably isn’t about money.”
Lee Gangrim muttered that after we visited our tenth house. I had felt the same thing.
“The people seemed strangely anxious.”
“It’s not an unlucky day, and this isn’t a goblin’s haunt. What could they be worried about besides money?”
“A centipede or a toad?”
“Do they offer up one village maiden every year?”
“If you put a blade in your hand and draped a jangpo over yourself, you’d look like a new bride. You’re just passing through in the perfect scholar role, after all.”
“Then who should play the role of offering a maiden to the toad?”
“...There were two people we haven’t seen in the village.”
The people from the village’s largest blue-tile-roof house, and the people from the Jangsal House at the entrance to the mountain trail.
“Now that you mention it, everyone at the community hall clammed up and watched each other whenever those names came up.”
“I heard that the elder from the blue-tile-roof house was the village’s strongest opponent of the submergence. They said nothing about the Jangsal House, though.”
The way the villagers spoke of those two was closer to fear and terror than irritation or anger. They were afraid of inviting misfortune. Afraid of divine punishment.
Not of people, but of something rooted beneath them in this land.
Grrrrrowl...
My stomach loudly ruined the atmosphere.
“...”
“...Isn’t it dinner time? Let’s go get a meal at that house from earlier.”
Lee Gangrim went back to being glib. One way or another, the sunset had already stained the sky red.
“I don’t mind that, but... Can we really eat food carelessly in a ghost story or Distortion like this?”
An absolute cliché found across every world and period of history. If you ate food in the underworld or another realm, you became one of its inhabitants and could never return to the living world.
But Lee Gangrim merely shrugged as if it were no big deal.
“They say ghosts who die after eating look better too.”
“...”
“You won’t die, you won’t die. Don’t worry. My instincts are pretty good. You should eat before you sightsee, so let’s eat, find somewhere to sleep, then climb the mountain together.”
If people were ranked by how slippery they were, this man would surely be number one in the Ghost Story Records Corporation. With no other choice, I sighed and followed him.
❖ ❖ ❖
“Well, come in. Come in.”
The Chilsong House, where we ended up getting dinner, belonged to a young man named Yongsik, the chattiest person at the community hall earlier.
“I don’t know if what we have will suit you Seoul people.”
“It’s a feast. Right, youngest?”
“Yes. I’m not picky about side dishes.”
The table held mixed-grain rice with barley and millet, aged kimchi, several vegetables dressed in soybean paste, and a thin soybean-paste soup with tofu.
There was no meat and nothing particularly grand about the country meal, but my mouth watered the moment the table was set.
“Wow, whoever made these side dishes can really cook.”
As if he were in his own home, Lee Gangrim picked up a spoon and attacked his rice. Carried along by the mood, I soon found myself laughing and talking with Yongsik and him.
“By the way, where is the Jangsal House?”
At that moment, Yongsik’s spoon came to a clinking stop against his bowl. The kerosene lamp, lit in place of a fluorescent light, flickered a few times.
“If we stop by there, it seems like we’ll have seen everything...”
“You would do well not to talk about that house in this village.”
Yongsik raised his head. The kindness had vanished from his eyes. His gaze, now mixed with displeasure, fixed on me.
“You hear me, Seoul gentlemen?”
“...Understood. We’ll just finish our meal and leave safely tomorrow, so don’t be like that.”
Lee Gangrim tried to ease the mood somehow, but Yongsik set down his spoon completely. Then, as though he had said something he should not have, he began clearing the table in a rush, fidgeting uneasily.
In the end, unable to ask anything further, we were more or less pushed out of the Chilsong House mid-meal and shoved into a small detached building behind the community hall.
“...Whatever it is, it feels like the Jangsal House stole our meat dishes and cotton quilts.”
I quietly agreed. It clearly was not a place people lived in, and the floor was freezing cold. We were lucky to receive even a stove and bedding.
“The toilet is that thing right next door, so use it. And don’t go out of the yard. Especially don’t go into the mountains.”
“The mountains?”
“It’s a village rule. Did you hear what I said or not?”
“I heard you. Have a good night.”
Yongsik walked off briskly, looking back several times. Perhaps he did not trust us, because after he left, the creak of a bar sliding across the main gate and the clank of a lock echoed through the yard.
“...”
“...”
Neither of us spoke first as we looked at each other. Unfortunately, we were not looking at each other with the same thought in mind.
“Let’s behave ourselves tonight.”
“It’s night, so let’s go to the mountain.”
...Was this man insane?
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