WeTried Translations

Translator/Editor: ZERO_SUGAR

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Chapter 166: Epilogue: This Is No Ordinary First Meeting (2)

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They say that with one-pointed focus, nothing is impossible.

“Now, here is some tea. It’s called gyokuro[1]. You’ve come a long way, so you’ve earned the right to drink it. Let’s skip the roundabout approach, get straight to the conclusion, and wet your throat right away.”

“Gyokuro is not merely tea. It is a declaration that your social [standing] has risen by one level, and a baptism that coolly soaks your soul.”

“...I like that analysis.”

“Such a perspective is truly rare.”

In that bizarre dimension where identical-looking gentlemen pushed up differently designed spectacles and prattled on, Han San desperately maintained his smile.

“Wow! Thank you so much. Gyokuro tea. To think you would give me a chance to taste something so precious! And the flavor truly is as deep as you said. What was it called, the Mariana Trench? They say it’s the deepest trench in the world. This is just like that...”

He had even parried and counterattacked!

“Ah! Come to think of it, this Mariana Trench I mentioned. You could say it’s a great big hole in the sea. An ana[2], perhaps?”

The Tsuchi crowd stared at one another, mouths agape.

The next moment, they clutched their bellies and rolled around.

“Wahahaha! Mari-ana!”

“Mariana! Indeed, it isn’t merely a trench! It’s a giant pimple pore on the Earth!”

“Mariana... ana... Wahahahaha!”

After landing a group stun on them, Han San finally had a chance to catch his breath.

He did not need to endure for long. Ayame stepped in to sort things out, though she too had been rolling around at the Mariana joke.

“Now, now, uncles! San-kun and I are tired after such a long journey. Please leave us alone so the two of us can rest for a while.”

The Tsuchi crowd scratched the backs of their heads and left the room.

Han San smiled brightly.

“Thank you, Miss.”

Ayame gave him a lovely smile.

“So San-kun gets tired sometimes, too?”

“Come on, I’m only human. Of course there are times when I get tired and worn out.”

As Han San spoke and let his shoulders droop, Ayame laughed and gave them a few light pats.

“Hm. Though it isn’t important what San-kun feels, is it?”

The question sounded abrupt, but even without the blessing of memory, Han San understood at once.

Their conversation on the way to the Soyang Bridge completion ceremony.

“You said it matters to the people around me.”

“Hehe...”

The smile in Ayame’s eyes deepened. Han San smiled too and touched the hand patting his shoulder.

Their fingers fidgeted, then intertwined.

They stayed like that for a moment before clearing their throats and averting their eyes.

“Wow, though. This is a lovely house. This stuff laid across the floor... Um, is it called tatami[3]?”

“Yes, tatami... Ahem, I heard Uncle Tsuchikaku measured and cut these himself when this place was built.”

“I see. Uncle Tsuchikaku. It would have been nice if he could have come with us this time.”

Tsuchikaku was currently traveling around Inje and Chuncheon, immersed in his actual work. It was a busy season for surveyors, beginning with estimating flood damage.

Of course, even if he had come, Tsuchikaku would hardly have avoided being driven out along with the Tsuchi crowd.

Throughout their conversation, their fingers remained intertwined.

That was when footsteps came from the direction of the garden.

Han San and Ayame startled. Their fingers hurried to separate, paused once as they tangled, then slowly withdrew.

The instant their hands returned to their own waists as if timed by a clock, screeech, the door slid open.

An old man with a cane entered.

Ayame and Han San rose.

“Hello, Grandfather!”

“Hm.”

Hajama Fusataro was not a large man.

Nor was he lavishly dressed. The farther south one went on the peninsula, the hotter it grew, so his clothing was thin, and his exposed neck was narrow.

Yet when he nodded, the center of the room shifted to him.

This estate, and nearly half of Busan beyond it, was his domain. He had every right to say, “I’ll stake Busan on it,” when quarreling with someone outside.

“So you’ve come.”

“Yes, Grandfather.”

Ayame approached the old man. Smiling brightly, she reached out and took Fusataro’s cane.

Fusataro sighed.

“Your face is a little tanned.”

“Hehe. I’ve been traveling around a lot!”

“Yes. And flying about in airplanes, too.”

“I got to ride one thanks to you, Grandfather!”

Ayame declared this with her chest out.

Fusataro tried to say something to her, then merely sighed again.

Only then did he look at Han San.

“So you are.”

Han San had been bent at the waist since Fusataro entered.

He had seen in television dramas that this was the proper posture for someone from the Eastern Land of Courtesy when meeting a man practically his future father-in-law.

Ayame introduced him.

“Yes, Grandfather. This is San-kun! The San-kun I’ve told you about so many times.”

“It’s a pleasure to meet you! I’m Han San.”

Only after that introduction did Han San speak.

“I’ve heard so much about you from Miss Aya!”

Fusataro’s eyebrows became a straight line.

“Miss Aya?”

Something had begun.

“Hm. So you two are very close. Hm. I had heard you were close, but still. Hm. ‘Miss Aya,’ is it? Hmmm.”

Han San wondered whether he should answer, [Miss Aya told me to call her that], or [If you can think of a better form of address, I will use it].

He did not need to. Ayame smiled sweetly and tugged Han San’s sleeve.

“I told him to just call me Aya, but he insists on adding ‘Miss.’

Grandfather, please tell him to drop the ‘Miss’!”

Fusataro’s eyebrows twitched.

“Hm. Aya. Isn’t that a little premature? I haven’t even exchanged more than a few words with this young man yet...”

“Hmph... Grandfather, do you not trust my eye for people?”

“No, that isn’t it... I only mean that I need a little more time to get to know this young man...”

“Grandfather always treats me like a child. I’m twenty-six now...”

“That isn’t it...”

The great businessman of Busan could only fluster and repeat, “That isn’t it.”

This was the brutal balance of power between a grandfather and granddaughter.

‘Perhaps I should be glad that I’m meeting Grandfather instead of her parents...’

Of course, what reassured Han San even more was that Ayame’s grandfather was not one of the men so common in those days who treated their granddaughters with contempt.

‘Then again, if he were that sort of man, Miss Aya would not have this much freedom.’

As Han San thought this, Fusataro, having had all his strength for their battle of wills drained away, spoke in a gentler tone.

“Yes, Han-kun. I have heard much about you.

Even about this flood, I heard you warned us several times. Aya passed word on again and again, so I was able to make preparations in advance as well. Thanks to that, the places within my reach escaped major damage in this flood.

You have my thanks.”

Fusataro bowed his head.

Han San waved his hands.

“Not at all. I’m simply glad if I could be of even a little help to people.”

“Too modest.

And I hear you avenged that child Tsuchimaru. You helped Baron Kannoizuna and Detachment Commander Sawada.”

“Ah.”

Remembering the man who had lost his life to Ginsei, Han San took Tsuchimaru’s calling card from his pocket.

“Yes. We had some connection.”

Fusataro examined the card.

Then he reached out and grasped Han San’s hand along with it.

The old man bowed his head.

“Thank you.”

“No. Catching a beast that harms people is only natural.”

Han San smiled as he spoke. Then he shifted his gaze slightly toward Ayame.

“To commemorate our meeting, I brought a gift...”

Ayame, who had been watching them with satisfaction, clenched both fists.

“Yes, Grandfather! The gift San-kun brought is truly, truly amazing!”

“A gift.”

“It’s so amazing that all the way here, I kept thinking, Hmm, will this really be all right? But, um, it really is amazing!”

“Hoho, is that so?”

Fusataro laughed.

His granddaughter was hopping around in excitement, but Fusataro did not expect anything too surprising.

With his wealth and connections, after all, what had he not seen?

‘Wild ginseng, perhaps?’

A man like Fusataro naturally had his own private network of information. He was confident that he knew every detail about Han San, despite having merely tested him with a show of force.

The fact that his granddaughter’s boyfriend, though Fusataro stubbornly wished to add the qualifier [prospective], was skilled at digging up wild ginseng was not something that could be hidden.

‘Wild ginseng certainly is precious.’

One could say it suited his standing.

“Let me see it.”

Fusataro nodded as though pleased by the young man’s thoughtfulness. Screeech, the door slid open, revealing the courtyard.

A great crate had been placed there at some point. It was the same crate that had made its presence known throughout the voyage to Busan.

Fusataro’s expression turned blank.

“That was the gift?”

The crate was one and a half times the height of a person. It was large enough to hold the crown prince of a nation with room to spare.

He had glimpsed it on the way and heard that such a thing had been transported here.

But that was the gift?

‘Then it isn’t wild ginseng...’

If wild ginseng of that size existed, it would not be a curiosity but a monster, and Fusataro had no desire to become the protagonist of a ghost story just yet...

Han San had no idea what Fusataro was thinking. He simply gave instructions to the Han’s Myriad Commerce employees waiting in the courtyard.

“Please open it.”

“Okay, sajang!”

The employees tore off both side panels of the crate with a thud. Like a rectangular solid coming apart, what lay inside revealed itself.

Hajama Fusataro’s eyes widened.

“Ho!”

A bear appeared.

One forepaw was slightly raised. Its head was turned to the side, its jaws were open, and its even teeth caught the Busan sunlight with a heavy gleam.

It was not enormous. It fit neatly inside the crate, standing about one and a half times the size of a person.

Even so, a bear was still a bear. Its swept-back shoulders and the heavy muscles of its exposed chest gave off a terrifying presence.

Han San puffed out his chest.

“I caught it. My father taxidermied it.”

Not long before the Great Flood of the Gap-sul Year, it had made its den near the chestnut-tree grove during this year’s chestnut honey season.

But when he caught it, it turned out to be rather handsome.

His father had immediately begun the taxidermy work. Whenever Han San returned home amid the construction at Meokbawi Valley, he helped out as well.

‘Later, when the uncles from the Inwang Gang came, they all pitched in, too.’

As a result, the quality of the finished work had become extraordinary.

“It held up fine even after the monsoon season. We worked on every strand of fur afterward, too, so even without special care, it should last at least twenty years without getting moth-eaten.”

Since it would be kept in someone else’s house, he had paid close attention to durability as well.

“Remarkable. This would be difficult to find even in Gyeongseong.

If you put it up for auction, it would fetch no less than 5,000 won...”

Fusataro marveled.

Han San smiled faintly.

“Come on. Money comes and goes. And it isn’t as though money can buy everything.”

“Hoho, that is true. To understand that principle while still so young. Impressive.”

The more money one had, the clearer it became what money could not do.

This taxidermied bear was one such thing. It was one thing to say it was worth several thousand won at auction, but Fusataro had no intention of selling it, no matter how high anyone piled their money.

“Truly, I have received a precious gift.”

Fusataro patted Han San’s shoulder.

“I cannot possibly forgo giving something in return. Come. I have prepared some fine liquor.”

Footnotes:

[1] Gyokuro, literally “jade dew,” is a high-grade Japanese green tea shaded before harvest to produce a rich, sweet flavor.

[2] Ana (穴) is Japanese for “hole”; the joke splits “Mariana” into “Mari-ana,” as though it means “Mari’s hole.”

[3] Tatami are traditional Japanese floor mats made with a woven rush surface.

“Ana” is Japanese for “hole,” making “Mariana” sound like “Mari-ana” in the joke.

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