WeTried Translations

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◈ The Hunting Genius of the Japanese Colonial Era

Chapter 45

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This Land's Owner (1)

The late dinner had been deeply satisfying.

'Pork and kimchi stew really are a heavenly match.'

They said wild boar was coarser than farm pork, but in this era, meat was a great thing all on its own.

On top of that, it had been butchered by a father who hunted on Baekdu Mountain and cooked by that hunter's wife, his mother, so the taste was nothing short of heavenly.

"That hit the spot..."

After helping with the dishes and the cleanup, all in the name of digestion, Han San sat down on the daecheong floor and patted his belly.

He drew in the fresh night air several times and let it out again.

It was peaceful.

Except.

'Falling back asleep is going to be hard...'

He'd woken up far too late.

'The reward... better to swing by the substation and collect it before Toono leaves. That means getting into town by tomorrow... I'd be better off just staying awake and setting out at dawn.'

If that was the plan, he'd do well to move around a little and loosen up.

Han San got to his feet.

"Mother, I'm going to step out for some air."

"At this hour? It's dark, so mind yourself."

Leaving her farewell behind, Han San stepped out the brushwood gate.

Spring had fully arrived now. The night air was no longer cold, just pleasantly cool.

Walking beneath the thick scatter of stars overhead, Han San groped at the inside of his shirt.

Stiff slips of paper met his fingertips.

'The calling cards.'

He had four calling cards now in all.

First, Hajama Tsuchimaru's card.

'So the gisu killed by Ginsei was...'

The information he'd raked together while running the tavern, the unusual reward, the way Sawada had reacted when he produced the card—every bit of it pointed to the surveyor Hajama Tsuchimaru.

He'd paid out his money freely and left a decent impression in more ways than one, so a bitter taste rose in Han San's mouth.

'Still, I avenged you. Go and rest easy.'

For now, he decided to hold on to the card.

'There's that big shot in Busan too. They said a good many of the Hajama clan are surveyors.'

One of them might end up coming this way again. There was no telling how things might connect.

Next, the card for Kim Mal-ja of the South Jade Pavilion.

'I'm going into town tomorrow anyway, so maybe I'll stop by.'

This was a stock on the rise.

That the connections held by the three sisters of the night would only grow thicker by the day was a fixed certainty of the future. Keep the relationship on good terms, and he could link himself to the upper crust or the back-alley world.

'At the very least, getting introduced to the second sister, Kim Seong-ja, in Chuncheon, and the eldest sister, Kim Wol-ja, in Gyeongseong would be no problem.'

And it would help on other fronts too.

'Things like wildcat hide or marten pelts, for instance.'

Such rare materials were better sold to a separately sought-out buyer than handed over in a lump to a place like Daeseong Leather, which he'd cracked open last time.

'Wild ginseng and the like too... no, would that have to wait until I'd pushed as far as Chuncheon?'

Well, he'd see.

The remaining two cards belonged, of course, to Sawada Kazuo and Kannoizuna Toono.

'A ticket guaranteeing 300 won.'

The moment he went to the substation, he'd be handed a stiff wad of bills.

Add to that the roughly 200 won in cash he'd earned from the tavern, and...

'500 won in all.'

For a slash-and-burn family in 1933, it was a sum so vast it overstepped every bound of their station.

Money that, if word got out, would draw not just envy but murderous intent.

'With this money...'

A range of options spread out in Han San's mind.

Foremost among them was, of course—

'Next summer, the Great Flood of the Gapsul Year.'

A tragedy that would raise its curtain in about fourteen months.

Rain hammering down from the sky like prison bars, muddy water flooding out as one side of Meokbawi Valley collapsed, the overwhelming and terrible force of nature that had swept away even his parents' bodies, and then...

[ "The Great Lords come!" ]

Han San clenched his fist tight.

'Do I really need to wait for that wave?'

What could you do with 500 won in 1933?

Sure, it was woefully short of landing a good house in Gyeongseong. In Chuncheon too, it would be hard.

But in Inje town?

'More than enough, with plenty to spare.'

It was enough to get a house with a yard in a good spot, land to farm, and an ox, with money left over.

'The trouble is the family register...'

The Han family were slash-and-burn settlers. Ask whether they had a register, and, well, you'd have to say the Government-General bastards had their reasons for going out of their way to launch the slash-and-burn settler clearance project.

'But that can be solved with money and connections.'

Funds of 500 won, plus a year and two months of leeway. With this much...

'Secure registers for the whole family, get a house up on higher ground in Inje town, and then...'

The Great Flood of the Gapsul Year.

Couldn't he break free completely from that nightmare that had flickered before his eyes from the very moment of his return?

'Of course, whether my parents would even want to live in town...'

His father's situation in particular was complicated.

It struck Han San all at once that his father, fearing his record of Independence Army activity—what his father called "Righteous Army activity"—might be traced, could be reluctant to move into town.

But hadn't it been close to fifteen years since he'd buried himself away in Sebeom Valley? His appearance, too, had changed from that brawny, broad-built strongman into the lean figure he was now.

After a register wash, who could declare with certainty that this man was that man?

'It's fine.'

He could persuade them.

Both his father and mother were practical people. They wouldn't cling to stubbornness like "I don't want to leave my hometown" or "a mountain man must live in the mountains," and even if they held something of the sort inside, they'd come around to his persuasion.

'And I've got that much power of persuasion now.'

Hadn't he proved it over this past month? That he was no longer a windblown layabout, but the next pillar of the Han household.

'So then... let me bring it up once I'm back from town tomorrow.'

In any case, the night was deep now.

It was an hour when no one would be surprised to find everyone already asleep when he got back, and he could hardly wake them to say, "Let's go live in town!"

'You have to take everything one step at a time.'

It was as he raised his head with that thought.

'Hm?'

Han San realized, all at once, where he was standing.

Before the Seonangdang shrine tree.

The very spot where, on the day of his return, the soul of a seventy-four-year-old man had opened its eyes inside the body of an eighteen-year-old youth.

He stood before that old tree, blue cloths trailing down from each of its three twisted branches.

'Walking while lost in thought, I ended up here before I knew it...'

Han San looked up at the tree.

The tree he'd seen just before closing his eyes in the final moment of his past life.

The tree he'd opened his eyes upon and gazed at in the first moment of this one.

The end and the beginning—but a tree that, from here on, would have no more bearing on him. He gazed at it, just so.

'Stay well. I'll be taking my family and leaving.'

He thought that, and just as he was about to turn away, as if bidding farewell—

Tock.

A small sound.

But in the stillness of this night, it rang out louder than thunder, spreading all at once.

Han San's gaze halted, dropping to the source of the sound.

A piece of blue cloth lay on the ground.

"...?"

It was a night without a breath of wind. No one had laid a hand on it.

And yet that cloth, that bluish cloth, was cut clean through, as though by sharp scissors.

'...'

A bell shaped after an infant's face sat beside it. The sacred rope that had bound it was severed as well.

'This is...'

The moment Han San's gaze shifted further to the side—

The shadow cast by the Seonangdang shrine tree, the spot where the deepest darkness pooled, where even the moonlight was devoured and snuffed out.

There, it was there.

A crude palanquin covered in striped hide. Planted in front of it stood a giant of a man with a bald head and thick lips.

The face he'd seen in his dream on the first day of his return.

'Park Il.'

The faithful servant of the Upper Hamlet shaman, Old Woman Wangdae!

Zzzrk.

With a sound like a dull blade slicing through hide, the curtain of the palanquin was drawn aside.

A smell like nurungji crushed into powder gusted out, mingling with the rank stench peculiar to wild beasts.

"How presumptuous."

Wrapped in that smell like a veil, a black form crawled out of the palanquin.

"You've touched a thing of the mountain."

The old woman, whose grand and towering frame made even Park Il, that adamantine guardian-king[5] of a man, look faded by comparison, revealed herself before Han San.

"Gunner."

In a voice rough as iron ground against a millstone, the old woman spoke.

In a fold of Mount Seorak that rose up out of Inje, there was a village called Sebeom Valley.

There were several stories behind how this village came by such a name. The most obvious reason was that the place was split into three tiers: Upper Hamlet, Middle Hamlet, and Lower Hamlet.

Each hamlet differed thoroughly, from the time of its founding to the origins of the people who made it up.

Lower Hamlet's waters ran shallow. Go Tae-chon, Mrs. Go, Pi Sun-dae, and so on—people who'd flowed in around the mid-1920s, when the new road construction site opened. Vulgar, fixated on money and material things, and therefore the easiest sort to read.

Middle Hamlet was older than that. Beginning with the Japan-Korea annexation of 1910[1] and centered around the time of the March 1st Movement in 1919, people who could no longer remain where they had been came drifting in. The Han family, too, were among those many burdened with stories.

And no one knew exactly when Upper Hamlet had come into being.

Some spoke of the Eulsa Treaty. Others, the founding of the Korean Empire[2]. Others, the Donghak Peasant Movement[3]. Others, the Imo Military Mutiny[4]. Others still spoke of something else entirely.

The further you traced back the lineages of those who lived there, the more their origins scattered apart. The more clearly you tried to trace the trajectories of their lives, the hazier their outlines became.

Old Woman Wangdae.

The great shaman who ruled over that Upper Hamlet.

"What is it you mean?"

Han San looked up at the giant witch who, in the dream he'd had on his first night after returning, had turned him into a chicken.

"Touched a thing of the mountain, you say? What on earth..."

"The Dog Star was no star meant to set so early."

The shaman looked down at Han San with eyes nearly all black, almost no white to them.

"Isn't that so?"

"What," Han San said, meeting that gaze. "I don't know what strange thing you're talking about."

"Strange?"

Old Woman Wangdae's head tilted to one side.

"What is strange is the shape of you. The shell is a fresh-hatched chick, yet inside, an old serpent lies coiled."

A wave of gooseflesh swept over Han San in that instant.

Narrowing her eyes, Old Woman Wangdae peered into him.

"Strange. Truly strange. ...What is this? ...A god's descent? Has one of the eight million of the archipelago crossed over? ...Or a blessing? Come down from the lofty Baekdu? ...The spirit of an ancestor, is it?"

Han San just barely managed not to let his teeth click together.

Old Woman Wangdae shook her head.

"Whichever it is, it is unholy."

She went on.

"You have thrown the stars into disorder with that unholiness. The three Mountain Lord Mamas, the Kings, will not suffer you."

The old shaman's voice pressed down on Han San as though it carried some weight. He even fell into the illusion that the shadow of the Seonangdang shrine tree was coiling around his ankles like a living beast.

An ordinary person would have gone weak in the knees and sat down right there and then.

But.

Clang!

A spine-chilling sound of iron split the shaman's spell-like voice in two.

The leaf spring dagger—

The knife an outsider hunter had brought in from beyond Sebeom Valley. That brutish blade, which had dug through the flesh of the "Dog Star" and shattered its bones, had torn through the damp air.

Old Woman Wangdae's eyebrow twitched.

Han San swept aside the darkness blocking his path with the point of the blade, whisking it away as if cutting through sacred ropes.

"...Will not suffer me, you say."

Han San did not retreat. Gripping that lump of iron, he stepped forward.

Thud.

A firm footfall rang out.

"This is a tough one..."

It wasn't all bluff.

The gooseflesh was real, and the down on the back of his neck still stood on end, but at the same time he'd realized something.

'She didn't catch it.'

His greatest secret—the regression—this old shaman had not seen through!

She'd only fumblingly picked up on a sense of wrongness, on the bare fact that he wasn't an ordinary eighteen-year-old boy.

That was all.

And if that was all, if the [caliber] of these so-called Mountain Lords or Kings the shaman served was only that much—

"So how exactly does this King of yours intend not to suffer me, granny shaman?"

In a voice like a blade, Han San fired back.

[1] The Japan–Korea Annexation Treaty of August 1910 formally placed Korea under direct Japanese colonial rule, ending the Korean Empire and beginning the thirty-five-year occupation.

[2] The Korean Empire (대한제국) was the sovereign Korean state proclaimed by Emperor Gojong in 1897, succeeding the Joseon dynasty and lasting until the 1910 annexation.

[3] The Donghak Peasant Movement (동학농민운동) was an 1894 armed uprising of peasants against government corruption and foreign influence, helping trigger the First Sino-Japanese War.

[4] The Imo Military Mutiny (임오군란) was an 1882 revolt by Joseon soldiers over unpaid wages and resentment of Japanese-style military reforms, which drew both Qing and Japanese intervention.

[5] An "adamantine guardian-king" (금강역사) is a muscular Vajra warrior, the fierce gate-guardian statue that flanks the entrance of Korean Buddhist temples to ward off evil.

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