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◈ The Hunting Genius of the Japanese Colonial Era

Chapter 78

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Wild Ginseng (1)

September, 1933.

With the Middle Hamlet redevelopment plan wrapped up to great success and the hiring of an intern and a resident physician finished, Han San gave a long, sweeping stretch.

"Time to see to the work I've let pile up!"

The tasks scheduled for September alone lined up like a string of sausages.

'Hajama the Second said he'd hand over the final construction estimate. And Ma Jong-sung, that fellow at Cheonbo Pharmacy, told me to stop by quick once September came. Money still has to keep coming in, as money will...'

Han San dealt with them one at a time.

First he brought the surveyor Hajama out to Meokbawi Valley and asked him to run a second survey.

The Hajama surveyor, seen again, did not come alone. He'd brought along some woman who looked to be in her mid-twenties.

"Say hello, Han San. This here's my niece."

"Hello. My name is Hajama Ayame."

The quiet-seeming woman, in a flat cap and glasses, dipped her head in a bow like that.

A light went on in Han San's memory.

[ My niece is a journalist, but she has a gift for surveying too. Our clan does business off land surveyed that way. ]

Han San bowed back in turn.

"Hello. My name is Han San. Back when the surveyor Tsuchimaru-nim was here, I did hear that he had a niece working as a journalist, so I wonder if..."

At that, Hajama the Second and Ayame both froze.

"My elder brother..."

"Uncle..."

The two said nothing for a while.

When they looked at Han San again, not only Hajama the Second, with whom he'd already shared drinks several times, but Ayame's face as well had softened a good deal.

"Yes. I work as a journalist at the Busan Daily."

Ayame said it in a gentle, mild tone.

Han San blinked. She was kin to a great Busan magnate, sure, but the Busan Daily.

"You've come a long way. Isn't that nearly from one end of the peninsula to the other?"

Ayame tilted her head slightly.

"From end to end... this isn't Onseong, is it?"

"Ah, right you are. Being a Gangwon man, I do tend to reckon everything from here."

Han San scratched the back of his head. Apart from the memory that had sharpened after his return, it still didn't quite sink in that the land up north there was under the same administrative authority.

'When it's all sorted out someday, maybe I ought to take the family, Father, Mother, and Bada, on a trip to Baekdu Mountain or something. Father's bad leg is just a matter of me carrying him on my back.'

While he was thinking that, Ayame went on.

"I'd been out with a senior colleague covering the scale of the damage from this typhoon. We'd just finished the Chuncheon coverage when my senior came down with a bad cold. Rather than sit around there, since my uncle happened to be in Inje, it seemed a better use of time to come have a look around. And once I got here and heard my uncle talk, my interest was piqued as well, so I ended up coming all the way out here."

True to a journalist, Ayame laid out the how of her arrival by the six honest questions.

Han San, who'd been thinking how pleasant her soft, murmuring voice was, realized something in that instant.

'This lass talks rather like a normal person?'

Even so, he didn't let his guard down. There was no telling when a torabasami of the "and so this is no ordinary coverage" sort might be set out.

But making a mockery of that wariness, Ayame, having finished her introduction and greeting, still like a normal person,

"Would it be all right if I asked you for an interview?"

Han San's expression turned odd.

With her murmuring tone, her quiet air, and no use of the clan's peculiar, infuriating manner of speech, she seemed harmless, but this lady journalist was a rich man's daughter of the Empire.

'From what I hear, and a direct descendant of that titan of a businessman himself, at that...'

Kim Mal-ja, third daughter of the peninsula's foremost gangster house, couldn't hold a candle to her. A genuine rich man's daughter like this, asking him, a Joseon youth from a slash-and-burn settler village, to help her with her coverage?

"That... are you sure that's all right? The surveyor Tsuchikaku-nim being a fellow of his years, him running around with me is one thing, but..."

"I am not a fellow of my years."

"Oh come now, ajae. Is that what matters right now? Anyway, you're young, my lady, and..."

"Aren't you younger than me?"

Han San shut his mouth. He turned to the surveyor Hajama with a look that just asked for a bit of help.

But Hajama Tsuchikaku only watched with interest, arms folded.

"It's fine, Han San. You're a trustworthy fellow, aren't you? Good with a funny joke, too."

"...I'm grateful you trust me, at least."

And it's also true that I'm good with a funny joke, Han San added. Even if the Ministry of Truth from 1984[1] existed for real and could change two plus two into five, there were absolute truths in this world that could not be changed.

"San-gun."

Ayame said.

It took Han San a moment to realize the words were addressed to him.

"I'll see you next time."

Ayame said it with her head still tilted.

After that they talked over the construction a while more, settled the budget and the plan, and once Han San had sent off the strange clan's strange uncle-and-niece pair, he caught his breath a little.

'Somehow it feels like handling one item on the schedule spawned one more, but it's true the situation moved forward, so...'

At their sajang thinking it over with such a complicated face, the hired hands teased away in high spirits.

"Sajang, well now! You made a date with a bourgeois lady?"

"Getting married soon, are you?"

"Going to be a rich house's young master!"

"Come to think of it, they say in Japan the adopted-son-in-law system is all the rage. No comparison to this land, they say?"

Han San scrunched up his face.

"Ah, hell, they're all wound up. All wound up."

Of course they were. How rare was the chance to tease this young sajang.

'Have to be so damn capable, don't you.'

'Those blasted word games still come to mind.'

The hired hands, having landed a pretext, poured on the joking to their hearts' content, and after listening a good while Han San gave a wry smile and coaxed them.

"Now, ease up a bit. Even if I'm fine with it, you've got to think of the lass's reputation. Any way you slice it, you ajaes are older than her."

The hired hands snickered. But sure enough, they took it sharp as a knife and didn't cross the line any further.

"Let's go handle the next item on the schedule."

This time it was Cheonbo Pharmacy.

When he went down to Inje, just as Ayame had said, all over the place things were overturned by the typhoon damage and the recovery was crawling along.

'That Sawada bastard's head must be about to split too right now.'

Recalling the self-proclaimed lord of Inje, he stepped inside Cheonbo Pharmacy, and Ma Jong-sung led off with a gripe straight away.

"Ugh. Our building being in a good spot and sturdy is the only reason it survived."

"Glad to see you came through with no trouble."

"Ah, no trouble, my foot! The military police go around shaking folks down, saying to hand over contributions for the typhoon recovery! Our place got fleeced something fierce, so this month I think I can only buy up half your phellinus mushroom."

'Sawada! This viper bastard, no help whatsoever in every possible direction, honestly...'

Han San ground his teeth. Only inwardly, of course.

"That... that's how state affairs go, I suppose."

"Ugh. The country is in a mess, that's for sure. Cults running wild, and the reds too, they say Gyeongseong's in an uproar over some troika[2], or dokkeuroimakka, or whatever it is. Anyhow, those red bastards, you've got to hand it to them for their knack at making the world noisy. You keep clear of the likes of them entirely, you hear."

Han San, who was harboring a band of Hyeongpyeongsa fugitives and had every qualification to be classed by Special Higher Police[3] standards as a red titan, a grand king of the reds, quickly waved his hand.

"Aigo. Why would I get tangled up with folks like that? I'm making good money as it is."

"Of course you're not the sort who'd do that. It's just, you're young, so I worry, that's all. Young men who ought to be steady, tsk, honestly..."

"Anyway, you told me to come by in September, so here I am. What's the matter?"

When Han San steered the talk that kept wandering off back to the main business, Ma Jong-sung went, ah, that, and lowered his voice.

"Wild ginseng, can you really get it?"

Oh.

Here it comes.

[1] The Ministry of Truth is the propaganda ministry in George Orwell's dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), where it is tasked with rewriting history and controlling information — an anachronistic reference from Han San's future memory.

[2] "Troika" (a Russian word for a three-horse carriage, also used for a ruling triumvirate) circulated in 1930s Korea as a loanword tied to Soviet-linked communist factional politics, which Ma Jong-sung garbles in his secondhand telling.

[3] The Special Higher Police (tokkō) was the colonial political police branch tasked with surveilling and suppressing socialists, communists, and other perceived threats to imperial order.

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