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◈ The Hunting Genius of the Japanese Colonial Era

Chapter 79

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Wild Ginseng (2)

Since he'd first opened trade with Cheonbo Pharmacy back in April, five months had already slipped by. How many snakes had Han San carried in over that stretch, how many nyang of phellinus mushroom?

'The running total must have cleared a few hundred won by now.'

For all his usual snapping and snipping, Ma Jong-sung hadn't forgotten that fact either. Han San was one of the most important suppliers he had.

"Trading with you, my own standing in this business has come up a bit, see? My footing in the Kaesong Merchants' Fellowship's[1] risen some too. And along the way I got acquainted with a few men of standing over in Chuncheon..."

And so began Ma Jong-sung's tale, which ran like this.

In Chuncheon there was a certain distinguished family. This family was renowned as ten-thousand-seom landlords, and

Thirty minutes later, Han San summed the whole thing up.

"So to boil it down, the son of that house is sick, and they mean to get their hands on wild ginseng. For 500 won."

"No. Cut it down and that's what it comes to, but haven't you cut it down a bit too far?"

Throat parched from all that talking, Ma Jong-sung gulped down water, while Han San only scratched the back of his head. Hearing out the long-winded story of a man he'd never laid eyes on was, well, awkward.

Still, there were a few points that piqued his interest.

"That commission fee of 500 won, you're saying it's money raised by a collection?"

"That's right. The young fellow's living off his older sister's place in Gyeongseong these days. And the sister works at a factory too... you might call their circumstances less than comfortable, but really they're just poor."

"Hang on, you said they were a ten-thousand-seom house."

"That young man's older brother is a real good-for-nothing! Gambled the whole household away, root and branch. Even a ten-thousand-seom fortune's no use if you sow one bad seed. In the blink of an eye, an eye."

And so gambling was as fearsome a thing as cults and communism, and Han San must never lay a hand on it, Ma Jong-sung urged again and again. Han San, who was on hyung-and-younger-brother terms with Pi Sun-dae, grand patriarch of the Mount Seorak gamblers, steered him back onto the original track.

"Anyway, with the house fallen so far, how could they put up a fat sum like 500 won? They couldn't, not ordinarily.

But this young fellow, seems there's something to him. His old schoolmates, and the students he taught when he came back to his hometown last year and ran a night school for a spell, and the hired hands who'd worked the house before it went under...

His sister sold the place in Sajik-dong to chip in some too. And that's how they scraped together 500 won."

This was the part that especially piqued Han San's interest.

"Schoolmates and students, fine, but the hired hands ran a collection?"

"That's right. The house had been a distinguished line for generations, and seems they were rather generous with their hired hands. The slave papers all vanished, of course, what with the Gabo Reform[2] and the annexation and all, but anyway the debts of kindness ran deep.

Take the old man who told me this very story, he was one of that house's hired hands. Couldn't care less about the good-for-nothing eldest young master, but he said it was a pity the younger young master had become a lunger at such a tender age, and put in a full 50 won of the collection all on his own, would you believe it."

Han San stroked his chin. Should he call it an age where romance still lived?

[Well now, hyung. Rather than that, isn't it more correct to see the invisible things, human feeling, loyalty, trust and the like, as resources that can in fact be measured, just that you can't see them?

If an old debt of the heart can be repaid with money, then that's the cheapest method of repayment there is.]

The words Teacher Han Bada had once let fall, when they met at some fellow's funeral in his past life, brushed through his mind.

Well, either way, the money had been raised, and that was that.

"What does he do, this young man? The patient."

"A scribbler, a scribbler. Literary youth, they call it? A young fellow who writes. Writes fiction."

Fiction, huh.

"What sort of fiction did he write? Anything come out?"

"A short piece called [Mountain Wanderer][3], he put it out a while back, they say. You ever heard of it?"

Han San tilted his head. His memory had sharpened through the regression, but that didn't mean he came to know fields he had no knowledge of.

Ma Jong-sung chuckled too.

"Then again, it was a short story put out in some little magazine. First Line, or whatever it was... A nobody, a nobody. Should I call him a hopeful? An aspiring novelist."

"What did you say the name was?"

"Kim Yu-jeong, apparently."

"Kim Yu-jeong[4]..."

It was then that a light flicked on in Han San's head, tilted as it was.

'Wait, could he be the writer that drama was based on?'

Han San recalled a short drama called Bombom[5] that had aired on KBS 1. It stuck in his memory because it was the same year they'd broadcast Gaekju, that runaway masterpiece of a drama he'd followed live on KBS 2.

'No, hold on. Could just be somebody with the same name, couldn't it?'

Honestly, he wasn't sure. If it had been a wuxia writer he'd have remembered...

Shaking off the stray thoughts, Han San decided to say only what needed saying.

"But I'm not sure wild ginseng even helps with lung disease. Are those folks fine with that part?"

Lung disease meant tuberculosis. Han San didn't know exactly when the cure for tuberculosis would be developed, but he knew well enough that in these times consumption was an incurable illness.

Miracles like gaining a full sixty-year cycle of inner force from one bite of ten-thousand-year king ginseng, or curing a nine-yin severed meridian with one bite of Taecheon Yang ginseng, did not happen in reality.

'This isn't some wuxia serial.'

Ma Jong-sung, who dealt in medicinal goods, knew perfectly well too that wild ginseng was no cure-all. He let out a sigh with a click of his tongue.

"They must be desperate too, those folks."

Han San scratched hard at the back of his head.

"Tsk. It isn't just some old rich geezer rolling in money who needs the wild ginseng, is it? Taking money that desperate people scraped together a jeon and two jeon at a time, that sits a bit, you know."

"You want to take a little less money, then?"

"No, that's out of the question."

Ma Jong-sung chuckled. So did Han San.

Ma Jong-sung spread both hands.

"Then just do it. Once money and goods are on the line, whether you do it or not, it's a thing that's bound to get done by somebody else anyway.

Besides, you at least, you'd bring back the genuine article."

Han San threw out his chest. The wild ginseng intel for these parts from his past life flashed through his head.

"Well, that goes without saying. I've got to earn what I'm paid."

"Right. So you do it. You can tell just from them raising a whole 500 won, but what naive people they must be, eh?

Blessed are they that believe, don't they say. Maybe a miracle really will happen, who knows."

"Huh? Sajang-nim, you've turned Christian?"

"Ah, who are you calling a Catholic-monger now! It's just, doing business, you pick a thing up here and there now and then. Don't get the wrong idea."

"Now what's there to be, that you're getting all embarrassed about it by yourself. Sajang-nim, turns out you're a romantic after all.

But if you're that much of a romantic, why'd you do me like that? Trying to beat my badger oil down to one and a half won. You're a mean one."

"Ah! You going to keep dredging up those old stories? Let's look to our future a bit! A beautiful future!"

Moving on to that beautiful-future talk, Han San took the commission.

"Since it's a job you brought me, Sajang-nim, I'll leave you a fee you won't feel shorted on. But you do your part too. Every single person who sees the wild ginseng, plaster them with a fine loud advertisement of who dug it up."

"Ah! You won't cut me even one fee for free, will you, kid! Just who was born a Kaesong merchant, me or you?"

Grumbling all the while, Ma Jong-sung took on the role of advertising tower all the same.

'As for whether 500 won is a fitting price for the wild ginseng...'

That was no problem at all for Han San.

In his past life, Han San had dug up a great many wild ginseng roots. For 500 won you picked a 500-won root, for 1,000 won a 1,000-won root, and that was that.

'As it happens, that ginseng was just about that size.'

The memory in Han San's past life lit up.

[Heaven plays no favorites; it only supports the virtuous.[6] Heaven is fair and shows no partiality, and only the man of virtue is rewarded, so the saying goes.]

Past life, Chuseok, an affair of the very next month.

That Chuseok, on the wooden floor of Yun Cheom-ji's tile-roofed house in Upper Hamlet stood a small tray-table. A silk wrapping cloth was spread over it, and on the cloth a single root of wild ginseng, two hand-spans long, lay quietly.

Upper Hamlet, which those from Middle Hamlet on down couldn't so much as freely enter in the ordinary way, flung its doors open that Chuseok, and onlookers all but climbed over the wall to crowd in.

[Heavens, would you look at that root crown...]

[The Cheom-ji elder's virtue's reached the very heavens, literally, reached the heavens.]

Yun Cheom-ji smiled contentedly then, fanned by his grandson Cheol-min. And whenever someone asked who found it and where, he'd click his tongue and say, [Now, one mustn't leak the secrets of heaven], and open his mouth.

[Chuseok drawing near, I was climbing up to trim the grass where my late wife lies. The Water Tiger had torn up the slope I always take something fierce, and I went blind with worry over how in the world to get around it.

But lo and behold. Before that collapsed heap of earth, beside a toppled ash tree, five leaves spread wide open beckoned me softly, just like the hand of the one who'd gone before me.

How could this be a thing this humble man found? It was heaven that laid it there, borrowing that woman's hand.]

In short, he'd pulled off an "Im Baechil's mother move."

Just where his wife's grave was, however that grass-trimming path went, whereabouts the blasted collapsed slope was, the exact spot the toppled ash tree stood...

Before a single day was out, the whole of Sebeom Valley knew every last detail!

'I thought I'd die of a bellyache back then.'

That wild ginseng sold for exactly 500 won, was it? Yun Cheom-ji laid new roof tiles and raised his walls with the money.

'And then, seated inside those walls, he watched the flood the following year with detachment and muttered, [The way of heaven is to send calamity down upon the man without virtue].'

Han San chuckled.

'Whatever heaven's paperwork was like last life, this life I'll lend heaven a bit of a hand with the job.'

The term "butterfly effect" seemed, from a meteorological standpoint, not so accurate. Typhoon 3383 had arrived just the same despite Han San's regression.

But from a sociological standpoint it would surely hold true.

Han San stepped out of Cheonbo Pharmacy and went back to his party.

"Baechil-hyung, when do they usually start the grass-trimming up in Upper Hamlet?"

Im Baechil, Han's Myriad Commerce intern accompanying this Inje run, had been tending the ox and jerked his head up. Having taken on all the dirty work of Upper Hamlet, he reeled off the dates by reflex.

"Y-you mean the grass-trimming before Chuseok? The quick households'll start about a fortnight from now..."

"Right. Just enough time to slip up there and back."

"Sl-slip up and back, up and back where?"

"Up the mountain a bit."

Han San grinned and turned to Chuk Hong-cheol.

"So I'll leave the Sokcho prep to you all to handle. I'm off up the mountain for a spell."

The Chuk Brothers didn't pepper him with this or that, whether he'd be all right alone, what he was going for. They were already used to this young sajang of theirs coming out with things out of nowhere.

They asked only what needed asking.

"Late?"

"Probably? So eat without waiting on me. And look after Baechil-hyung well."

"Ah, of course. Not because he's the sajang's friend, mind, a new hand ought to be looked after.

Baechil, was it? Newcomer, have you by any chance ever heard that the whole of history until now is the history of class struggle..."

"Aigo, for real. Ugh, these red gentlemen! I swear I'll just, keep it moderate, would you? Any gentleman who forces the line and crosses it, that gentleman's a reactionary."

Thoroughly fed up with the Chuk Brothers swallowing their drool as they closed in around a flustered Im Baechil, Han San headed for the mountain.

Just as surveyor Hajama had said, a summer's weather on this peninsula stripped off a whole layer of the terrain. This year especially, with a great typhoon come through, the mountain had chunks of flesh gouged out here and there.

The boulder that had served as a landmark had rolled off somewhere down below, and great girthy trees lay sprawled across the paths, blocking them.

A situation any ordinary herb-gatherer would have needed a month to grow used to.

But Han San didn't lose his way.

'Of course not, I lived around here long enough for the hills and streams to change seven times over.'

For something this much, a slight adjustment through his sharpened memory and he had it in no time.

Around the hour the sun stood at its height, Han San took in the very collapsed slope Yun Cheom-ji had advertised all over the village in his past life.

And below the ash tree the typhoon had torn out, the five-forked leaves quietly laid bare.

"This is it."

Han San knelt before the ginseng. Not, of course, out of any awe for lucky ginseng, this was simply the easiest posture to work in.

Ever so gently he dug it out and moved it into the box he'd brought, and the business of bellowing 'Found ginseng!' loud enough to wash the mountain away, that too, of course, he didn't do, only whispered in a small voice.

"Found ginseng..."

Substance over show, that was best.

Later, one morning some fortnight on.

The Upper Hamlet grass-trimming procession climbed the mountain. The hands bearing sickles and A-frame carriers had thinned by about half compared to years past.

Recognizing that his own grandson's figure was absent among those thinned ranks as well, Yun Cheom-ji felt his insides sour and ache.

Just then, the procession's path halted before the collapsed slope.

"Elder, the path..."

Yun Cheom-ji clicked his tongue and stepped to the head of the line.

His feet stopped right beside the toppled ash tree. That until a fortnight ago a wild ginseng root had sat in that very spot, Yun Cheom-ji of course had no way of knowing.

Yun Cheom-ji only lamented the collapsed grass-trimming path, and said,

"Heaven and earth are not benevolent; they treat all things as straw dogs.[7] Heaven is not kind and regards all creation as a dog, so they say, and how not a whit is that saying wrong!"

There was, one might say, a reason that across every age and land people had regarded heaven as a kind of administrative office.

For it is the fate of the public servant that however he does his work, someone will curse him for it.

[1] The Kaesong Merchants' Fellowship refers to the trade networks of Gaeseong (Kaesŏng) merchants, historically renowned across Korea for their distinctive double-entry bookkeeping and commercial acumen.

[2] The Gabo Reform (1894) was a sweeping set of institutional reforms in Korea that, among other changes, formally abolished the legal slave and servant-bond system.

[3] "Mountain Wanderer" is an early short story by the real-life Korean writer Kim Yu-jeong.

[4] Kim Yu-jeong (1908–1937) was a celebrated Korean short-story writer of the 1930s known for rustic, humorous tales of rural life; he died young of tuberculosis.

[5] Bom bom ("Spring, Spring") is a 1968 Korean television drama adaptation based on Kim Yu-jeong's famous 1935 short story of the same name.

[6] A paraphrase of a line from the Confucian classics, meaning that Heaven favors no one but rewards only the virtuous.

[7] A quotation from the Tao Te Ching: "Heaven and earth are not benevolent; they treat the myriad things as straw dogs," meaning nature is impartial and indifferent to individual fates.

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