The end of august, p.51
The End of August, page 51
The man yawned widely, before narrowing his eyes as if he were looking at something in the depths of the darkness.
“I’m sobering up, and I’m starting to get sleepy. Hey, take us to the Tōgō Ryokan in Shinano-chō. It’s tricky to get just drunk enough, but I think I’m gonna sleep real well tonight. If I don’t have enough to drink, then my mind races and I can’t sleep, so I drink until I’m calmer, and then the next morning . . . Look, the closer we get to the station, the rougher it gets; the area around the station is where most of the Japanese live, broken up into little sections, Wakasa-chō, Mikawa-chō, Naniwa-chō, Ise-chō. Take a step into an alley and there’s red lanterns everywhere, all the customers and places are Japanese; it’s easy to forget where you are—Fukuoka? Osaka? Maybe Tokyo . . . ?” He trailed off. “Look, look, over there, isn’t it just like a Japanese city?”
She was nonplussed. She’d always thought that wherever people gathered, cities sprung up naturally, and the more people there were, then the bigger it got, but Dalian was a city dreamed up in the minds of some Japanese higher-ups and created just as it had been planned. But it wasn’t only Dalian, it was Mukden and Hsinking too; the Japanese were, in their minds, revising the entire continent from start to finish . . . One Land Under the emperor . . . colony . . . the Greater East Asian Co-prosperity Sphere . . . invasion of China . . . Five Races Under One Union . . . anti-Japanese patriots . . . settling Manchuria and Mongolia . . . scorched-earth policy . . .
This’s your room, he said, putting his hand on the door to the room assigned to her, opening it slowly so that the hinges didn’t creak; at her feet the laid-out futons swelled in mounds the shape of people. As she thought to herself that it was like the aejangteo in Gyo-dong back home, someone rolled over in their sleep and a mountain moved; she tiptoed through, careful not to step on any of the mounds, and lay down on a vacant futon.
She was sleepy, that was true, but she had seen and heard so much, her head was so full of shapes and colors and sounds and voices that she didn’t know what she should think about first. Her body was telling her to rest, not think, but her mind was racing, racing, trying to catch the tail of a word or an image.
The rain was still falling noisily. She hugged her pillow and tried to listen to the sound of the rain. The reverberation of an organ somewhere snuck in between the raindrops.
Blow softly, blow, spring wind
Blow, spring wind, blow, through the willow threads
Blow, blow, spring wind
Oh, spring wind, blow
Gently blow . . .
She sang along in her mind, thinking: whoever’s playing isn’t very good, it sounds like they’re playing while they’re trying to figure out where the next note is on the keyboard . . .
but don’t blow here, in this garden . . . see, they stopped again . . . wind, don’t blow, wind . . . through the cherry trees . . . don’t blow, wind, in this garden . . . are they playing without a score? It must be a girl about my age . . . no, don’t blow, wind don’t blow wind . . . her playing is so disjointed I forgot how the next line goes . . . a long time ago, when Korea belonged to the Koreans, there was a girl named Arang in Miryang District, an only daughter . . . speaking as if flinging the words into the air . . . it’s Halme’s voice . . . Arang had lost her mother at an early age, and she trusted her nursemaid as a mother . . . And there was a man by the name of Ju-gi who was in love with Arang and tricked her nursemaid; the nursemaid lured Arang out to Yeongnamnu . . . The full moon shone reflected in the Miryang River, casting its glow on the banks where the violets and twinleaves were in full bloom . . . on nights when I couldn’t sleep my halme would always pat me on my chest and tell me old stories . . . When Arang, drinking in the exquisite beauty of the spring evening, turned around, there stood a man . . . It was Ju-gi. He confessed his feelings for her, and when Arang attempted to flee, he pushed her down, loosening the strings of her jeogori and putting his hand in her chima . . . Arang resisted violently, and Ju-gi, enraged, took out his blade and stabbed her in the throat . . . Halme, dead now for seven years . . . my beloved halme . . . Arang’s father, having lost his beloved daughter, went crazy . . . a ghost with disheveled hair at the railing of Yeongnamnu . . . I am Arang. I’ll tell you the name of the man who killed me, please undo the han that binds me here . . . once Halme finished her story she would always rub my chest and stomach and watch over me as I fell asleep . . . and I’d doze off feeling her eyes on me . . . sometimes I’d open my eyes slightly . . . see her wrinkled, sun-browned neck . . . oh, what a nice breeze . . . Halme’s fanning me with a paper fan . . . She took a breath in, slowly exhaled, and fell gently to sleep. The organ was still playing, somewhere far off, in fits and starts . . . I’m in the sunny backwater of a river, swimming naked, the water up to my neck.
The rays of sun reflect off the surface of the water glittering, banjjak banjjak, and my limbs sway, pale in the sunlight, but the water is cold as melted ice. Maybe the sunlight is cooling it, she thought idly, laying her head back on the water and looking up at the sky. It was August, of course. Everything was so green, so lush that it almost looked black. The wind rose; the greenery moved, moved, moved. The wind wasn’t coming down from the sky; it was rising up from the river. But there’s no sound, she thought. Not from the wind or the river; even my own body is silent. A dead silence. High, high above the tops of the trees, the kites were inscribing circles within circles in the sky, but she couldn’t hear them calling to one another. On the banks of the river the reeds were swirling around as if they were fluid, but there was no rustling. She tried putting her head underwater. Bubbles spouted from her nose, but they didn’t burble at all. She opened her eyes, moved her limbs, and tried to swim against the current, heading upstream. As she did, every inch of her skin felt a sliminess.
The sweetfish are swimming past me. I’m swimming upstream with the sweetfish, but with the coldness of the water and how hard it is to breathe, I can’t do it, she thought, sticking her head above the surface with a gasp.
Was I dreaming? Did I wake up? Instead of taking a breath? She tried moving her right arm in front of her eyes and saw that her skin was bristling with goose bumps. She turned her head and saw a thin belt of sunshine coming in through the gap in the curtains. Halme isn’t here, even though when I couldn’t sleep, she told me the story of Arang . . . No, I’m not at home . . . I took the Continent, and then the Dove . . . Dalian, I’m in Dalian . . . oh no! Everyone else is already up! But I want to lie here a little longer, my body’s chilled through from the water, eueu, chuwo, what time is it? Guh-guh-guh-guh-guh-guh-guh, a cooing dove cried faintly; she listened with one ear still pressed to her pillow and heard the chi-chi-chi-chi-cheep of a sparrow; ka-ka-ka-ka-ka kaw-kaaaaw keel-keel-keel, all the calls of birds she had never heard before mixed together, but the cooing dove she had first heard did not call out again.
She went downstairs and found the two men and ten women sitting at two dining tables, starting to eat. She sat down in an empty chair and looked at the steaming food. White rice congee, green bean congee, mantou, guo-tie, jianbing, baozi, wontons, yuebing, pidan tofu, pickles, Chinese tea in a ceramic pot with a dragon design—she lifted her arm, heavy with the exhaustion of swimming, and grabbed her spoon.
* * *
• • •
The pale blue sky had ripples of clouds as far as the eye could see. Oh, I’ve discovered a cloud formation that looks like tiger stripes! There’s clouds with little holes all over like a beehive, it’s like the wind is drawing with clouds, see that cloud over there, doesn’t it look just like it was just scribbled down? That one’s tangled basting thread, and that one’s a thimble, and nearby there’s a pile of waste thread and cloth scraps, so I think I’d call this the “sewing box.”
“Haha, this little lady really is full of curiosity. She’s even got her eyes on the sky.” The man took off his cap and stretched, letting the sun wash over his whole face.
“But the sky and clouds are so pretty. . . .”
“Oh, see, when the clouds are that high up, summer’s almost over.”
“What day is it today?”
“The first of September.”
“Already?”
“Yep.”
It’s the start of the second semester, better get serious. She read the words on the sign at the streetcar stop with the same expression as if she were looking up at the class schedule on the noticeboard at school: Shinanomachi—next stop Nihonbashi.
Above the streetcar stop, an acacia tree, its bark torn vertically, crossed branches stiffly with the poplar next to it; every time the wind blew, their glossy, rain-washed leaves rubbed against one another, and as they spoke, raindrops scattered from them and fell, like drops of mercury, making impact around the whorl of her bob. The poplar’s branches stretch straight into the sky, no matter what country it’s planted in, just like the poplars along the banks of the Miryang River, the ones that cheer him on as he runs down the embankment morning and night . . . he should be running right about now . . . in-hale ex-hale. She spread her arms like wings and took a deep breath.
“That big building over there is the Kikuya department store. If you go down the lane just before it, there’s a row of restaurants behind it; at night you walk under lots of strings of electric lights. There’s a street that intersects Shinanomachi vertically stretching to the east, and Naniwa-cho is on either side of that street. I guess nothing’s open right now, but there’s a music store, a candy store, a café, a dance hall, an oden place, a soba place, an eel place, a kimono store, a Western clothes store, a shoe shop, a watchmaker, a hardware store, an antiques shop. . . .”
“Just about anything you could want.”
“There’s nothing you can’t find on this continent. Dalian has its own Nihonbashi, even a Ginza; about the only thing it’s missing is an imperial palace—hahaha!”
I can’t fit everything I’ve seen in my head. She focused with all her might on looking at the flowers of the silk tree hanging over into the road from the garden of someone’s house. As she reached out for one of its brush-like, pale crimson flowers, a green streetcar arrived at the stop with a screech.
It ran right down the middle of Kanbu Street. On either side of the road were horse-drawn carriages, rickshaws, and public buses. Boys in black high-collared uniforms and caps who hadn’t seen one another over summer vacation and girls in sailor-style uniforms chatted, laughing, but the workers in their brown or yellowed shirts said nothing, wearing expressions of pure endurance.
“In spring, the coolies come down from Shandong on junks to work. In Dalian there’s a lot of work in oil extraction and stevedoring. I can’t believe this—even though there’s special streetcars for them, here they are swaggering around, not knowing their place. But hey, these Chinks, they don’t speak Japanese, they can’t understand a word I’m saying. Hey, you stink! The smell of garlic and green onions is unbearable!” The man in the flat cap pulled a handkerchief out of his pocket and covered his nose with it, jabbing one of the day laborers in the side with his elbow.
She heard the Chinese man yelp and exchanged glances with him. Her heart pounded violently. He knows that I’m a Korean, that I’m a Korean who speaks Japanese like a Japanese—she clamped her arms to her sides, pressing against her heart, which felt like it might jump out of her rib cage.
The Chinese man ended the glance as if shutting a door, turning his eyes toward the beautiful streets bashful in the illumination of the morning sun. Ominagi Street, which led to the harbor, brimmed with such an abundance of tranquility that it was almost hard to believe there was a war going on.
The sea! Over that wave there’s another wave, and then another, and another, and another, and another, and another! It’s so big, it’s like there’s no end. It’s like a big, blue animal, swelling like it’s breathing in deep and then flattening back out. The sea! She wanted to scream, but her throat wouldn’t let her voice out. She faced the sea, her hands outstretched and fingers tensed. Each time a white wave broke, its shining light entered her, slowing the intervals between her heartbeats little by little, and the fear, surprise, unease, and sadness that ebbed and flowed in the hesitations of her heart were bundled with the light and thrown onto the waves. She felt something strangely hot and dazzling gush-gush-gush through her entire body. Aya, nunbusyeo! But I won’t close my eyes, it feels so good! I want more, more light! She shook her head hard, slowly raised her chin, and stared out at the line between the sky and the sea. That white line’s called the horizon. As far as she could see, the sea was just as blue as the sky, but white waves bashed into the quay, clustered with mounds of barnacles, where the corpse of a jellyfish floating in an oil slick came and went, pulled in and out by the waves. The wind fluttered her hair, shirt, and skirt, striking against the beads of sweat from her brow and smoothing them out like pebbles on a riverbed.
As she gazed out at the sea she bent, stretching her right hand to her calf. In her sleep she had torn at her mosquito bites and left them bleeding; now she scratched at them with her outstretched, blackened nails. Then she took off her rubber shoes, the soles of which had come loose and were clop-clopping with each step, and barefoot, she put her right foot in one of the rusted rings that connected the mooring ropes, which gave a little bounce, and pretending that she was playing jump rope, she began to sing.
Ame ame fure fure
Kaa-san ga
Janome de omukai
Ureshii na
Pitch, pitch chap, chap
Run, run, run
She remembered that her jump rope was in her jumeoni. As she pulled the pouch out of her pocket, peanuts scattered at her feet. I forgot, that teacher gave them to me, and I put them away without eating them. She cracked a peanut with her teeth and removed the shell, then threw it at a seagull, which had its white wings spread and was crying like a baby. The bird plunged down almost touching her hair, catching the peanuts in midair, but once it realized it couldn’t eat them, it let them drop from its beak, hovering on the waves at the base of the lighthouse to rest its wings and voice. She skipped down to the jetty where the lighthouse was and sat on the wall of the breakwater, dangling her legs as she whistled with her fingers to call the seagull.
The man in the flat cap looked with disgust at his match, which wouldn’t light in the wind, and raised his head, unlit cigarette in his mouth, to squint at the girl as if he were severely shortsighted.
“C’mere! I got something to tell you!” he shouted suddenly, waving his hand.
The girl leaped up and ran, swinging her limbs wildly as if she were running across a road.
“You can’t just run around barefoot like that. What if there’s rusty nails or glass around?” He paused. “Say, how old are you?”
“I’m thirteen.”
“Thirteen . . .” He had hurt his voice from smoking too much; even his sigh was hoarse.
“This is the first time I’ve seen the sea. It takes an hour and a half by train to reach Busan, but most women in Miryang never leave there once in their lives. My grandmother didn’t, and probably my mother won’t either . . . Where are we? Where’s this sea?” She squinted out at the sea. The sun and the wind shone on the crest of each wave.
“It’s the north of the Yellow Sea, at the tip of the Liaodong Peninsula, between Liaodong Bay and West Korea Bay.”
“So you mean . . . whichever way you look you can’t turn away from the sea?”
He was silent for a moment. “My duty was to bring you to Dalian Port.”
“What?”
The man turned his back to the sun and wind and lit his cigarette, tasting his own resin-stinking saliva.
“I wish you the best.” As he exhaled, the smoke was scattered on the wind and disappeared.
Gratitude blossomed in her heart like a flower; she swallowed and choked back tears. For some reason, the man’s face looked strained to her. The wind stopped as if it were holding its breath, and a ship approached, dragging behind it a dazzling, snow-white wake. At the prow of the ship fluttered the Japanese flag.
Twenty
To Paradise
| 낙원으로 | 楽園へ |
Countless stars shimmered in the perfectly clear night sky, and the silver moon, which looked like it had been made of bent wire, shone its light into the vast darkness. She was on the deck, trying to control her nausea, and retracing the path that had brought her here. All the other women had apparently gone south, except for the unni who had been sitting next to her on the train, who was the only one who had gotten on the Mukden-maru with her at Dalian Port. That night, Mr. Yoshida, the leader, explained that the ship’s destination was not Fukuoka but Shanghai, that the military uniform factory in Fukuoka had enough workers now so they would instead go up the Yangtze River from the port of Shanghai to work in a military boot factory in Wuhan.
I’ve never even heard of Wuhan, I don’t want to work there, I don’t know how to sew boots, I bet the food and clothes they give me there will be worse than in Fukuoka, and the dormitory’s probably small and dirty too, and in China I might not be understood if worse comes to worst.
I don’t know the language, she thought, but then reconsidered: I can’t turn back now, I’m going to save up money and go to Busan Girls School, I just need to be patient for three years.
She did not complain or protest. It had taken two days to get to Shanghai, where they had changed to the Daikichi-maru for another two days, and the next morning they would arrive in Wuhan. . . .
