The Same Hotel Room
At the hotel counter, Huiyeong borrowed the telephone and placed a call to the Masan People's Committee. I couldn't catch every detail of the conversation, but the gist seemed to be this: that we had arrived safely in Busan in order to escort Hong Sa-ik; that the city's atmosphere was still thick with Japanese influence; and that tomorrow, rather than stopping in Masan, we would head straight up to Seoul via the Gyeongbu Line.
While Huiyeong was on the phone, I went ahead, collected the room key, and climbed up to our second-floor room. After washing up, I slipped into a thin one-piece undergarment and pulled back the curtain to look out. Busan at night was not especially bright — but it wasn't dark, either.
The ships sat motionless in the harbor. Even granting that few vessels bother to put out at night, it was equally true that none were coming in.
And yet this was unmistakably a bustling city. From what I had observed that day, it wasn't only passenger ships — there had been plenty of vessels loaded down with grain. What did that mean? It meant this country was still, at its heart, an agricultural nation. The industrialization of the peninsula, which had all but started with the Gwangmu Reforms under Gojong, had developed — outwardly, at least — in dazzling fashion, centered on the strategic hubs and great cities of Gyeongseong and Busan.
The north, where farming was difficult, had its fair share of factories too. In the Republic of Korea I came from, they'd been useless relics, but no doubt Lyuh Woon-hyung's government had taken proper possession of them and put them to work. They were short on weapons, granted, but there had been an Japanese-built arsenal in Bupyeong. I'd heard the Japanese hadn't bothered to demolish it on their way out — so weapons-manufacturing facilities must still remain.
But still… the rice baskets kept leaving this country. Those ships were almost certainly bound for Japan. There was nowhere else for them to go. The southern peninsula — Honam above all — had to be left for agriculture. The Korean peninsula had been set free, yet it remained essential. Part of the reason Yamamoto had consented to letting go of Korea probably came down to exactly this.
After all, Korea's industrial capacity was never as important to Japan as Manchuria's. As long as grain could keep flowing in through the harbors they'd built and the rails they'd laid — as long as they could force it to flow — Korea was fine even with its own government in place. That was the logic of it, surely.
Back in my days at Jongno Station, I'd heard talk like this all the time. The Americans are deploying another long-range airborne aircraft carrier for strategic bombing.If the Americans really commit to extending their bombing range, it won't be long before they start dropping bombs on Gyeongseong too.
No. It was here, seeing it with my own eyes, that I understood.
If Korea ever went to war with the United States, the first place to bleed would be here — Busan. They would drop earthquake bombs on the harbor and render it useless forever, and they would smash every Japanese transport vessel in sight, as a warning to Korea.
…I didn't want to see that happen. I didn't want to watch the foolish, half-formed future of this Korea — its foundations still unclear — dragged into sharing the fury that America was owed by Japan. If I wanted to prevent it, then what could I possibly do…
"I'm back, unnie. Oh!"
The door burst open without warning and Huiyeong strode into the room. I was still facing the window; I only turned my head slightly.
"There you are."
"Did you just wash up? A shame — I was going to suggest we bathe together."
"That's exactly why I washed first."
"If my saying that scares you, why are you dressed so thin?"
It was an undergarment, but not a modern one. Not a fundoshi either — a thin white one-piece, shaped like a dress. It wasn't sheer enough to reveal the body entirely. On Huiyeong, I suppose her chest might have shown through, but on mine it didn't. I answered her.
"Because even though you're strong, and you keep leering at me, and for reasons unknown you covet me like some kind of pervert—"
"You can stop right there. Hearing it myself embarrasses me too."
Huiyeong said it sheepishly, scratching at her head. I let out a sigh and dropped onto the bed.
"But you do seem diligent about your own work, and you seem to have your own line you won't cross. And more than anything, you apparently hate being hated by me. Because I'm, whatever I may look like, a soft person. I'm bad at hating people. I don't like being hated, either."
"Is that why you managed your reputation among the Koreans, unnie?"
I didn't bother to deny it.
"That's right. As the underling of a colonial ruler — the sort of person more easily hated than anyone else in the world — if a few small kindnesses are all it takes to avoid being despised, there's no better bargain to be had. People will curse me behind my back, someone will come to loathe me, and sooner or later it finds its way back to me in one form or another. So if I can simply… sidestep all of that, cheaply — isn't that enough?"
And then I let it be known, half without meaning to, that the slice of bread I'd given her a year ago had held nothing deeper than those shallow reasons. Huiyeong, still standing with a hand on the bathroom door, looked at me and said,
"If only the world's leaders thought the way you do."
"Politics by offering up slices of bread because you're afraid of being hated? That doesn't look like much of a politics to me. To lead something as vast as a nation, you have to accept being hated. If you can't accept it, you shouldn't go into politics at all."
"Maybe so. But look at the world we live in. If Hitler or Mussolini had feared the hatred of the people more than they craved the pleasure of being exalted and praised by them — the world wouldn't have turned into this."
"People like that never get their hands on a country in the first place."
"Which is the problem — we're supposed to hand countries to the ones who say I cannot."
Huiyeong opened the bathroom door and shrugged off her coat. I silently wished she would do the rest of her undressing inside. She set one foot into the bathroom and finished her thought.
"Because the world hands supreme power to whoever says I can. I wonder how long it will take us to realize what a mistake that is."
Fortunately, my wish was granted: Korea's deputy minister of military affairs stepped into the bathroom still fully dressed, hanging only her outer coat on the rack. Before long I could hear the sound of her washing. I flopped down onto the softest bed I had lain on since crossing over into this era.
Supreme power, given to the ones who say 'I cannot.'
What country on earth does that? The legends of Yao and Shun may tell such stories, but if we're meant to follow the ways of the Zhou — does a person imagine himself Confucius just by wishing it?
I lay there staring at the ceiling, thinking this and that. Eventually Huiyeong emerged from the bathroom, scrubbed clean but with her hair still damp, wearing something much like what I had on. The clothes were similar, certainly — but the difference in her figure gave the whole impression a completely different cast.
At some point I'd acquired a woman's heart, I supposed, because looking at her stirred an odd twinge of envy in me. Hiding my body under the blanket with only my face poking out, I asked:
"Did those get that big in just one year?"
At first she seemed baffled, not following — but then she caught where my eyes were pointing, laughed a great hah!, and brought a hand to her own chest.
"No. No. Ah — well, a little, I suppose. I mean, obviously — I was eating properly and my nutrition improved, so they did grow a lot. But they were already this big before. Not quite this big, but close. Back then I was always hunched over, so you probably just couldn't see past my knees. My arms and legs were so skinny you might not have noticed at all."
"If I'd seen them then, maybe I'd have remembered you better when we met again."
"Do you like them big?"
I turned my head away.
"I don't dislike them."
"Huh. And here I thought you were about to say women's breasts don't interest you."
As if they wouldn't. As if… they didn't.
I was a terrible liar. Merely keeping my mouth shut was honesty enough — my thoughts showed plain as day. Huiyeong came over to the bed and sat down on its edge.
"I shouldn't have been so forceful at the start. If I'd known you were already someone who could come over for nothing but my charm — that is, that you were interested in women — I wouldn't have needed to be so anxious about it."
"I'm not interested in men. That's not the same as being interested in women."
"You don't seem entirely uninterested in women, either."
The conversation was drifting somewhere strange. I cast about for a way to turn the subject onto her.
"In the first place — why are you interested in me? If it's because of that thing I gave you once, I already told you. That sort of thing—"
"What you want to say is that logically, it's not a good enough reason for one person to like another. Isn't it?"
With only my face peeking out from under the blanket, I nodded. Huiyeong turned her head and glanced back at me. A dark room, lit by a single oil lamp and the faint glow bleeding in from the city.
And in that darkness, two eyes so dark they became vivid seemed to bore straight through my chest.
"Unnie — if I could explain, logically, why I came to love you, I'd already be persuading you, grounds and evidence laid out in order. I'd be saying: through this event, by this mechanism, I came to love you this way — and so by that same formula, I could make you love me, and then we'd simply exchange affection back and forth, mutual and reciprocal. That's what I'd be doing right now. And since I can't, here we are. So just… don't try to understand it. Just accept it. I don't expect understanding."
I nodded. Tonight, it seemed, she was not going to be rough with me.