The Izakaya in Osaka (3)
The news that President Jeong-hee would be arriving tomorrow drained all the pleasure from the H Chemical Director's drink. He couldn't afford to overdo it tonight—one slip in front of her tomorrow and there was no telling what might happen. He rose from his seat.
The Osaka Branch Manager stood as well.
"All right, let's get a good night's sleep and pick this up tomorrow. We can't show up in front of President Jeong-hee looking hungover and puffy-faced."
The Director grumbled as he shrugged back into the suit jacket he'd taken off.
"Of all the times for President Jeong-hee to show up—right in the middle of our Japan trip. We can't even sightsee properly. What a mess."
The Branch Manager clapped him on the shoulder.
"This is a once-in-a-lifetime chance! How often do we get to see President Jeong-hee up close? Score some points with her, and you'll be on the fast track."
"President Jeong-hee inspected the Changwon plant last year and stripped a Senior Managing Director of his position, didn't she?"
"Yeah, I heard about that too."
"She asked about the plant's power consumption and fired him on the spot."
"The man couldn't come up with the electricity rate per kilowatt fast enough. He'd only just been promoted from headquarters and sent down there—probably hadn't gotten a handle on those numbers yet."
"Not being able to answer right away and getting fired for it... I feel sorry for that Senior Managing Director."
"There must have been other reasons. Maybe he was getting on in years, something like that. Don't get too wound up. We'll see how it goes tomorrow."
The H Chemical employees parted ways with the Branch Manager's group and returned to their hotel near Osaka's Namba Station.
It was a newly built four-star hotel, immaculately clean, and the staff were remarkably courteous. The Osaka Branch Manager had booked it for them.
Kim Chirok asked the Director,
"You and the Osaka Branch Manager seem to be close, sir."
"We worked together back when we were Staff and Assistant Managers. Not many of our cohort are left in the group now, so I suppose that makes the two of us even closer."
"The Osaka Branch Manager seems to have majored in Japanese."
"That guy graduated from an English department. He's good at Japanese, too."
"Is that so?"
"His older brother served as Consul General in Japan, I believe. That's why he was always traveling over there even back when he was still Staff and Assistant Manager."
"I see."
Kim Chirok found himself thinking that connections like those were how the man had landed the Osaka Branch Manager post.
That's right. It's all connections. Connections are a kind of ability.
As they entered the hotel lobby, the staff at the front desk bowed in greeting. One of the women even greeted them in Korean. She was remarkably quick at picking out Korean guests.
The Manager who'd come along with them spoke to her.
"Your Korean is excellent."
"Thank you. I did a language program at Hankuk University of Foreign Studies."
The Japanese woman smiled brightly as she said it.
On a table in one corner of the lobby sat complimentary hotel amenities, packed in small plastic bags for guests to take up to their rooms. The hotel employee arranging them was kneeling on the floor as she worked.
Working on her knees! The Japanese really do have an outstanding work ethic.
The group picked up the plastic packs containing toothbrushes and other amenities and boarded the elevator. Once inside, Kim Chirok pressed the button for the twelfth floor, where their rooms were. The elevator didn't move.
The Manager snickered.
"You idiot! You have to tap the room key they gave you against the button. That's what makes the elevator move. This is a smart building."
The Manager was far more at ease than the Director. Meeting President Jeong-hee tomorrow weighed heavily on the Director, but not on him. At the Manager level, even if you got stuck on a question, they'd let it slide. It was different for a Director. A situation could arise where he'd have to put his neck on the line. That was why he was so tense.
The Director gazed at the elevator wall and muttered, half to himself.
"If things had gone as planned, we were going to visit Universal Studios tomorrow morning and then head to Kyoto..."
The Manager grinned.
"To see the Kyoto geisha?"
"That'd be tough. Geisha aren't just expensive—you can't even get in without a reservation."
In his hotel room, Kim Chirok took a shower. When he was done, he changed into the complimentary yukata provided with the room. He gazed out at the densely darkened window and drank a can of Sapporo beer.
Not bad. This is the kind of luxury you get when you graduate from Seoul National University and work at a major conglomerate subsidiary.
Still, Kim Chirok couldn't help feeling disappointed that they'd be heading home tomorrow without any sightseeing. He could always take vacation days and come back on his own, but then he'd have to cover the expenses himself. For someone putting most of his salary into savings to build up a lump sum, that was no small hurdle.
It occurred to him that he ought to bring his mother to a nice hotel like this someday.
His mother was a woman who had staked her entire life on Kim Chirok. She was the one who had moved all the way to Gangnam just to give her only son a proper education, then worked two jobs and endured every hardship imaginable to put him through school.
Because she worked as an apartment cleaner, she left for work early. The building's shared entrance had to be cleaned before eight in the morning. If residents heading out to work found the lobby dirty, they'd file complaints—and then even this supposedly decent cleaning job could be taken away from her.
Years of cleaning had worn her hands raw until her fingerprints were nearly gone. Some mornings she'd arrive at work and have to wrestle with the management office's fingerprint scanner. In winter, she'd stand there shivering, pressing her finger against the device over and over.
That same mother had quit the apartment cleaning job the moment Kim Chirok found employment. Even after he'd landed a position, she'd wanted to keep working. But her knees wouldn't allow it. Hauling heavy water buckets up and down the stairs had given her degenerative arthritis.
Kim Chirok's father had been in an accident at a construction site when Chirok was in the fifth grade. He'd been working as a scaffolder, and while installing the framework he'd fallen from a fifth-floor height. His back and legs were badly injured. The wounds were treated through workers' compensation, but he was never able to work again after that.
For a year, his father sat at home smoking cigarettes. Then one day he announced he was going to Wasu-vegas. His mother tried to stop him, but he insisted he didn't want to be a burden on the family any longer, and that he was going to Wasu-vegas.
When his father said he was going to Wasu-vegas, Kim Chirok had thought he meant Las Vegas in America. It turned out to be Wasu-ri, a village in Cheorwon County, Gangwon Province.
According to his mother, a friend of his father's was raising black goats on a hillside near Wasu-ri. That was where he was headed.
About two weeks after his father left, a letter arrived. His father's friend had already moved away, it said, and there was no way to find him. So he would go into the mountains there and live like a hermit, foraging for medicinal herbs. He wrote that once his back and legs healed, even if it took time, he would come back and live with the family again.
After that, his father vanished into the mountains as if he'd become some mountain spirit, and all news of him ceased. When Kim Chirok was in middle school, his mother went looking for him in Wasu-ri once. She came back and did nothing but cry. His father's circumstances, it seemed, were far from easy.
"Your father's become a mountain man through and through."
That was all she said, and then she staked every last hope of her life on Kim Chirok. And she worked with a terrifying intensity. Even as her hands wore raw and degenerative arthritis ate at her knees, she worked with a terrifying intensity.
The photographs of his mother and father in their youth were genuinely striking. His father had originally been a poet. When he taught poetry composition at the neighborhood cultural center, his mother had been one of his students. They fell in love and got married.
But a poet's income amounted to next to nothing. It didn't even match what you could earn from physical labor. When the child came along, Kim Chirok's father quit teaching at the cultural center and started working construction. His mother had to earn money too. She took a job at a supermarket in Goyang.
Even so, the family had been happy in their own modest, ordinary way. But his father's accident shattered that ordinary happiness to pieces.
As he grew up, Kim Chirok resented his incompetent father. He resented his mother, too. What stung his pride most of all was that she worked as a janitor in the very apartment building where his classmates lived. So he begged her, time and again, to move. But she wouldn't budge, insisting he had to attend school in the Gangnam 8th School District.
Living in a semi-basement, Kim Chirok was always an outcast at school. He was also subjected to relentless bullying. The students of Gangnam spent money on a different scale. From their bags to their shoes, everything they owned was high-end. And those rich kids would grab poor Kim Chirok and take his money. If he protested, the only answer he got was fists—and not just one kid's fists, but a whole pack of them.
The worst of them was a kid named Lim Jae-geun, who lived in the Raemian apartment complex where his mother worked. That bastard made Kim Chirok's life a living hell. He was a prosecutor's son, and he would snatch Kim Chirok's money and beat him at the slightest provocation.
The day Kim Chirok came home with his whole body swollen from a beating by Lim Jae-geun, his mother demanded to know who he'd been fighting. She was so furious she was practically hopping in place, insisting they go to that kid's house. But Kim Chirok wouldn't tell her. His mother worked as a cleaner in the apartment building where Lim Jae-geun lived.
Fortunately, the bullying tapered off around his second year of high school. They'd matured some, and the pressure of college entrance exams probably had something to do with it.
Lim Jae-geun had graduated from Konkuk University and now lived in Garak-dong. His parents still lived in Dogok-dong in Gangnam, and when Lim Jae-geun got married, they'd apparently bought him a newly built apartment in Garak-dong. Typical of the wealthy—he'd married young, too.
Kim Chirok wondered if he'd ever be able to get married himself. It seemed impossible until he owned a home. He thought, to hell with it, and stretched out on the bed.
Suddenly, the face of the famous geisha from the poster he'd seen at the bar floated into his mind.
It really had been a beautiful face.