“Not you—you stay here with me,” Major Hayashi said when the Korean guide, a timid creature named Baek, tried to scurry away. “Do you think I’d let you out of my sight?” Baek wrung his hands and whimpered, staring down at his feet bound in rags and shod in wet leather shoes.
Shortly after being assigned to the prefecture, Major Hayashi had asked Police Chief Fukuda where he could find game in these parts. Fukuda, who had made a detailed report and census of every Korean within fifty miles, had recommended three locals for the task of guiding their hunting party. The other two were potato farmers whom even other Koreans deemed quite savage, cloistered in the deep mountains, mating among themselves, and living off the land, only coming out to join the rest of the world a handful of times a year on market days. They both knew every stick and stone in the mountains—but Baek, a traveling silk merchant, was the only one who could speak Japanese. Major Hayashi had considered that to be a more important qualification, much to the regret of all, not least Baek himself.
*
IT WOULD BECOME ONE OF the images that would flash in front of Captain Yamada’s eyes, just before the end of his life. The bearded man lying under the moonlight. When he’d gone about twenty feet into the woods to collect firewood, he nearly stumbled over the body sprawled out on the snow. After the initial shock, what struck Captain Yamada was how the man was spread calmly on his back, both hands over his heart—as if he hadn’t frozen to death, but had fallen asleep in a moment of rapture. The second thing that struck him was how poorly clad this small man was. The quilted jacket he wore was so thin that the sharp angles of his shoulder blades showed clearly through.
Captain Yamada circled around the body. Then, for reasons he himself couldn’t understand in retrospect, he lowered his ear to the bluish face.
“Hey, hey! Wake up!” he shouted, realizing that there was a trace of breath still flowing from the man’s nostrils. When there was no response, Captain Yamada took the man’s face in his hands and slapped it lightly. The man began to moan almost inaudibly.
Captain Yamada placed the man’s head back on the snow. There was no reason he needed to help this nearly dead Josenjing, more of a vermin than a person. Captain Yamada started heading back toward the camp, but after a few steps he turned around, without understanding why. Sometimes the human heart was like a dark forest, and even a man as rational as Yamada had mysteries within. He picked up Josenjing in his arms, almost as easily as if he were a child.
“What the hell is this?” barked Major Hayashi when he returned.
“I found him in the woods,” Captain Yamada said as he laid the man down on the ground.
“What do you want to do with a dead Josenjing? Unless you mean to burn him for fuel—and he’d make an awful fire—you should’ve left him where you found him.”
“The man’s still alive. He was hunting alone in these parts, which means he knows the mountains well. He might be able to find the way down,” Captain Yamada explained coolly, unfazed by the veiled accusation of softheartedness; after all, that compassion had never been in the library of Yamada’s motives and emotions was something both men knew well.
The rest of the group came back, and Captain Yamada ordered Baek to move the unconscious man next to the fire and shout to him in Korean. When he started coming to, Baek called out, smiling like a lunatic, “Sir! Sir! He’s waking up!” Captain Yamada had Baek feed the man some crackers and dried persimmon from his own provisions.
“Make sure you stick the cracker in the snow to wet it a bit. He might choke otherwise,” Captain Yamada said, and Baek promptly obeyed, holding the man’s head on his lap and cooing something softly in Korean.
“Do they know each other?” Major Hayashi asked. He was eating his own supper of stiffly frozen onigiri and some pickled plum. There was even a bottle of sake that the sergeants were now passing around, suddenly merry and heartened.
“I don’t think so. Baek didn’t seem to recognize him,” Captain Yamada said. Police Chief Fukuda also didn’t know the man. But one of his officers thought that he might be a certain tenant farmer Nam, whose only distinction from all the other miserable peasants of the area was having once been in the Korean Imperial Army, and thus came to the police’s attention.
“A dangerous man then. A viper,” Major Hayashi said.
“He might prove himself useful. I would think it well worth keeping him alive for one night, if he can get us down this accursed mountain at dawn,” Captain Yamada replied as calmly as ever. He himself ate just a few crackers and a dried persimmon, and prepared to take the first watch.
*
THE DAWN CAME without a sunrise, and illumined by the cinereal light the woods materialized around them once more. The absence of sun and shadows made everything seem weightless, as if the trees, rocks, and snow were all made out of soft silver air. It seemed a halfway world, a world between other worlds.