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"Seoul" Novel Exerpts (38 pages)
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Posted by kadmin on: 2007-07-02 00:41:21
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“Here’s to your part in the glory of empire,” said the tall old Korean with a white mustache, lifting a cup. He wore the uniform of a Japanese Army colonel.
But it was not the gold or coal mines of Manchuria, nor the trackless swamps or the agriculture that had lured Yi In Gak to Manchuria, but rather the lucrative mining of humans.
“It’s just a matter of shedding blood, of a willingness to take life, and inflict pain,” remarked the thirty-year-old Korean bounty hunter who had made a comfortable living turning in his own people since his days at the Chunchon Middle School in Kangwon
Province.
“Here’s to your part in the glory of empire,” said the tall old Korean with a white mustache, lifting a cup. He wore the uniform of a Japanese Army colonel.
But it was not the gold or coal mines of Manchuria, nor the trackless swamps or the agriculture that had lured Yi In Gak to Manchuria, but rather the lucrative mining of humans.
“It’s just a matter of shedding blood, of a willingness to take life, and inflict pain,” remarked the thirty-year-old Korean bounty hunter who had made a comfortable living turning in his own people since his days at the Chunchon Middle School in Kangwon Province.
Born the last of three sons to a well-to-do merchant family in Kangwan Province’s Chunchon City the week after Japan annexed Korea in 1910, the short, squat Korean bounty hunter for the Japanese had defied his abusive parents as a youth, refusing to marry an unattractive girl in an arranged marriage, preferring to carouse with shiftless youth from the town and, most unforgivable, with Japanese police.
In time-honored Korean tradition, mother and father had favored their first-born, oldest son, a tradition Yi hated. He despised both older brothers. At age four, little In Gak had to be pulled from the top of his oldest brother during a jealous assault, which left bruises on the face and body of eldest brother. The attacks continued for the next year, until one day his frustrated mother cried, “if you don’t learn to behave, I’ll cut your toe off!” Within a week, the short, homely youngest son again turned on the fine-looking family favorite while playing in the courtyard. Then father, drunk as usual from rice wine and in a rage his family was known for, pinned the screaming, unruly child to the ground and mother, with a sharp kitchen knife, cut the little toe from the squirming boy’s right foot. For more than a decade, In Gak’d bitterness had outwardly appeared subdued. As a youth, it had always been power that he wanted, and he discovered at an early age that a good living, safety against abuse and freedom to inflict abuse and revenge, quickly came to a man who well served the Japanese. His Japanese name was Hirobuto Katamiyami.
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News Source: Whalen Wehry
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