CHAPTER 02
Part III: The First Morning
March 16, 1933 — 7:23 AM
The girl was sixteen or seventeen. She wore a simple chima jeogori—a skirt and jacket—in pale blue cotton. Her hair was braided and pinned. She held a brass basin of water and a folded cloth, and she was staring at him with an expression that mixed curiosity and concern.
"Young Master is awake?"
Her voice was soft, deferential, with the particular intonation of a servant who has served the same family since childhood. The Korean was slightly different from modern Korean—the vocabulary, the rhythm—but he could understand it. The body's memories helped.
"Yes." His voice came out younger than he expected. Higher. He cleared his throat. "I—yes."
She entered, set the basin on the floor beside his mattress, and knelt with her hands in her lap, eyes lowered. "Your father wishes to see you at breakfast. He said—" She paused, as if weighing whether to deliver the message exactly.
"He said what?"
She risked a glance at his face. "He said, 'Tell the boy to come when he's finished being dramatic. I've waited three months for him to speak properly. I can wait another hour.'"
Min-jae felt something unexpected: a laugh rising in his chest. It came out as a snort, which surprised him further. In 2024, he had not laughed much. His ex-wife had once said he laughed like a man calculating the probability that humor was worth the energy expenditure.
"Thank you—" He searched the body's memories. "So-jung."
Her eyes widened slightly at the use of her name. "Yes, Young Master."
"Is there news from outside?"
She hesitated. "The Japanese newspapers say Herr Hitler has become Chancellor in Germany. The Japanese say this is good—he hates the Communists. The Korean newspapers don't talk about it. The police would not allow it."
He absorbed this. Hitler. Chancellor. 1933. He had known it, of course. But hearing it spoken in a kitchen girl's voice—as news, as present, as something happening in the world while he sat on a warm floor in Gyeongseong—was different.
"The young master is pale," So-jung said. "Are you ill?"
"No." He stood. The body felt light, almost untethered. "I dreamed strangely, that's all."
He washed his face in the basin. The water was cold and clean. The cloth was rough cotton. The sensations were so ordinary, so physical, that they anchored him better than any thought could have.
So-jung waited by the door. When he finished, she took the basin and said, "I will bring your breakfast clothes," and was gone.
He stood alone in the room that was his and not his. Through the window, he could see the courtyard: the pine tree, the stone basin, the tiled roof of the main house. A magpie hopped along the eaves.
I am in 1933, he thought. I am nineteen years old. I have a father who expects me at breakfast.
He looked down at his suit—the suit from 2024, now crumpled and filthy, utterly impossible. He needed to hide it. He needed to become the person this house expected him to be.
He opened the wooden chest. Inside: traditional Korean clothing, folded carefully. White jeogori jackets. Loose baji pants. A durumagi overcoat for formal wear. Everything clean, pressed, waiting.
He undressed slowly, folding the suit as carefully as he would have in his old life, and placed it at the bottom of the chest. The shoes went underneath. The watch—he looked at the watch. Stainless steel, modern, impossible. He couldn't wear it. He couldn't throw it away. He put it in the chest, wrapped in the jacket.
He dressed in the clothes of 1933. They fit perfectly. Of course they did.
When So-jung returned with a tray—rice, soup, kimchi, a piece of grilled fish—she found him standing by the window, dressed properly, looking out at the courtyard.
"Young Master," she said, and set the tray on a small table. "Your father will see you after you eat. He is in the sarangbang."
The men's quarters. The formal reception room. Min-jae nodded, sat down, and ate.
The food was simple and good. The rice was perfect—short-grain, sticky, exactly as he remembered from his childhood, from meals with his grandmother before she died. The kimchi was sharper than modern kimchi, less sweet, more aggressively fermented. The soup was clear and hot.
He ate everything. His body was hungry—the body of a nineteen-year-old who had walked through half of Gyeongseong in the middle of the night, who had slept in his clothes, who had woken to a new world.
When he finished, So-jung appeared as if summoned, took the tray, and said, "This way, Young Master."
He followed her through the house. Wooden corridors. Paper doors. The smell of pine and old wood and something faintly medicinal from a room they passed. He catalogued everything automatically, the way he had always catalogued data—the layout, the exits, the sounds, the people he glimpsed through half-open doors.
The sarangbang was at the front of the house, facing the street. A formal room, with a low table and floor cushions, calligraphy scrolls on the walls, a brass brazier in the corner. A man sat at the table, reading a document by the light from the window.
Kwon Se-hun. Fifty-four years old. Heavy-jowled, handsome in a solid way, with the calm authority of a man who has never had to prove his importance because everyone already knows it. He looked up when Min-jae entered, and his eyes—sharp, assessing—studied his son for a long moment.
"Sit down."
Min-jae sat. Cross-legged, on a cushion, the way the body's memories told him to sit.
His father looked at him. "You were out late last night."
It was not a question. Min-jae's mind raced. What did the young man do at night? The memories were there, but faint, like trying to read through fog.
"I couldn't sleep," he said. It was true, in a way. "I walked."
"Where?"
"Toward City Hall. Then back."
His father's expression didn't change. "In those clothes?"
Min-jae realized his mistake. The young man—the real Kwon Min-jae—would not have walked through Gyeongseong at night in a Western suit. He would have worn traditional clothes. He would have been noticed.
"I—" He stopped. Truth was safest, if he could make it plausible. "I wasn't wearing these clothes. I changed before I went out. I was wearing—something else."
His father waited.
"I don't know what happened to them," Min-jae said. "I must have—I was very tired. I don't remember coming home."
Another long silence. Kwon Se-hun's eyes moved over his son's face, cataloguing, assessing. He was not a fool. He had noticed, over the past three months, that his son had changed. The questions he asked. The way he looked at things. The silences that stretched too long.
"You were always a strange boy," his father said finally. "Even as a child. You watched instead of playing. You asked questions that made adults uncomfortable. Your mother used to say you were born old." He paused. "Since you came back from Tokyo, you are stranger still."
Min-jae said nothing. There was nothing to say.
"The merchants talk about you," his father continued. "The ones you've spoken to. They say you know things you shouldn't. They say you predicted the price of rice before the Japanese announced their procurement schedule. They say you told the timber merchants to buy from the north, and now the Japanese are buying everything they can cut."
Min-jae kept his face still. He had been careful. He had been very careful. But in a small world like Gyeongseong commerce, careful was not always enough.
"Are you in trouble?" his father asked. "With the Japanese? With someone else?"
"No."
"Are you working with someone I should know about?"
"No."
"Are you planning something that will get you killed?"
The question was so direct, so unlike the careful circumlocutions of Korean speech, that Min-jae looked up in surprise. His father's face was calm, but his eyes were not.
"I am planning to build something," Min-jae said. He chose the words carefully, feeling his way toward a truth that would not reveal too much. "Something that will matter. For Korea. For our family. For the people who work for us."
His father stared at him. "You are nineteen years old."
"Yes."
"You have been home for three months."
"Yes."
"And you have already made yourself the subject of merchant gossip, which is the most dangerous kind of attention a Korean can attract in this city."
Min-jae said nothing.
His father sighed. It was a heavy sound, full of years and disappointment and something that might have been fear. "I don't know what happened to you in Tokyo. I don't know why you came back different. But you are my son, and this house is your house, and whatever you are planning—be careful. The Japanese are not fools. They watch. They remember. And they do not forget that we are Korean."
He picked up the document he had been reading. "You may go."
Min-jae stood, bowed, and walked to the door.
"Min-jae."
He turned.
His father was looking at him with an expression he couldn't read. "If you need money—real money, not the allowance you've been using—come to me. Tell me what you're doing. I may not understand it, but I will not stop you."
It was the most generous thing anyone had ever said to him in either of his lives.
"Thank you, Father."
He left the room and walked back through the house, past the kitchen where So-jung was washing dishes, past the courtyard where the magpie still hopped along the eaves, to the room that was his.
He sat down at the small desk, took out a sheet of paper, and began to write. Not in Korean—the Korean of this era was different enough that his modern writing would be noticed. Not in English—too conspicuous. In a cipher he devised on the spot, a mixture of modern Korean romanization and personal shorthand, the first entry in what would become sixty-seven volumes.
March 16, 1933. Day two. I have a name, a family, a place. My father suspects something but does not know what. The body's memories are accessible but faint. I need to learn more—about the family businesses, about the merchants, about the Japanese colonial administration, about everything. I have perhaps seventy years of reliable foreknowledge remaining. I need to use every day of it.
First objective: assess the family's financial position. Land, cash, businesses, debts. Second objective: establish a relationship with a Japanese broker who can access the Tokyo and Osaka exchanges. Third objective: begin building a portfolio that will compound through the decades.
I am Kwon Min-jae now. I have to be.
He read what he had written, folded it carefully, and placed it in the wooden chest beneath the impossible suit from another world.
Then he went to find the family's account books.
---
Part IV: The Ledgers
March 16, 1933 — Afternoon
The sarangchae—the men's quarters—contained a small study lined with bookshelves and document chests. Min-jae found it easily, guided by the body's memories. His father was not there; he had gone out, the servants said, to meet with other merchants.
Min-jae sat down at the low table and began to read.
The family's financial records were kept in the traditional manner: Chinese characters mixed with Korean, handwritten in ledger books, organized by year and category. It took him time to decipher them—the handwriting was different from anything he was used to, the accounting conventions archaic—but his mind, trained on decades of financial data, adapted quickly.
By the time the afternoon light began to fade, he had a picture.
Land: 340 jeongbo of agricultural land across North and South Gyeongsang provinces. Mostly rice paddies. Some dry fields for barley and soybeans. The land was good, productive, well-managed by tenant farmers who paid rent in rice.
Property: The house in Bukchon. Three ancillary properties in Gyeongseong—a small warehouse in Jongno, a commercial building near the city market, a residential property in another district that was rented out. All owned outright, no mortgages.
Cash and near-cash: Approximately 180,000 won. Held partly in a Japanese-owned bank in Gyeongseong, partly in a Korean mutual credit association, partly in actual coin and currency in a hidden safe in the house.
Loans receivable: About 40,000 won, extended to tenant farmers and small merchants. Most were current; a few were doubtful.
Business interests: A 15% stake in Sejin Trading, a small general trading company run by a family connection. The stake was valued at approximately 20,000 won in the partnership agreement.
Debts: None. The family owed nothing to anyone.
Min-jae sat back, staring at the numbers. It was not a fortune—not by the standards of the wealthiest Japanese merchants, not by the standards of the 2024 world he had left—but it was enough. Enough to start. Enough to build.
He made calculations in his head. 180,000 won in cash. At current exchange rates, roughly $4,500 US dollars. Not much. But in 1933, at the bottom of the Depression, $4,500 could buy a lot of stock.
If he could get it out of Korea.
If he could find a way to invest it in the United States.
If he could convince his father to let him try.
He was still sitting there, making notes in his cipher, when a servant appeared in the doorway.
"Young Master. Dinner is served."