War Photographer's Notebook

Chapter 1783: Memoirs and Details in the Envelope

On the eleventh day of the first lunar month, Wei Ran visited Chen Guangling, who was considered his half-master, with gifts.

"Where's Luo Xiang?"

Wei Ran put down the gift and followed Chen Guangling upstairs while asking.

"I went to Sui Xin's house to celebrate the Lantern Festival."

Chen Guangling responded, "He said he was going to visit various places, and he probably won't be back until the end of the first month of the lunar year."

"Why don't you go out for a walk?"

"Why should I be a light bulb? My wife has just gone back to her parents' home, so I have some quiet time."

Chen Guangling laughed and said, "Come sit in the piano room. I'm taking advantage of their absence to enjoy your bed."

Hearing this, Wei Ran smiled and continued the topic, "Speaking of this, I also brought a song with me this time."

"What song?" Chen Guangling asked with interest. He would not underestimate this young man.

"You'll know soon," Wei Ran said as if he was keeping someone in suspense, but in fact he had no idea what song it was.

Having talked about this topic, the two of them had already walked into the piano room.

Wei Ran did not bother to be polite with the other party. He changed into the round-toed cloth shoes prepared by the other party and sat down beside the piano table where Youquan was placed. Without any preparation, he played the song that his father taught him on New Year's Eve.

After the song ended, Wei Ran pressed the strings of the zither and looked at Chen Guangling who was sitting opposite him.

"As fierce as a violent gale, as swift as a thunderclap."

Chen Guangling sighed, "This is Fengleiyin. It is different from any Fengleiyin I have ever heard or played before, but I can still tell that this is Fengleiyin."

"That must be the Wind and Thunder Yin." Wei Ran just smiled but didn't intend to continue the topic.

"This piece of music, Feng Lei Yin, is just like the Guangling San and Jiu Kuang you played before. They are versions I have never heard before."

Chen Guangling said jokingly while pouring tea, "I even doubt whether you played these pieces yourself."

“Learned by accident”

Wei Ran spoke frankly without waiting for the other party to finish, and took the small teacup handed to him by the other party.

Hearing this, Chen Guangling wisely stopped asking questions and instead talked enthusiastically about his son Chen Luoxiang's achievements and his satisfaction with Sui Xin. Finally, he asked, "What about you and Sui Sui? When do you plan to go to Maozi's place?"

"It is estimated that the earliest will be after the fifteenth day of the first lunar month."

Wei Ran said apologetically, "I can't stay any longer today. I have to catch the high-speed train later."

“It’s a good thing for young people to have their own things to do”

Chen Guangling said gently, "And I am already satisfied to hear this Fengleiyin today."

Taking advantage of this topic, Wei Ran and Chen Guangling, two friends of different ages, spent the whole morning drinking tea. Only then did he say goodbye and drive to the high-speed rail station.

He and Xia Shushi and others had agreed to meet tomorrow, but the reason why he chose Hangzhou as the meeting place was that he actually had other ideas.

While hurrying on the road, Wei Ran finally had time to take out the backpack that the Japanese had given to Xia Shushi a few years ago, took out the thick stack of manuscripts from it, and started reading from the table of contents.

Even from an objective point of view, when Hirano Daisho wrote this memoir, he did not seem to have much reflection on the war. Of course, he did not have much admiration for the war or enthusiasm for porn.

In this memoir, Hirano Daisho looks at the war from a somewhat strange perspective.

Or rather, he has always viewed this war from a businessman's perspective.

Hirano Daisho has an older brother, an older sister, a younger sister, and of course, a widowed mother and a wife who is a sister of his sister-in-law.

In his words, his elder brother Taro Hirano is an excellent businessman and has always been his role model. Even the family's life became better after his elder brother started the rice business.

Before that, the family even had to worry about having enough food to eat.

Because of this, Hirano Daito regards his brother as a role model. If there were no war, he might have become his brother's helper in business.

But later, the war began and Hirano Daisho became a soldier in the Osaka Division.

For a long time afterwards, Hirano Daito recounted how he rose from a private to the position of quartermaster, and how touched he was when his brother gave him the family heirloom wakizashi after learning about this.

Skipping the long paragraph of nonsense in the middle, in the memoir, Hirano Daito followed the Osaka Division to Shanghai as the quartermaster.

Because of the job of the quartermaster, he was assigned an interpreter, who did his job diligently and took him to many places and experienced many things during this period, so much so that he often wondered if they could make greater profits if there was no war and if they could do business.

Continuing to flip forward, there is another considerable section recording everything he saw and experienced in Shanghai. These memories include delicious food, foreigners from various countries, all kinds of women, and all kinds of overseas Chinese and Chinese people.

He even specifically mentioned that he had fallen in love with a dancer from Poland, and his translator brought the dancer to his bed the next day.

It was during these trivial matters that his sister Aoi Hirano came to Shencheng, China as a nurse.

He also discovered that his translator seemed to have a crush on his sister, but he didn't care.

He believed that his sister would not fall for such a man who was "like a wild dog wagging its tail to beg for mercy."

It seems that it was since his sister came to Shencheng that his translator Kawaguchi Yoshiyoshi began to drag him into some "dangerous business".

But because he was a dancer in the hotel, and in order to make his sister Aoi Hirano live a better life, Hirano Daisho made full use of the "racial talent" of Osaka people.

Soon, he brought two of his friends along, and used various pretexts to embezzle some scarce medicines and seized weapons, which he then sold to local gangs in Shanghai through his translator.

Although this business was extremely dangerous, it also allowed Hirano Aoi to save up a lot of money for his brother, and also made him evaluate his translator as "reliable Kawaguchi-kun".

In this section, Wei Ran read the part about transactions in particular detail.

But I don't know whether he was worried that this memoir would cause trouble for his friends or for himself.

Therefore, not only did he never mention the names of his two accomplices in his memoirs, he did not even write down in detail the time, place and quantity of any transaction.

Accordingly, he used a lot of vague descriptions in these memories, such as "I remember one time", "another time", "some injections", etc.

"Businessman's caution."

Wei Ran muttered something incoherently, and continued to flip through a few pages to "fast forward" in a physical sense, and finally found Hirano Daisho's description of his departure from Shencheng.

In this passage, his translator Kawaguchi Yoshiyoshi has become "my most trusted friend and business partner". Before leaving China, Hirano Daisho hired "my most trusted friend and business partner" to serve as the "translator and bodyguard" of his sister Hirano Aoi "at a salary that is definitely generous".

He even gave his ancestral wakizashi to "my most trusted friend and business partner" Kawaguchi Yoshiyoshi.

The latter also vowed, "I will protect Ms. Hirano Aoi with my life."

Although this description was so childish that Wei Ran almost went into slow motion and recalled the past, in fact, when he turned to the next page, the whole article was full of curses against "my most trusted friend and business partner" and concerns about his sister.

Of course, there was also the "bad news" he learned when he unexpectedly encountered "Kawaguchi Friendship" 25 years after recruiting nuclear weapons.

Continuing to watch, Wei Ran saw that the next memory had become the part where he was transferred to Feilu Funeral. He fast-forwarded again and finally found the preparations when Hirano Daisho decided to go to Yinni to find Kawaguchi Yoshiyoshi and his sister Hirano Aoi.

By the way, he also mentioned that his mother, brother, sister-in-law and nephew died in the US bombing of Osaka in 1945, and his sister had "died a martyr" on Saipan before that.

Because of this, he must find his only remaining relative at all costs.

"We really are destined to meet each other," Wei Ran muttered vaguely, and continued reading with an unconcealed smile.

In the following description, Hirano Daisho went through a long period of preparation before rushing to the inkstone, but when he followed the address, he only found the handle of the wakizashi sword that he had given to Kawaguchi Kinsei and the ox horn comb of his sister Hirano Aoi in the house.

Although these were almost the same as what Xia Shushi had said years before, Wei Ran still noticed a detail.

In the description of the handle of the wakizashi, Hirano Daisho said, "This wakizashi, which symbolizes the honor of the Hirano family, was broken by someone. Could it be that my sister doesn't want to see me? Otherwise, why didn't she even want the comb that mother left for her?"

Was it broken by humans?

Wei Ran put the manuscript aside temporarily, took out the knife handle from his bag, and carefully observed the broken end for the first time.

"It really is"

Wei Ran muttered secretly that the broken part had obvious signs of annealing after heating, and also seemed to have been chiseled off when it was in a red state.

After throwing the wakizashi handle back into his bag, Wei Ran picked up the manuscript again and started reading it. However, he did not expect that the subsequent description only lasted until he returned to Osaka in despair and decided to save money to go to Shanghai to look for it.

Apparently he was dead, killed in that perhaps accidental fire.

After putting the memoir manuscript, which he had only roughly flipped through, back into the Japanese leather backpack, Wei Ran picked up the photo album and flipped through it carefully.

Most of the photos in this album are group photos or individual photos of Daisho Hirano and his sister.

Fortunately, he found a photo of Kawaguchi Yoshiyoshi, or "Zhang Taichuan" in it.

In this photo, Kawaguchi Yoshiyoshi is standing on the right side of Hirano Daisho, and Hirano Aoi is standing on his left side.

However, Wei Ran keenly noticed from the shadows of the three people in the photo that Kawaguchi Yoshiyoshi and Hirano Aoi seemed to be very boldly holding hands behind Hirano Daisho.

Kawaguchi Friendly Zhang Taichuan.

What kind of person are you?

Wei Ran looked at the young man in the photo and pondered secretly. Judging from the appearance alone, whether it is Kawaguchi Yoshiyoshi or Zhang Taichuan, they might be considered a little "greasy and powdered" in this era, but in that era, they were definitely handsome young men.

Especially since he doesn't look very old. This might be the last photo taken before Hirano Daisho left China. Zhang Taichuan looks to be no more than 24 or 25 years old.

But Hirano Aoi looks younger, probably around 20 years old.

On this point, Wei Ran still believed in his own vision, especially this large-size group photo which was indeed exceptionally clear.

I continued to flip through the album. The second half was mostly tropical scenes, while the last part of the photos showed a scorched city landscape and a tree that was burned to a one-meter-high trunk.

Hirano even took a photo next to the charred tree trunk.

Then, the dead tree in the photo began to sprout, and a building appeared next to it, with a sign that read "Hirano Izakaya". This is also the last photo in this album.

Seeing these relics here, the high-speed train was about to arrive in Hangzhou, so Wei Ran immediately packed up his things, put a cheap backpack he bought randomly on the outside of the Japanese backpack, stood up and walked out.

Although the meeting time with Xia Shushi was scheduled for tomorrow, in fact, as soon as he got out of the station, he immediately saw Qin II waiting for him.

"Why are you here? Where is Xia Shushi?" Wei Ran asked as he followed the other person out.

“He is still with his grandfather.”

Qin II said, "I brought the things, and also the photos that my crazy aunt found. Oh, by the way, Zhong Zhen also came with me."

"Take this"

As Wei Ran spoke, he handed a red envelope containing eight big red bills to Qin II.

"What's this?" Qin II asked in confusion as he took the red envelope.

"I brought it to you from Sui Sui's grandparents and our parents."

Wei Ran explained seriously, "Happy New Year."

Upon hearing this, the scumbag Qin II reacted very quickly, and then hurriedly responded with "Happy New Year". By the way, he also stuffed the red envelope worth 800 yuan into the inner pocket of his down jacket, and at the same time said that he would go to pay New Year's greetings in person later.

During this casual chat, the two of them left the high-speed rail station and got into a car that they had borrowed from someone. Qin Ershi immediately took out a file bag from the glove box and stuffed it into his pocket, "Take a look first, everything is in here."

"Have you found the person?" Wei Ran asked as he took out a pair of gloves and put them on.

"Writing a threatening letter?"

"Definitely"

"I didn't find it," Qin Ershi replied as he lit a cigarette. "It's not possible over there with the Japs. There are too few surveillance cameras and it's hard to find."

At the same time, Wei Ran took out a kraft paper envelope from the file bag and took out the letter from it.

However, before he opened the letter, he sniffed.

"Forget about the cigarette."

As Wei Ran spoke, he had already opened the car door and put the letter to his nose and smelled it.

"What's the matter?" Qin II asked in confusion after opening the car door a step later.

“Very light perfume smell”

Wei Ran handed the letter to Qin Er Shi and said, "Is it originally supposed to taste like this?"

"It was there originally," Qin II replied as he took the envelope, "It looks like it was sprayed on intentionally."

"Why spray perfume into the threatening letter?" Wei Ran couldn't help but frowned.