Ugly Case II (cont’d)
Her nickname was Okan but she currently goes by Omine in the interior, and her real name is Omaki. Using three different names is a unique phenomenon that can only be seen among wily fellows. She arrived in this port safely and Tatsurō Shinjō’s duty was over. Around this time, landing was not as difficult as today, and she immediately left the ship and hid in the city of Vancouver. There is no way that she reenacted Lao-tze’s expression “Great philosopher hides (lives) in the city” but even if she actually did, it is hard to accept that she is a great philosopher. But she is indeed an experienced and crafty warrior prostitute, a Nagoya seed raised in Yokohama and that traveled over the Pacific Ocean, and she might had false confidence that they were the true intelligentsia, seeing the world only partially and treating all the tangible and intangible things in society merely as idiotic. In that sense, she might have actually been a great philosopher who hid in the city.
In the meantime, there was a strategist, who found no philosophers remaining out there and was robustly looking for new resources. As the woman arrived via a promised route, being certified by Yoshida in Yokohama and entrusted to Shinjō on Tartar, the rest went quickly. Okan stayed in some hotel on Westminster Street and later disguised herself as a waitress and hid at a Japanese restaurant in Chinatown for a while to judge the state of affairs. When an opportunity came, the strategist finally sent her to Kawamoto’s cave in Nelson. But after evolutionary theorist Shiraishi moved from Rossland and took over Hayashi, Okan seems to have moved to Shiraishi’s. As I wrote earlier, she no longer calls herself Okan but Omine, a disguising pseudonym (!), and she never tired of her life in the cave.