Miscellany (cont’d)
Severance Pay and Human Trafficking (cont’d)
Being threatened by Saburō Egawa, number three Jirō Hashimoto answered: “Tsurumi got involved with Oshin soon after she left Lethbridge and while she was at Matsumoto’s. If you have any problem with it go talk to Matsumoto directly. As for Yakichi Murata, he is indeed a relative of mine, but I had no knowledge about his relationship with Oshin. It must be some kind of mistake.” He said firmly. Then his wife Okiyo heard about this after Egawa left and furiously accused Jirō, “Why did you say such a thing? How could you say you didn’t know about the relationship when Yakichi is actually staying in this house? Even if you play innocent, the community wouldn’t approve of that!” This ended up in a quarrel and Okiyo left that night to hide in Hosmer. Uncle Jirō went pale and made a stir.
When Okiyo was on the way to Hosmer, she accidentally bumped into Takeshi Satō’s wife Osaki on the train. Osaki was on the way back to Saskatoon, from Nelson’s Chabujin’s place, for her secret mission to pick up a prostitute, but she was unexpectedly caught by Okiyo. Okiyo spread the news that Takeshi got a new prostitute out to the cave community. This prostitute is Kichi Satake, whom we introduced back then in a series entitled “Story—Proliferation of Devils”.
I went too off the subject, but in sum, in the interior cave society severance pay connotes complex relations in all directions and severance pay refers to the price of human trafficking. There are mountains of actual cases of this, but these are ridiculous matters anyway and I will move on in haste. I will conclude this section here and leave the rest with the reader’s imagination.