This is the beginning of a new chapter.
About five years or so have passed between Chapter 5 and the beginning of 1548, which is the time of this chapter.
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6-1
Shang Liwu ("Kamisato Stall") in the city of Ayutthaya is a big store known throughout the country of Siam. The owner of the store is Zhang Songyi, the son-in-law of Zhang Jingxiu, a major overseas Chinese merchant based in Luzon and Manila. About six years ago, Zhang Songyi arrived in Ayutthaya and immediately started buying rice in bulk and exporting it to Luzon and Manila in large quantities. This led to a large amount of speculative buying and selling, and from the very beginning, Zhang Songyi sold his name very well as the man who caused the price of rice in Siam to skyrocket.
After that, he continued to buy several large junks and sell their cargo to big Japanese stores, as well as to purchase large quantities of niters, thereby making a name for himself not only in Ayutthaya but throughout Siam as a man of big business. At first, it was thought that he was a kind of new broker in Ayutthaya, but his big business quickly blew away such speculations of the people around him, and he allowed himself to set up the Shang Liwu as a goodwill broker. Nowadays, he is such a man in Ayutthaya, it is claimed that simply saying "Young Master Zhang" refers to Zhang Songyi.
However, who is he really?
"I can't help it. I didn't mean to do this to myself."
It was none other than Lieutenant (promoted after his achievements and the passage of time) Shoichi Kamisato.
Now, Kamisato lives in a mansion that is connected to the Shang Liwu building. He lives with his concubine, Pricha, and together with Pricha's two children, they have four children. He also lived with a number of servants.
Note that Pricha is someone that Zhang Jingxiu had found and recommended to Kamisato. As a single mother, she was often flirted with by the people around her, while the servants looked down on her inwardly, making it difficult for her to manage the house properly. Therefore, Zhang Jingxiu recommended Kamisato to take her as a concubine (of course, Zhang Jingxiu had other reasons for recommending Pricha to Kamisato).
His father-in-law's appraisal of the human condition was not wrong, and Pricha was defending herself. Pricha was a woman of intuition as her name implies ('Prīchā' means 'intuition' in Thai) and she was perfectly capable of taking care of things around the house, even admitting that Kamisato would eventually leave her. But the problem was.
"Father, stay with me."
"Father, I need you to do the same."
Pricha was three years older than Kamisato, married and initially living near the Burmese border. During the recent war between Burma and Siam (which was apparently only a small-scale border dispute of human hunting), her husband and relatives were missing.
The irony of it all was that she had come to Ayutthaya with her family to work there by way of a message while her husband was working in Zhang Jingxiu's store, and when her husband took the money he earned to his parents' house, he and his relatives were kidnapped. Seeing Pricha at her wits' end, Zhang Jingxiu encouraged Kamisato to make her his concubine. It would be a lie to say that Pricha was not distraught, but she could not resist the lure of living comfortably with her children and decided to accept the offer.
Thus, they began living together, thinking of each other that they would be separated in a year. Six years passed, and Kamisato was adored by Pricha's children as much as their own father to the point they began to openly call him "father." Furthermore, two more children were born from their union.
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