Saju · your birth chart, read by a blind fortune-teller

Korea, the 1890s.

A blind fortune-teller traveled
from market to market
with a troupe of street performers.

Nobody used his name.
They just called him Pansu.

He went blind at seven.
At thirteen he started
reading birth charts,
working them out
with bamboo counting sticks.

On market days
the line to his mat
wrapped around the stalls.

A year later, many were back
with a sack of rice
to tell him he’d been right.

He couldn’t see their faces,
so he never sugarcoated a thing.

He worked the markets
until the spring of 1897
and died on the road.

A man in the troupe who could write
took down every reading.
Forty-five years of them.

Pansu left the last page blank.
“That one’s for whoever comes next.”

After he died, the pages scattered
across the market towns.
It took three years
to find them all.

The last page is still blank.
It’s yours.
What do you want to ask him?

Ask Pansu →