— Holy Roman Empire Calendar, Year 1940. —
Love in a Closed Country portrayed the people of Wano as guileless and warm, its unhurried pastoral rhythms unspooling across the first half of the film. Borsalino found himself smiling at the screen more often than he expected.
The story was uncomplicated enough. An amnesiac Marine washes ashore in Wano Country and is taken in by a village girl named Hibari. He forgets his name, his rank, and the fiancée waiting for him at Marine Headquarters. The villagers call him Helmeppo. He takes to farming. A quiet romance grows between him and his rescuer.
In the middle stretch of the film, things took a sharp turn.
The country's ruling general — General Orochi — had caught sight of Hibari at a village festival and become fixated on her. On the couple's wedding night, he sent soldiers to take her. What followed was brief and brutal: rather than be brought before Orochi, Hibari drew a blade across her own throat and died on the floor of the bridal chamber.
When the amnesiac Marine arrived moments too late and found her there, his memory came flooding back all at once.
The second half of the film concerned the Marine sending warships, and the fiancée personally leading the rescue operation to extract her man from this sealed country. But by the time she reached him, Helmeppo had already shaved his head. In memory of Hibari, he had taken vows, cut every worldly tie, and refused to return to her. The final scene was a pier at sunset: the fiancée Kujaku's tears, and Hikaru back, walking away.
When the credits began to roll, a production credit appeared that Borsalino had not expected: Wanokuni Films.
Barry glanced sideways at him. The young couple sitting one row ahead were wiping their eyes. They shuffled out quietly, leaving uncle and nephew to themselves.
Borsalino waited until the doors swung shut behind them, then exhaled every complaint he had accumulated over two hours.
"This is what you called a romance film? Did they film the whole thing in Wano Country? They borrowed Marine characters and used them to tell a story about their own people. What exactly is this supposed to be?"
He crossed his arms. How Helmeppo, Hibari, and Kujaku had ended up in a love triangle set entirely in Wano Country was entirely beyond him.
Barry kept his expression neutral and offered the explanation Borsalino had already half-formed himself. Love in a Closed Country was, at its core, a Wano Country tourism film dressed in a Marine uniform. The Marine setting gave it commercial credibility. The Wano setting gave it scenery.
"It is the highest-grossing romance film of this era," Barry added.
"I can see that much," Borsalino said.
Barry explained the market without being asked to. Romance films were the dominant genre in peacetime. Historical pieces and war films received critical praise and respectable retrospective runs, but young audiences did not seek them out, and they rarely turned a profit. The Marine had featured in too many shoddy productions over the past decade. People had grown tired of watching pirates get defeated. It had become a formula — and formulas, eventually, grew stale.
Borsalino listened, then let out a quiet, slightly strange laugh.
"The world really is changing. And people's hearts along with it. What future generations pursue is not so different from what we wanted — but what they're willing to sit through for two hours is apparently quite different."
Barry nodded. "That's ordinary life. For most people, history is something that happened to someone else, a long time ago."
He had grown up in the new era. The Marine was a chapter in a textbook — a page with illustrations and a summary box at the bottom. Admiral Borsalino warranted a paragraph, he said, a portrait, and a reasonably complete account of the major engagements. Barry had read it in school.
That was why the disguise had been necessary going out. Not because Borsalino was unrecognizable — quite the opposite. In this era, anyone who had sat through a history class would recognize that face without difficulty. Barry had applied a false beard and still considered it insufficient.
Borsalino absorbed this in silence.
"Helmeppo," he said, after a moment. "I remember him. Bald young man. A few rough edges, but genuine conviction, and the character to back it up. He had room to grow." He paused. "But Admiral? The background wasn't there. The networks weren't there."
He shook his head — not unkindly. In the landscape of the Twelve Admirals, Helmeppo had been a peripheral figure at best. And yet here was a film studio crafting a love triangle around him, complete with Kujaku and Hibari on either side.
"Will he be very famous in the future?"
Barry told the story without embellishment. Helmeppo was considered a household name in this era — a model of the unlikely hero. He was the son of a Marine traitor. His closest early companion had also been a Marine traitor. He had never been positioned near the institution's elite, never cultivated the right connections, never moved in the mainstream circles.
And yet.
Dressrosa — conquered. Three engagements with the one known as the Bloody Guanyin — survived, each time coming away with the better outcome. Morgan, the Silver Axe — killed by Helmeppo's hand. Blackbeard — captured.
"Before he passed away," Barry said, "he left behind a line that became widely circulated. Today I know who I am."
Barry repeated it with a slight self-conscious pause, as if aware of how it sounded.
Borsalino stared at the darkened screen. The line was unexpectedly heavy for a man who had spent his youth as the son of a traitor, and later as a bald background figure in Marine history.
"What does nirvana mean, exactly? It doesn't sound like something to celebrate."
"It can be understood as a form of death — but the kind that may be a state of mind as much as a physical end," Barry said. "Helmeppo was the first monk in Marine history to have achieved it. That's the record."
He added, after a brief pause, that Sengoku had not reached the same standard — a point that Buddhist practitioners in this era were apparently not shy about raising. Their assessment of the former Fleet Admiral was not generous. He was described as a traitor to the faith, the figure who had set the Sixth Heaven Demon King loose upon the world. The Buddhist country that fell as a consequence had since vanished from history entirely.
The Marine's official historical position on Sengoku was that his merits outweighed his faults — though that verdict was contested in the broader public sphere, and without the institutional endorsement backing it, the image would likely have been considerably worse.
"My old boss," Borsalino said quietly, "still having his corpse dragged out to be examined after all these years. People in the future have remarkable creative energy when it comes to the dead."
He shook his head, genuinely unable to imagine what shape Sengoku's villain arc had taken in whatever dramatizations the era had produced.
The theater's house lights rose gradually. He sat with it for a moment.
Ghost in the Shell earlier in the week, and now this. A clearer picture was taking shape. The future moved toward entertainment — everything commodified, everything adapted, the seams between reality and spectacle growing thinner. Whether a script was accurate was a question for archivists. Whether it sold was a question everyone else was asking.
In this future, only a narrow slice of the population would ever care about the buried truth of an era. As a proportion of the total, they barely registered.
And why would they? Life here was comfortable. Safe. The kind of peace people worked for without quite believing they'd reach it.
Borsalino thought: Anything that delays making money is not doing the right thing. It was not how he had been taught to think. But watching that young couple cry over Helmeppo and Hibari, and then walk out into the evening holding hands — he found it difficult to argue with.