Confessions of a Yakuza Page 11

  The pack got gradually farther and farther away up the gully, till they disappeared altogether. We watched, thinking we might see them again at the top of the hill, but they didn’t show up, and we never saw them again that winter.

  Well, we got through the winter. Spring came, the grass started growing, and suddenly we were in trouble. I mean, training began in earnest. Up to then, we’d been having basic training on the barrack square, but once it got warm real training started outside the base, at the foot of the hills. Seems the colonel had got it into his head that he was going to put the 75th Regiment through its paces till it was a match for any other regiment. So the officers gave us a pretty rough time. We were being bawled out all day long. I got really fed up.

  Come the end of summer and I couldn’t stand it any more. So I got the idea of deserting. It makes me smile to think about it now. I don’t suppose anyone who wasn’t alive before the war would understand just how serious an offense desertion was in those days. The deserter himself was shot if he was caught, so for him that was the end of it; but it made life really tough for his family afterward, at least out in the country anyway. People just cut them dead. The son was a traitor, so his family were “non-citizens,” and no treatment was too bad for them. So nobody with any sense at all would ever attempt it. And the people back home, as well, would almost rather their boy got killed than have him desert. But in my case—well, I wasn’t exactly the “sensible” sort, and I was considering it quite seriously.

  Still, talking about deserting was all very well, but there was no chance of getting back to Japan proper, so it meant getting away to another country or nothing. The quickest and easiest way would be Manchuria. Manchuria was only just across the Tuman river.

  Luckily enough, just around that time, I was assigned to the rifle works, where they repaired all the regiment’s weapons. A couple of likely looking men were selected from each company to see to the company’s own weapons, which meant there were about twenty of us in the workshop. Rifles were fitted with bayonets at the muzzle end, but the bayonets themselves weren’t usually sharpened; they had to be sharp if you were going into action, though, so we were taught how to use the grinder on the blades in case of an emergency.

  The best things about working there were that you didn’t have to run round and round the parade ground, and you could talk to the other men. In other places, you couldn’t ever say what you liked because an NCO always had his eye on you, but here nobody bothered you so long as you were doing your work. The noise of the machines helped keep things private, too. That was convenient—particularly when I struck up with two guys from the machine-gun unit there, Nemoto Yusaku and Kanazawa Ryukichi. Kanazawa was a schoolteacher’s son, and knew a good deal about China. I don’t know who he got it from, but to hear him talk you’d think he’d been there himself.

  There was a general feeling in Japan in those days that anything was possible if you went to Manchuria. I remember a popular song that went: “I’m setting out, so you come too, / To a nobler, freer fate— / Across the seas to China where / A land and people wait.” Anyway, the fact was that Manchuria was a mess. The place was crawling with warlords, bandits, and so on, who did more or less what they liked—I mean, there wasn’t any proper government, so it was every man for himself, and a lot of people who couldn’t make a living in Japan drifted over there hoping to get rich. A fair number of them became bandits, apparently. There was a woman called “Okiku of Manchuria,” for instance—she was one of the best known—who was supposed to be a force to reckon with there, with at least five thousand followers of her own.

  All this was happening just when we were being trained in Korea, so I felt it mightn’t be a bad idea to set up as a bandit myself. At first it was me and Kanazawa and Nemoto who worked out the plan, but after a while we decided to include two others, and started thinking of ways of stealing machine guns.

  The reason I liked the idea of us becoming bandits was that I’d actually seen some myself. I told you there was a red-light district near the base, didn’t I? Well, once every few months or so, the leader of the most powerful mob in Kilin province used to turn up there. His name was Wang Kungtê, a big, dark man with a long moustache drooping down to his chin. He wore a bearskin hat, and his hair hung down his back as far as his waist. He used to come riding in on a fine chestnut horse—not a care in the world—with about a dozen armed followers, then spend a couple of hundred yen there in a matter of two or three days, before heading back across the Tuman river again.

  I saw him several times myself, and I always thought what a fine sight he was: riding along with his hair streaming out behind him in a great clatter of hooves, and his men all galloping after him with the tails of their coats flapping in the wind. Compared with us, all smeared with sweat and dust from the parade ground, you’d have thought he came from a different planet. Seriously, I’d have given anything to be like him, galloping off as far as I could get from there!

  I only found out later, actually, but it seems Wang Kungtê wasn’t the kind of man we imagined. He had ties with the Japanese secret service; the reason he came to Hoeryông was so he could sell Japan information about the situation in Kilin. They had an agreement, apparently: officers from the Special Service Agency would have a secret meeting somewhere with him, listen to the latest information he’d collected, then pay him off. That’s why he was able to come to the brothels right close to our HQ, bringing his followers with him and passing our sentries on the way. But we, of course, hadn’t the faintest idea about that in those days, and just went on waiting for the right moment to escape.

  Luckily or unluckily, though, the time never did come. As the day for putting the plan into practice got closer, Kanazawa began to get the wind up, and ended up confessing to the sergeant. So we were all arrested and interrogated. According to the sergeant, the others owned up without any fuss, but I swore I didn’t know anything at all about the plan. So they treated me as the ringleader, on the grounds that I was holding out on them.

  Soldiers who’d committed some serious offense were usually sent to the military jail at Kokura in southern Japan. I was resigned to the same thing happening to me, but instead they put me in the regimental lockup.

  This was located behind the sentry box at the north corner of the base, a square, concrete building. The door was a wooden grille, like Japanese jails in the old days. Inside, though, it would have put Sugamo to shame. It was really small—a kind of kennel just big enough for one person to get into. You couldn’t stand up or sit down, you had to lie down all day. It was two feet wide, just enough to take your shoulders, and roughly two feet high and seven feet deep, with a wooden floor and one blanket. It was almost impossible to turn over.

  The other guys had all been put in the same sort of holes, but there was hell to pay if you talked, so generally it was quiet as a tomb. About the only thing to look forward to was when you went to the john. There was a john inside the lockup, and they took you there twice a day. You can’t piss only twice a day, though, so when you wanted to go you had to call the guard.

  “What’s the matter with you?” he’d say.

  “I’m sorry, but I’ve got to have a piss.”

  “Well, you can’t. You can wait,” he’d tell you, sharply.

  “Please!... Please!” you’d try again, and after a few times, grumbling, he might let you go.

  The other men asked to go in the same way several times a day, so the give-and-take between the guard and the prisoners, and the sound of footsteps, at least made something to listen to.

  Anyway, I just can’t tell you how tough it is, not to say boring, to stay lying down without being able to move. Particularly after the first few days, when the others were let out and I was left there all alone, it was plain agony. If you leave a person cooped up in the dark for too long, he begins to go funny in the head. It’s worse than any torture. You know you’ll be bawled out if you shout, but you just can’t help calling, “Please ... please—let me o
ut for a minute to stretch my back a bit.” But the guard would just bang on the bars and yell, “That’s enough of that noise there!” If you still went on hollering, he’d open the door and clip you around the head. The result was I gradually went a bit balmy, and began to spend all my time cursing Kanazawa and telling myself I’d kill him.

  I had all kinds of dreams too; one of them I can remember quite clearly. I was galloping along all by myself on a horse, and I suddenly realized I was Chinese. So I got in with a group of bandits, and was riding about the plains when another group came riding toward us on red horses. Funnily enough, the red horses weren’t real ones, they were rocking horses. And the strange thing was, the rocking horses were much faster than our own. I was wondering why that should be, when someone said to me, “Don’t you know? This is the age of rocking horses, not real horses any longer.” Then I realized it was Kanazawa. “You fucking traitor,” I thought, “I’m going to kill you!” and I chased after him, but he turned around to look at me. “D’you think a Chinese can beat a Japanese soldier?” he said, and he laughed out loud. The next thing I knew, he had a machine gun and was coming after me. I ran like mad, till I found myself on the parade ground with men pounding around it in single file and the colonel shouting orders at them. I looked harder, and saw he was just like Nemoto.

  “Nemoto—what are you doing here?” I asked.

  “You’re a traitor,” he said. “I’m going to have you shot!”

  They grabbed me on the spot, and tied me to a tree in the middle of the square. I was so cold I didn’t know what to do. Everything all around was white with snow. I knew I’d die if I didn’t do something. “Help!” I yelled. There was a sound like thunder over my head, and I woke up and found the guard beating on the grille with an iron bar....

  So time went by in much the same way, day after day, till in the end I got delirious. According to the guard, it was on the twenty-fifth day that they finally let me out. When I first went outside, the bright sunlight and the crowds of people made me giddy. The main thing I noticed, though, was that the world looked completely different from what it had before I was put inside. I suppose I’d lost all my kid’s illusions and begun to see things straight. Even when I bumped into Kanazawa again, I didn’t feel any particular hate for him at all.

  The training grounds, which I couldn’t stand the sight of usually, looked wonderful to me then, and the hills and countryside were like a dreamland. Yes, the lockup’s a dreadful place....

  Alexandrias

  I was in Hoeryông for something over a year after that, but nothing much worth mentioning happened.

  I was discharged at the end of 1927. I celebrated it by drinking all night in the red-light district. As we were sailing east on the ship, Japan came into sight, a line of green hills; my eyes got damp, and I stood there gazing and gazing at it. We played cards for cash to kill time on board—games organized not by a soldier but a professional gambler. Quite a few of the men were completely cleaned out, and had to send a telegram from the ship: “Please meet at Osaka with money.” When I was discharged, they’d given me back the twenty yen the boss had sent me, and I used it to make a hundred and seventy-five yen in all.

  My mother and sister were at the harbor in Osaka to meet me. We stayed in Kyoto that night, then did some sightseeing the next day; I bought a couple of bolts of best Nishijin brocade for my sister to have a kimono made, and a kimono sash for my mother. That was the first and last time in my life I did the decent thing by my family.

  I went home to Utsunomiya and loafed around for ten days or so. During that time the local Veterans’ Association gave a party to celebrate my return from army service—just as if I was a hero or something; I was tickled pink. But before long a letter came from Okada, one of the senior men in the gang. I knew he was the type that hardly ever wrote letters, so I felt a bit uneasy and opened it in a hurry.

  “The boss has got something wrong with his chest,” he wrote. “He’s getting treatment, but things don’t look too good. You’re one of us he’s been specially good to, so why don’t you come and see him?”

  That was a real shock. It was some time since I’d got back, but so far I hadn’t even dropped in to see them, and I’d been thinking it was about time I went and paid my respects. So I hopped on a train that day and went to Tokyo.

  The boss was really pleased to see me safe and well. He noticed how the training had made me thinner, and teased me about it: going into the army had made me half as handsome again, he said. He seemed better, in fact, than I’d expected; it set my mind at rest for the moment. When I thanked him for the pocket money he’d sent, he said I could make up for it by telling them about life in Korea. So I told them how I’d been put in the lockup.

  That interested them a lot. They all knew what it was like to be in jail, but nobody’d ever been in a military lockup before. I’d seen something even the older men hadn’t seen, and that made me the center of attention, I suppose. When I told them how I’d tried to desert they were disgusted. They made fun of me, said I ought to have known better than to trust someone who was a clever talker, and that I must have gone a bit soft in the head.

  With one thing and another, I ended up staying on in the Dewaya, and never went back to Utsunomiya at all.

  Well, things went on all right for a while, and then the boss took a turn for the worse again. It was the beginning of summer. He wasn’t bad enough to go into a hospital, but they told him he’d got to rest, so he went off to stay at his villa on the coast at Oiso. With Muramatsu taking charge of the games, there was nothing for him to worry about. I mean, Muramatsu was famous as a gambler, there wasn’t a single yakuza in Tokyo who didn’t know about him. So the boss could afford to recover in his own time. Once a month, Muramatsu would send him some spending money, and if anything else came up he’d send down one of the younger men.

  One day he called me in and said it was my turn to go and see how the boss was getting on. “Right,” I said, “I’ll be off straightaway.” But he gave me a lot of instructions before I left. “Listen,” he said, “the people who live in Oiso aren’t your ordinary locals. The big political and company bosses have all got fancy villas there; if you get into a quarrel or make any other sort of trouble, it’s the boss who’ll suffer for it, so mind what you’re doing. And you can’t go looking like that, either. Put on your best clothes, and go and get your hair cut good and short.”

  It sounded a bit funny, coming from him, but orders are orders, so I went and got myself trimmed up. Then, when I was ready to leave, he gave me some money and said, “This is to buy a present for him. Go to Sembikiya in the Ginza and get some Alexandrias to take with you.”

  I hadn’t a clue what Alexandrias were, so I asked him. He said they were grapes.

  You know, in those days, in the late 1920s, almost nobody ate things like that. I imagine they grew them in greenhouses or somewhere; most ordinary people, though, would never even have seen them. Muramatsu handed me twenty yen to buy them with. I couldn’t believe it.

  “But—how am I going to carry as many as that?” I asked.

  He laughed. “You stupid bastard,” he said, “you’ve no idea what things cost, do you? Listen—just go along to Sembikiya and ask for twenty yen’s worth—you’ll find you only get a handful.”

  “You’re kidding!”

  “Stop messing around and go and see for yourself.”

  So I went to Sembikiya, still only half believing him. But it was just like he said: all I got for my money was two measly bunches. I was so worried about squashing them, I kept them in my lap all the way down to Oiso, feeling like I was holding the crown jewels....

  The boss’s place was a solid-looking house with a big garden. The garden had an artificial hill and a pond in it. Beyond it, I could see a grove of pine trees. And beyond them was the sea.

  “It’s been a long time, boss,” I said. “How are you feeling?” He looked pleased to see me. He’d got a tan, so you’d never have thought he was
sick. I handed him an envelope I’d been given for him.

  “Muramatsu said this was to keep you going for the time being.” He nodded. “And these are a present—I bought them at Sembikiya on the way here.”

  He thanked me, and Shiro, who was helping out at the villa, went and washed the grapes, then brought them back on a dish.

  “Boss,” I said, “these grapes are something special, aren’t they?”

  “What’s so special about them?”

  “But they cost twenty yen!” I said, my eyes fixed on them. Shiro too was staring at them with a sort of half-starved look.

  The boss laughed. “Haven’t you ever had them, then?”

  “No.”

  “Didn’t you get them in Korea?”

  “Even the colonel probably couldn’t afford things like this.”

  “I don’t suppose he could. Army officers are all moustaches and empty wallets.” He chuckled. “Here—try one, for the colonel’s sake.”

  I hesitated, so he said “Go on.”

  So I picked one grape and popped it in my mouth.

  “Good, aren’t they?” he said.

  “I’ve never had anything like it.”

  “Well, have another.”

  “You sure?”

  “Go ahead. It’s more fun watching you eat them.” So I helped myself to another grape. Shiro was positively drooling as he watched all this.

  “You want some too, Shiro?”

  “Well, I wouldn’t say no.”

  The boss was grinning, and the grapes sat there on the white dish like bunches of jewels.

  I went to visit him any number of times after that. Maybe he was worried in case I was stopped and questioned by the police, as he didn’t much like it if I went out to look around the neighborhood. Anyway, the other villas there were all as quiet as the grave, even in daytime; the only sound you heard was the wind in the pines. Rich people actually seem to like lonely places, but not me—give me a crowd, every time.