Confessions of a Yakuza Page 13

  “I want you to go back to your parents’ place, by yourself. I’ll sort things out somehow on my own side.”

  “I’d rather kill myself than go home,” she said, just like that. It was November by then, and the wind had a bite to it. She cried, and I got irritable. I made up my mind that the next day I really would leave her, and that night we went into the woods on some hills nearby and slept there, with her lying in my arms....

  The next morning, the cold woke me up just as the sun was rising. I looked around, and the girl had gone: nothing anywhere but bare trees. If people’s hearts can really turn cold, as they say, that was just how I felt right then.

  The idea that she’d run out on me gave me a queer feeling, part annoyed and part sorry for myself. I’d meant us to separate at any rate, but to have her go off of her own accord made me angry: people are funny like that. I pulled myself together and hunted around for her. No sign. Then, just as I was sitting on a stone in front of a little wayside shrine, I saw her in the distance, walking fast along a path between the paddy fields.

  “Where the hell have you been?” I asked, but all the fire had gone out of me by then.

  “I went and got some riceballs,” she replied.

  With Omitsu, on the run

  She opened a package wrapped in bamboo leaves, and there were four riceballs inside. I was surprised that somebody’d been good enough to give them to her, but it turned out she’d given the ivory toggle on her sash for them. That made me do some hard thinking as I was eating my share: it’s no good, I thought, we can’t go on like this. So I said to her, “I can’t stand seeing you like this any more. Before long I’ll be a proper yakuza, and then I’ll come and marry you, I promise. So you go back home for the time being.” She cried, but in the end it was decided she should go.

  I went with her as far as Koiwa, then went on alone to Funabashi, found an eating place where they knew me, and asked them to lend me a kitchen knife.

  “Haven’t seen you for ages, Eiji,” said a cook with a cotton towel bound neatly around his forehead. “What do you want it for?”

  “I’m going to use it here, so don’t worry. I’ll give it back to you right away.”

  He gave me the knife. I held one end of a bit of string I’d brought with me between my teeth, got hold of the other end with my right hand, and tied it around the little finger of my left hand. I pulled it as tight as I could. Then I chopped off the tip of the finger. The cook just stood there gawping, but it hurt too much for me to bother about him. I cut off one end of the clean white cotton of my bellyband, bound up the finger, then asked him for a sheet of paper. I wrapped the bit of finger in it, and left. I wasn’t at all sure that cutting off a finger would be enough to make them let me off, but there wasn’t any other way by now. So I set out for Makuta’s place in a sort of what-the-hell mood.

  When I called out in the entrance, a maid came out, and a young man with her. I introduced myself and said I’d come to apologize, and held out the finger, still wrapped in its piece of paper.

  “Just wait there a second, will you?” the man said, and disappeared inside the house. I didn’t know whether Makuta was in or not, but I could hear women talking at the back of the house. My hand by now was throbbing like hell, and my kimono was soaked with clammy sweat.

  After a while the same man came out again and said, more politely than I’d expected,

  “The boss says he understands. Now will you please leave?”

  “I see,” I said. “I’m much obliged.” And I bowed and left.

  It all went off so simply that I felt kind of let down. After that, I went straight back to Asakusa. On the way, I kept wondering why he’d made so little fuss, but I couldn’t make any sense of it. So I assumed my boss must have done the apologizing for me. The boss was back in town by then. He glanced at me when I showed up, and said, “Mind you take yourself a bit more seriously from now on.” And that was all he ever said about it.

  I got a good talking-to from Okada, but Muramatsu wasn’t even particularly angry. I remember him saying, “You’re quite a character, aren’t you?” Then he noticed me trying not to show the pain, and was decent enough to put me onto a good doctor; he even wrote a note to the surgery at the Yoshiwara hospital.

  Incidentally, I didn’t meet the girl again for years after that. I knew too well what would happen if I did, you see. A man’s no match for a girl crying. I heard rumors that she left home soon after, but I was in Maebashi jail around then, so I wouldn’t have been there even if she had come to Asakusa to see me.

  III

  I’d finished seeing my patients and was relaxing one Saturday afternoon when Hatsuyo dropped by.

  “I wasn’t sure about coming on a weekend like this,” she told me, “but he said, the doctor always comes in the evening—it might be nice for once to give him a cup of tea while it’s still light. And he asked me to pop along and ask you.”

  “How’s his temperature?”

  “Normal. He’s gradually eating a bit more too. I was worried, I thought he’d never pull round this time, but he’s stronger than you think, isn’t he?”

  Going into his living room, I noticed a flat dish lying on the low table. There was no water in it, but right in the center lay a large, lumpy black rock. The man had on a brown kimono of the kind they wear for tea ceremonies, tied with a black sash with a figured pattern.

  “What’s this?” I asked.

  “It’s a rock they use in what they call ‘tray landscapes.’ ”

  I peered more closely at the black rock in its dish.

  “Mind if I pick it up?” I said.

  “Go ahead.”

  It must have been a kind of lava. It was made up of a number of tight layers, with dark cracks in it here and there.

  “There’s grass growing on it, isn’t there?”

  “That’s because it’s a living thing. It was fifty years ago when I was given this. I was always making a mess of things in those days, and the boss was pretty disgusted with me, but one day he sent for me and said, ‘Here, Eiji, I want you to look after this.’ My mouth fell open. ‘What is it, boss?’ I asked. ‘What am I supposed to do with a lump of rock like this?’ ‘You give it water every morning and evening,’ he said. I was a bit puzzled, but it was the boss’s orders, so I took it back to my own room. And I gave it some water twice a day, but after a while I forgot to do it, and the next thing I knew it had gone. I forgot all about it for thirty or forty years, then all of a sudden it turned up again.”

  “Recently?”

  “Eight years or so ago. It was with Kamezo, my junior. Kamezo died of lung cancer, but a month or so before he went he asked me over and said, ‘Do you remember this?’ ‘Where on earth did you get it?’ I asked, in surprise. ‘When you were doing time in Maebashi I thought it would disappear if it was left where it was, so I put it away in a trunk, then forgot all about it. But as my wife was tidying up my things it turned up again. I thought that if I didn’t give it back to you in a hurry it would get lost somewhere again, which is why I got you to come here.’

  “Kamezo was a good, warmhearted friend, I never thought he’d go before me.... Anyway, I was grateful to him for keeping it for me like that. Now I’m old myself, I sort of understand what the boss felt about it, and I make a point of giving it some water once a day at least.”

  With a blanket over his bad leg and his arms folded lightly in his lap, he sat there gazing steadily at the rock.

  The Bone-Sticker

  I was twenty-six when they sent me to jail in Maebashi. I’d killed someone, you see, and I was in for over four years.

  He was sitting with his feet in the sunken hearth, leaning against a back rest; he had a padded jacket over his kimono, and a muffler around his neck. The telephone lines were moaning in the wind above the roof.

  Just north of the Ryounkaku in Asakusa, the twelve-story building like a pagoda that collapsed in the Great Earthquake, there used to be what they called “Gourd Pond.” The dis
trict near it was packed with brothels, and I’d been put in charge of a gambling place right there among them.

  It was a boiling hot day at the height of summer, I remember. Around noon, Muramatsu sent for me and asked if I’d mind taking someone in for a while.

  “What kind of guy is he?” I said.

  “You know Tomi in Shinagawa, don’t you? He’s a brother who helped me out once. Well, this fellow’s the bookie at Tomi’s place, a guy called Kiyomasa. Seems he’s a good man, but from what I heard he caused some kind of trouble that put him on bad terms with the younger men. So they asked if we couldn’t take him in here in Asakusa till they get it out of their system.”

  “I see.”

  “Just keep him out of the boss’s way—you know how it is with him now.”

  Muramatsu was my senior as well, so of course I agreed to do it. I could see its advantages, in fact. A good bookie makes all the difference in a gambling joint—it’s up to him whether a session comes alive or falls flat. At my own place, which was fairly small, Kamezo was the bookie, but with the best will in the world you could never have called him good at it.

  When I actually met the guy, though, I had a feeling that something nasty was going to happen. The minute I saw his face, I felt we weren’t going to hit it off. The feeling was right, too: I was going to end up killing him. It makes you think, doesn’t it?... But it’s too easy to make the facts fit after the event.

  Anyway, I realized right off that with Kiyomasa around the gang could come unstuck. It was no good pretending to be senior in rank, in front of the younger men, if I was going to lose control over my place. I’d be ashamed in front of the boss, too. So I knew I’d have to do something ; not bump him off, obviously—you don’t kill a man just for that—but get him out of the way as soon as I could. But even kicking him out wasn’t as easy as that, not with someone who’d been sent to Muramatsu by one of his brothers. So I decided to wait a while and see how it worked out.

  In the end, it was about two months later that anything actually happened, but the seeds of trouble were there right from the start. There’s a saying, “hate a priest, hate his cassock,” and it’s true: I took a dislike to every single thing about him. I expect it was the same with him as well.

  On the outside at least, Kiyomasa was a good-looking guy, tall and with good features, straight nose, thick eyebrows, and a kind of brisk, convincing manner. And yet ...

  “I hope I’ll be satisfactory,” he said to me when he first came, bowing his head as a junior should, but as he raised it again he flicked his eyes up at me as though to say, “You think I’ll take orders from a kid like you?”

  I was still only just over twenty-five at the time, and Kiyomasa was a good seven or eight years older, so I suppose it hurt his pride. But age doesn’t matter in that business. As I said before, there are some men who are like the paneling in the john, however old they get, and there are others who become the main pillar of the house while they’re still young. Age by itself just doesn’t carry any weight.

  That doesn’t mean, though, that he was a dead loss, that he was no use to anybody; it wasn’t as straightforward as that, which made it all the more awkward. To be fair, he had a real talent for organizing games, as you might expect in someone with such a punchy character.

  When I first tried him out as our bookie, the way he called the betting and kept a general eye on things was all you could ask for. The games went like wildfire. He had a deep, husky voice and a good line in come-ons. The players lapped it up, and the bets came fast and furious. He made it exciting— made you feel you could almost see the spots on the dice in the cup.

  Kiyomasa started getting popular, and the younger guys at our place were all behind him. The feeling was that he looked after them well, and for a while everybody got on fine. But it wasn’t long before he began to show his own spots.

  He was good, no doubt about it, but he was too proud of it—that was obvious too. He’d never actually say anything, but his expression had something snide about it. You could tell he didn’t give a damn about you. I don’t know why he always looked like that. That being his nature, I suppose, he couldn’t stop it showing in his face. He’d do something to amuse the customers, then the next minute he’d give this nasty little smile. It’s fatal in a professional gambler.

  Let me tell you what happened one day. It was an evening when there weren’t many customers, and he said to me:

  “There’s not much action here, so how about it—why don’t we play some chiipa?”

  “It’s an idea,” I said. “But not tonight, there aren’t enough of us. Let’s leave it to some other time.”

  “When exactly is ‘some other time’?” he asked with a little sneer.

  This made me tense up, but I just told him not to worry, we’d do it soon, and that was the end of it for the time being. Even so, I couldn’t help feeling it wasn’t very bright of him—I mean, to say that kind of thing openly, in front of the customers. He was testing me, and, particularly with us yakuza, if somebody suggests in front of other people that you’re not up to doing something, you’re almost obliged to have it out with him. But maybe I’d better explain this all a bit more.

  Just occasionally, if only a few customers show up, the professionals will have a game themselves, and one of the games they play is chiipa. When this happens, the ordinary players are asked to move away from the action and have to be satisfied with watching. In fact, once in a while, they’ll hold a session specially to play chiipa, with nobody but yakuza in the room. Though I doubt whether any yakuza nowadays know the proper way to play it....

  In ordinary games, you have two dice and gamble on the odds or evens, but in chiipa you have four. All different sizes, too. The biggest of them is called daito. The second, which is yellow, is nishuku. The third has its eyes painted red, so it’s called akappa. And the smallest of the lot is chibiri. All different, both in size and color. The players stake their money on one particular dice or the other, in various combinations.

  Everybody present is a professional, so you don’t have to work up an atmosphere. The bookie, for example, never calls out “Place your bets, then, place your bets.” Nobody talks at all, in fact. And the stakes are higher than usual, too. The people around you are all professional gamblers, so there’s a different look in their eyes. About the only thing you can hear is the sound of money being put down and the rustling of kimonos.

  A dice game

  After a while, when he thinks the time is right, the bookie says, “That’s all, gentlemen,” and everybody has to take their hands away from the cash. Once they’ve done that, he says “Play,” in a quiet voice. And that’s when the money moves.

  Anyhow, that was the game Kiyomasa suggested we should play. But you see, the guy knew perfectly well that it wasn’t possible at my place. Serious gambling never goes right unless you’ve got the right people. To play chiipa, you’ve got to have solid bosses or professional gamblers who come regularly to your place.

  “Listen, Eiji,” Kamezo said to me later. “Are you going to let him get away with that? He’s getting above himself, the bastard.”

  “Never mind,” I told him. “He just said what he felt without thinking. In fact, why don’t we do as he says sometime soon?”

  Actually, though, I’m not as cool or forgiving as I might have sounded. I was furious, and tucked the incident away at the back of my mind.

  With things as they were, I was just thinking of telling Muramatsu that I couldn’t take responsibility for this man any more, when there was a bit of trouble, and over a very minor thing at that. One evening, Kiyomasa got drunk and pissed on a brothel signboard. It was late at night, and I suppose he thought there wasn’t anybody looking. Actually, the place was shut, and they didn’t realize what was going on. But a woman in the vegetable shop on the other side of the road saw him at it. Even so, if it had happened only once there wouldn’t have been any fuss, I suppose, but it seemed Kiyomasa was always pissing on signs in
the area whenever he got a bit drunk. Word of it got around, and one day, when one of the lower-ranking members of our outfit—“Little Mitsu,” we all called him—was going by, the woman stopped him and complained.

  “Here, you—” she said, “there’s one of your people goes about every night peeing on the signs around here. The sort of thing even a dog would be ashamed to do. If your boss goes on letting him get away with it, it’s going to ruin his reputation.”

  Little Mitsu was a bit shaken by this, and the least he could do was ask her to lend him a bucket so he could get some water from the well and wash the signs down. He went around to the other establishments near there, apologizing to the owners, then came to tell me what had happened.

  “I see...,” I said. “I was already thinking of talking to Muramatsu about him myself. So hang on till I can do something about it.”

  But Mitsu was too upset to be calmed down as easily as all that. He went and found Kiyomasa and complained to him directly:

  “Look, Kiyo—I know you were drunk, but if you go around doing that kind of thing, it’s going to hurt Eiji’s reputation, right?”

  Now, any normal member of the gang would just have apologized and that would have been the end of it, but Kiyomasa wasn’t like that. He just flared up, and since there wasn’t much he could say as an excuse, he shouted something about Mitsu teaming up with the woman to spy on him.

  This got Little Mitsu going too, of course.

  “OK, you shithead,” he yelled back at him. “You think you can pull rank on me? Nobody talks to me like that.”

  So Kiyomasa ups and belts him in the face. Mitsu then lets him have it, saying he’ll kill him.

  Luckily, that time, Kamezo went in and separated them, and Kiyomasa came to me later and apologized, down on his knees. Which settled things for the moment. But Kamezo kept on telling me to get rid of him, and the others felt the same way too. So I thought: well, that should be enough to convince Muramatsu, and I made up my mind to go and see him, the next day if possible.