Confessions of a Yakuza Read online

  Before I could get around to it, though—that very same day, in fact—there was another row. I wasn’t there when it started, but from what I heard later Kiyomasa suddenly picked on Little Mitsu and insisted he take him to see the woman who said she’d seen him pissing. When Mitsu asked what he meant to do, he just glared at him and told him to mind his own business—shut up and take me to her, he said.

  That made Mitsu really start slanging him. And that made Kiyomasa come in fighting. The other guys there tried to hold him back, but he was too strong for them. So Kamezo ran out to get me.

  As for what happened next—well, I’ll just stick to the main points, as it got really messy. Kiyomasa must have gone completely off his rocker. He rushed out into the kitchen, grabbed hold of a gimlet, and set on Mitsu with it. (It was a three-pronged thing we’d got to break up the ice for the little pillows we used when we took a nap in summer.) Then, when I waded in to try and stop him, he suddenly turned on me instead.

  “I’m going to kill you!” he shouted, coming for me, so I picked up a kitchen knife that was lying around—the “bone-sticker,” we used to call it, a kind of stiletto—and stuck him in the chest. It went clean through a rib and into his heart. The blood spurted out, and I got splashed red all over.

  It was a dancing teacher, who happened to turn up just then, who called the police. A whole crowd of them came rushing over. They took in what had happened, and an elderly detective asked me:

  “Eiji, was it you that did it?”

  “Yes, it was me,” I said.

  They all knew me well enough, so they didn’t use the handcuffs.

  I was sent from the police lockup to Ichigaya. And then there was the trial. It was only then that it really came home to me just what a big man the Dewaya boss was. Nobody else could have done what he did: running all over the place, getting up a petition to present in court, and so on.

  He and Muramatsu covered everywhere they could think of in Asakusa—all the shops along the approach to the temple, for example—getting hundreds of people to sign. When a detective told me about him going around from shop to shop—and he was sick, you know—bowing his head to people for their signatures, it brought the tears to my eyes. I actually put my hands together, there in the lockup, and said a little prayer of thanks to him.

  And it wasn’t just signatures, either. He actually went to Kiyomasa’s parents and got them to put in a plea for man-slaughter, not murder.

  It seems Kiyomasa was the son of a timber wholesaler. But he got mixed up with a gang of young hoods, and one thing led to another till he was stealing his parents’ money, getting women into trouble, and generally getting so out of hand that his father asked the boss in Shinagawa to take him over.

  The father must have given him up as a bad job, because when he wrote to the court he said he’d been half resigned to something like that happening. It was a miracle, in fact, that Kiyomasa had lived as long as he had, he said. In a way, he’d brought it on himself, making a nuisance of himself at the first place he was taken in, and ending up pulling a knife on someone. His father didn’t bear me any grudge, and his other children didn’t either, so they hoped they wouldn’t charge me with too serious a crime....

  The boss even got a politician in on it, too, a man called Okubo, who had a lot of support in Asakusa. This Okubo, apparently, introduced him to a lawyer and did all kinds of other things to help as well.

  It took a year before they reached a verdict. I wasn’t charged with murder, but with inflicting bodily injury resulting in death, and I got five years. So, after keeping me in Sugamo for a while, they sent me on to Maebashi with a handful of other prisoners—by train, in a coach we had to ourselves. I’d been in detention for a year already, which left four years to do in Maebashi.

  The Jellywobbles

  “I don’t suppose you know what it’s like inside a jail, do you, doctor?”

  “I know a bit about it.”

  “Really? How’s that, then?”

  “Sometimes, if a prisoner gets hurt or sick, I get called in to see him.”

  “And how about it—I mean, your impression of what you’ve seen inside?”

  “It’s interesting, in its way. They can be pretty tricky.”

  “Pretending to be sick?”

  “Yes. Most of the time, of course, they really are sick, but there are some of them who try to fake it. They’re quite good at it, too. Groaning with pain, even making themselves break out in a sweat—if you’re not careful, you can fall for it.”

  The man chuckled. “I’m not surprised,” he said; “some of those guys are pretty sharp. A young doctor could easily get had. But there are all kinds of doctors too, you know. The Maebashi jail where I was had its own medic, and he was a real bastard. He’d never come straightaway, even if the prisoner was in real pain. Absolutely refused to get up if it was at night. He’d write the death certificates himself, but most other things he left to the warders. We didn’t dare get sick because of what might happen.”

  The thing about Maebashi was the cold. Looking back on it now, I get the feeling it was always winter there. The jail was by the river Tone, on the edge of the town, and you could hear the water roaring past; it got on your nerves at night, when an empty belly kept you awake. Way up in the north there were the Akagi mountains, and a cold wind blew down off them. There was an eighteen-foot-high wall around the place, and the wind went round and round inside it. The sound of it alone was enough to make you feel cold.

  At the Sugamo jail there were twelve men to a cell, but in Maebashi there was only six. At night, you slept on one thin quilt spread on the tatami; it was terribly small—not three feet wide, more like two foot eight or nine, I’d say. And about five foot six long. I’m tall, so my legs stuck out at the end. The top quilts were a bit bigger all around. But they’d all been in use for years, and they were so old there was hardly any cotton stuffing left in them. Actually, it was still there, but the quilt had been reserviced so many times it had gone flat and hard. It wasn’t an even thickness, either—there were lumps in places, like islands in the sea; where the islands were, the quilt bulged, but the other places were so flat they were mostly cloth and nothing else. Not much chance of a good night’s rest when even your top quilt was like that....

  The warders put me to work making paper bags. There were other men doing the same job; fifteen of them were yakuza. They say a yakuza in jail is like a nightsoil dipper that’s lost its handle—the shit’s still there, but no way you can use it. A bad joke, but it’s not far off the mark.

  The yakuza never do any proper work in ordinary life, so it’s no wonder they can’t do any when they’re put inside. I mean, you could hardly tell them to organize gambling sessions, could you? But you can’t leave them idle, either, so they get taught some simple job or other. Sticking bags together is just the thing for yakuza, as its only simple repetition.

  There was a boss from Kiryu called Kanjiro in with me—Kan-chan, people called him. I soon got friendly with him, and we kept it up for years even after we were outside again. And there was another one too, who went by the name of Muraoka Kenji. With him, I struck up a brother relationship.

  This Muraoka was closely connected with the Kodama organization, which, years later, got mixed up in the Lockheed scandal. He came in a while after me. Then there were two others, Tsunegoro and Namiji, who became sort of recruits of mine and helped me in all kinds of ways.

  I never did find out just what Muraoka was in for, but Kan-chan was in because he was framed by the police.

  “It was diabolical, what they did,” said Kan-chan as he stood next to me, pasting bags. “This dick turns up at my place and tells me to hand over a couple of pistols. Now, I ask you—have you ever had guns around? No? Of course you haven’t. After all, I hear you used a bone-sticker for the job that got you in this time. Smart, I call it.”

  “What’s so smart about it?”

  “No need to be modest, now.... Anyway, that was what this copper
said to me, so I dug my heels in and said I didn’t have any. But he wasn’t having any of that. Well then, he says, you’ll have to go out and buy some, and then turn them in. In the end, he started threatening me—said if I didn’t come up with them he’d have my place raided. That really pissed me off. Go on then, do it, I said. And—sure enough, like good honest cops—raid us they did, the bastards, that same night. Right in the middle of a session. Caught red-handed. And here I am.”

  Kan-chan seemed really burned up about it. The real reason why the police set him up, of course, was to improve the district’s anti-crime record. Sometime after I left jail—around 1938, I suppose it would have been—I had just the same kind of trouble myself at my joint in Uguisudani. Told me, in just the same way, to hand in my guns. This particular detective came straight from the Metropolitan Police Board—the very top. I expect they’d been tipped off that some yakuza somewhere had got hold of a few pistols, so they planned to make a clean sweep. But there weren’t any in my place to begin with, and there was nothing I could do.

  So they told me to produce some even if I had to buy them. It was way out of line, but if I’d gone on insisting I didn’t have any, I’d have ended up the same as Kan-chan, so I got a brother to buy me a couple at three hundred and fifty yen apiece. That was enough to buy a house with in those days, but I couldn’t afford to think about that.

  I turned them in to the police immediately. “Good work,” they said—and that was the last I heard about it: no letter of thanks, and no punishment, either....

  Anyway, with one thing and another, Kan-chan and I got on together like a house on fire, and we were always talking to each other in whispers in the workshop. We went too far, though—the warders got pissed off, and we ended up in trouble.

  It was the day after there’d been a fall of snow. It was always twice as cold after snow. At night, it got steadily chillier and chillier, and people had to take a leak all the time. You’d just be dropping off to sleep, and somebody would make a clatter getting up. Then as soon as one man had finished, another would get up. This went on all through that night, but in the end I must have dozed off, because I suddenly woke up to hear a warder calling me.

  “What d’you want at this time of night?” I asked.

  “Come on out,” he said, so I shambled out, only to find myself handcuffed on the spot.

  “What’s this for?” I shouted. “I haven’t done anything, have I?” So another warder swiped me across the face. It turned out that my crime was communicating with another prisoner—i.e, talking to Kan-chan behind the warders’ backs. So I was hauled to my feet, marched along the corridor, and taken into a bare, concrete room. Kan-chan joined us on the way. In the middle of the room was a sort of small swimming pool. “Get in that,” they told me. There was a single light hanging from the ceiling.

  “Hurry up!” the warder kept shouting at me. I was handcuffed, so there wasn’t anything I could do, but the night was already cold enough to make you shake, and a “swim” could easily have killed you. I glanced over in Kan-chan’s direction; he was looking over at me, too. That gave them the chance to give me a shove, and I found myself underwater before I even had time to yell.

  It wasn’t as deep as all that, but the bottom was slippery, and it was hard to find your feet. Not being able to use my hands, I choked and swallowed a hell of a lot of water. Then the warder grabbed hold of my handcuffs and dragged my face up to the edge of the pool, so I managed to get some breath, but I was in a terrible state—I mean, I was past being just cold, I thought I was going to pass out.

  “How about it?” the warder was saying above my head. “Are you going to do as we say?”

  I was in no state to say anything, but I managed to get out a “Fuck you!” so he kicked me in the face and I went under again. The second time he hauled me up, I could hear him still saying “Are you going to do as we say?” I was past talking, though—I couldn’t even breathe. They finally dragged me out, but my body was all stiff, it felt as if I was wearing armor. The water was dripping in great drops from the bottom of my kimono. The funny thing is, I felt like I was hot, as though I’d been burned all over.

  But when I got back to the cell and got in between the quilts, I started shivering and couldn’t stop. It’s a wonder you can be treated like that and not die. Kan-chan got a fever and couldn’t get up for a week.

  It was cold at other times too—like when we came back from work every day. That was when you saw what we used to call “the jellywobbles.” Between the workshop and the cell-block, there was a changing room where the prisoners took off their work clothes and put their uniforms back on. The windows there were always wide open, and the outside air came blowing straight in, so that we had to strip off in a freezing draft.

  First they had a roll call, and as soon as your number was called you stripped off. Then you had to put your hands over your head and stand there with your legs apart, while the warder circled you to make sure you didn’t have anything on you. When he’d finished checking, you put your prison uniform on. That was the roughest part of it. I mean, the clothes had been left out all day on a shelf. And they were dirty, too; we were allowed to wash them from time to time, but only with water, no soap. So they were thick with years of sweat and grime, which froze into something like ice, so when that came in contact with your skin, you couldn’t help starting to shiver. Your face, your jaws, your belly, your arms and legs—they all shook, there was no way of hiding it. People talk about it being so cold “you can’t get your teeth together”—well, that just about describes it. Even if you wanted to say something, your jaw was shaking too much to get anything out.

  It’s a funny thing, that kind of trembling. It’s not something you can stop by sheer effort. You try to control it so it won’t show, but it’s just impossible. Even the toughest fellow trembles. That was what the prisoners used to call “the jellywobbles.”

  In those days, prisons didn’t have glass windows or anything like that. There were sliding doors with bars, pasted over with paper like shoji. When the paper got old it turned yellow and cracked so that drafts came blowing in. Maebashi had been built in 1888, if I remember rightly, and everything in it was worn out.... The cells and corridor, too, were separated by the same kind of sliding doors—I suppose it was a kind of hangover from the old-style, all-wooden jails of the past.

  There were four other men in the same cell with me. The one who’d been there longest was an umbrella repairman called Toyama. There was also a man who sold matches, a handsome guy who thought he looked like Gary Cooper, but I’ve forgotten his name. Toyama the umbrella man had been put inside for murdering his wife after she ran off with someone else.

  Almost everybody gets a kind of run-down look when they’re in a prison cell, but Toyama looked particularly seedy. He had a round face, with a little nose sticking out of it like a nipple, and drooping eyes. He was a timid fellow, always kowtowing to the warders; I don’t think it was just because he was in jail, I’m sure he’d been like that even when he was working outside.

  Toyama and his wife had been living for years in a cheap tenement behind a horsemeat store, but in the year it happened there’d been a bad drought, with next to no business even in the so-called rainy season. Umbrella men don’t get much work even at the best of times, so I reckon that when things got really bad they couldn’t make a living at all. So they were helping at the store, going around buying up horsemeat.

  It seems the guy who stole Toyama’s wife was one of those men with a little stall on wheels who used to go around cleaning out the tiny pipes that people smoked tobacco in. When Toyama came home one day, after he’d been out buying up horses, his wife was out. Several days went by and still she didn’t come home. He’d just about given her up for good when one day—it was raining for the first time in ages—he heard the pipe-cleaning man going by on a back street near the house, blowing that funny little horn they used to have. Toyama happened for once to be busy repairing an umbrella, but
he had a kind of uneasy feeling, so he put his work down and went outside to look. Just outside the entrance there was a stream, with a narrow road running along the other side. And there was the pipe-cleaning man, hauling his stall along through the mud, blowing his horn as he went. And walking along behind the stall was a woman.

  “If I’m not mistaken, I thought, that’s my wife,” he told me. “My wife, holding up a little umbrella in the pouring rain, traipsing along behind him.

  “I rushed out of the house in a kind of frenzy. I soon caught up with them.

  “ ‘You come with me!’ I shouted, tugging at her.

  “ ‘Hey, stop that!’ the man said, but I knocked him down and went off dragging her along with me, across the stream at the back of the stables, and into a graveyard that stood by the stream.

  “It was raining buckets, and the drops were bouncing off the gravestones. I grabbed my wife by the scruff of the neck. ‘What’s all this about?’ I asked her.

  “ ‘I’m fed up with you,’ she said. ‘I’m leaving you.’

  “ ‘Don’t be a fool!’ I said, grabbing the front of her kimono and almost pleading with her. ‘We’ve been together ever since we were twenty!’ That made her look as if she was going to cry, and she said, ‘It’s all over.’ So I hit her.

  “Then I asked, ‘Is it really over?’ and she just went on nodding her head—like a drowned rat, she looked—so I hit her again, hardly knowing what I was doing. I think I knocked her back over a gravestone. But however much I think about it, I can’t remember what happened after that. The first thing I knew, she was dead, and for some reason or other I was standing there with an umbrella in my hand.”

  “Was it your wife’s umbrella?”