Confessions of a Yakuza Read online

I was tempted—it’s hard to leave without trying to recoup your losses after you’ve been asked to play another round —but, as I told him, the cash just wasn’t there.

  “Come on,” he said, “you don’t need to say that kind of thing!” And he had someone bring me a wad of bills. There was five hundred yen there when I checked.

  But my luck was out, and that went the same way as the first: straight down the drain. So he lent me some more. He did the same thing a couple more times, in fact; and I blew the lot.

  So I thanked him, told him I’d pay him back tomorrow, and left. But I was in quite a state, I can tell you. I hadn’t just lost, I’d lost eight hundred yen. I couldn’t possibly scrape up that much money.

  I went home feeling pretty sick, then sat down and did some hard thinking. The boss of the Dewaya couldn’t just say “Look, I’m sorry, I’m broke, so let me off.” And he couldn’t run for it, either—it would have made a laughingstock of him.

  I was racking my brains there, leaning against the charcoal brazier and poking at the ash with the tongs, when I heard a voice behind me. It was Osei.

  “What are you doing here?” I asked.

  “That’s a fine way to welcome a woman,” she said. “What’s up?” And she looked at me closely.

  “Nothing.”

  “I don’t believe a word of it. Something’s wrong, isn’t it?”

  Osei was pretty sharp, you know. She could tell at a glance that I was in trouble. It was no use trying to hide it, so I said,

  “Oh, it’s nothing much, I just lost every game I played today.”

  “How come? I thought you were an expert.” But she looked sympathetic, all the same.

  “Gen-chan said he’d lend me some more money, so I was fool enough to take it—and then I went and lost that, too.”

  “Wow. How much was it?”

  Well, I didn’t have anyone else to talk to, and I was feeling low. At times like that, you’re glad of somebody you can at least tell the facts to without worrying, so I ended up coming clean: told her how much I’d taken with me, how much I’d borrowed, and so on.

  “I see,” she said, cool as a cucumber. “Uncle, listen—let me take care of it.”

  That annoyed me. “We’re not talking about pin money, Osei, this is serious.”

  She didn’t turn a hair. “But you’re broke, aren’t you? How do you think you’re going to get it?”

  “That’s just what I’m thinking about right now.”

  “Well, then, let me do the thinking for you. I mean— you’ve helped me no end in the past....”

  I wasn’t sure how seriously to take her. “All right,” I grumbled, “if that’s how you feel about it, perhaps I’ll try leaving things to you for once.”

  “Right!” she said. “I’ll be back soon, so stay put there.”

  A few hours later she was back.

  “Here you are, then,” she announced, unwrapping a bundle tied up in a cloth. There was a whole pile of money inside.

  “For shit’s sake, Osei. Where did you get so much?”

  “Does it matter?” she said, just as calm as ever. “You wouldn’t be any the wiser if I told you. Just use it.”

  “Well, thanks, I mean it! I’ll take it as a loan.”

  The next morning I told Omon, my wife, and had a couple of my guys take the money to Gen-chan in Senju. That way I managed somehow to save face. If it hadn’t been for Osei, I don’t see how I could have carried on working as a yakuza.

  As it turned out, though, this episode led to a bit of personal trouble. My wife got jealous. As she saw it, for Osei to lend me all that money must mean that we were lovers. She’d never complained about the way Osei came and went at our place, but all the while inside her she must have been holding it against me, so that it exploded over this business of the loan.

  There was a nasty scene. She looked as if she wanted to scratch my eyes out.

  “Borrowing money from a woman like that—you’ll ruin the Dewaya’s reputation. Gen-chan asked me all kinds of things—I was so ashamed!”

  “What—you mean you told him where the money came from?”

  “Of course not! Who d’you take me for? But you’ve handled it all wrong from the start. Why did you keep me in the dark about it? You might not think it, but I’m your wife! If you’d just told me how things stood, we could have found the money somehow, even if it meant selling the house and land. And if that still wasn’t enough, I could have managed it somehow—why, I’d have sold myself if I had to! But you—you have to keep it quiet, then go and borrow it from that bitch.”

  Her face was as white as a sheet.

  “I didn’t go and ask Osei,” I explained; “she just happened to turn up when I was thinking about it.”

  “That’s not the point!” she said. “With something as important as that, why didn’t you tell me straightaway?”

  “I wanted to, but, honestly, what could you have done about it?”

  “I said I’d sell myself, didn’t I?”

  “Oh, for God’s sake! How do you think I’d look if I sold my own wife because I couldn’t pay my debts?”

  By the end of it, neither of us was making any sense. So I told her she was a fool, then stormed out and didn’t come back for two or three days. When I did, I found she’d packed up all her stuff and left. Didn’t come back for some time, either. Anyway, it was my fault for losing the money in the first place, so I let a month go by, then apologized and got her to come home. But things were never the same after that, and we ended up separating.

  Sometime during the war, Osei asked if she could come and live on the second floor of the house; and since this was OK with me, she became a member of the household, along with Okyo—the girl Captain Hashiba had rescued—and five or six of my own men. She wasn’t there every day, though: she’d stay for a couple of days, then disappear for a while. She never said where she’d been to, and I didn’t ask. Just because she was in the same house didn’t mean we were living together as man and wife, so it wasn’t any business of mine what she did. I don’t know how it looked to other people, but I never even slept with her—not once.

  One clue as to what she was up to came when she turned up one day with a laborer pulling a handcart and asked if she could leave some stuff upstairs. They carried in a good twenty or thirty containers about the size of gasoline cans. I was wondering what they were, when Osei told me: white sugar. It was hard to get hold of sugar of any kind around that time, so white sugar was fairly valuable. I expect she’d bought up a lot somewhere and was hoping to sell it at a much stiffer price; either way, she didn’t discuss it with me at all. After a while she must have found a customer, because they loaded it onto a handcart again, all except two cans, and carried it away. I took that to mean—not that I had any real grounds for it —that they’d left a couple of cans by way of thanks, and we used them, they came in very handy.

  Osei disappeared without a word. That was the last I saw of her until a while after the end of the war, though I heard later that she’d been in Kobe. It was due to Osei that I went to jail in Abashiri, seven or eight years after the defeat, but I’ll tell you about that later.

  IV

  I finished taking his blood pressure, and snapped the top off an ampoule in order to give him an injection.

  “That sound always takes me back,” he said with quiet feeling as he lay there between the quilts. “My old boss was forever having the doctor in to examine him, and the doctor, after he’d looked him over, would snap the top off those things in just that way. I’d be standing close by, and I can still hear the sound even now.”

  “How’s your appetite?”

  “Not too bad. But when your legs start swelling up, it means you’re near the end of the road, doesn’t it?... Come to think of it, though, people looked even puffier than me during the war, didn’t they?—in the face at least.”

  A brief smile flashed across his cheeks, which were mapped with dark brown blemishes, and without getting up he pu
t a cigarette which the woman had lit for him between his lips.

  “Were you in Tokyo all through the war?” I asked.

  “No. I got out into the country toward the end.”

  “Where did you go?”

  “Kashiwa. There was a transit camp nearby, and there was plenty going on to keep us interested.”

  He blew out an appreciative puff of smoke, handed the rest of the cigarette back, and turned on his side.

  “Shall I make your pillow a bit higher?” the woman asked.

  “No, leave it.... Listen, doctor—how much longer do you give me?”

  “It depends on how well you take care of yourself.”

  “Let’s not beat about the bush. What you really mean is around two or three months, isn’t it?”

  “No, I don’t. You’re good for another two or three years yet.”

  He laughed. “You’re only half my age, but you’ve still got what it takes. Doctors have to be like you. Perhaps I shouldn’t say this, but doctors and gamblers are surprisingly alike in some ways.”

  “You think so?”

  “Yes, I do. A patient may think he’s done for, but the doctor will talk him into taking his medicine just the same. The customers at a gambling place know they’re going to lose, but they let themselves be taken in by the professional’s smooth talk, and end up making heavy bets. It’s just a fact. I suppose that’s how people manage to keep going: life would be pretty grim if everything went according to the rule book. Look at me—so long as I believe I’ve got a while left like you say, doctor, I expect I’ll find the energy to do it somehow.”

  Pork and Bombs

  One day—it was before the air raids really started—Okyo came up with a suggestion: why not try making a bit of extra money by selling black-market pork?

  “Even high-class restaurants are having a hard time nowadays because they can’t get hold of meat,” she said. “They’re only too glad to buy it at any price.”

  Okyo had stayed on as a maid even after I’d separated from Omon; she was a marvel, saw to absolutely everything for me. While the old boss of the Dewaya was still alive, they’d never employed any women, either at the gambling joint or in the boss’s house; but we weren’t so strict about it. A sign of the times, I suppose. In the old days, it would have been unthinkable for a woman to tell the head of a gang to consider a sideline of that kind.

  Anyway, Kamezo had his doubts about it. “But where do we find the meat?” he wanted to know.

  “I’ve got relatives in the country, down in Chiba,” said Tokuji, one of our old hands. “They keep pigs. We could get them to let us have some.” He seemed surprisingly keen on the idea. He and Okyo had been planning to get married for some time, and I expect they’d got it all worked out in advance together.

  But Kamezo still didn’t look convinced. “Just knowing a farmer doesn’t make it any easier,” he said. “If the military police got wind of the fact you’d killed pigs without permission and sold them on the black market, you’d be really in the shit.”

  He was right, too: you couldn’t do anything with farm animals without permission. Military needs had absolute priority, and it was a serious offense to kill a pig secretly and eat or sell the meat. But Tokuji talked as if he knew what he was up to, and told us not to worry. So I let him go ahead, warning him to watch his step, and to leave me out of it altogether.

  The number of gambling places shutting shop because of the war was increasing steadily, but just around then I began to get some customers, including a few tekiya bosses and their men. One of them was a guy called Katano, a brother of mine who had a lot of clout. The tekiya were well into the black-market business by then, including meat, and Katano and Tokuji, with his wife-to-be, must have talked it over. Anyway, he was all for the idea. He had good contacts, so they soon found a lot of outlets, and the meat sold well. The porters were kept busy: every three days or so they’d dump a whole load of meat in cans on our second floor. Even cans were hard to come by at the time, and when there weren’t any available, they’d put the stuff in greaseproof paper and wrap it around their bellies. They came by train, then trolley, and did the last stage on foot. Thinking back on it, it’s a wonder so many of them got away with it.

  Even so, just as business was really beginning to go smoothly, there was a hitch, a big one: Tokuji was nabbed by the military police.

  His family lived in Chiba, and one day a letter came from them.

  “Not often you get a letter,” I said.

  “It’s nothing to worry about,” he told me, “but it seems there’s been a bit of trouble at home, and I’d like to go and see them.”

  He set off for his parents’ place immediately—but he never came back. Not a word from him, even, and I was wondering what was wrong when I got word from the MPs that he was dead. It was so sudden, it took a while to sink in, but I soon found out what had happened.

  The letter from Tokuji’s father had had a notice in it telling him to report for war work. In those days, they were mobilizing ordinary civilians for work in war supply factories, where they turned out airplane parts and shells, sewed parachutes, and so on. These were people like middle school students, who were too young to be conscripted, or women college students, or men who were too old to carry a gun.

  Tokuji, though, decided to drop out of sight. Judging from the way he rushed off without saying anything to me, he must have felt discussing it wouldn’t do any good. He drifted around Tokyo, Yokohama, and elsewhere, stopping in at friends’ houses and sometimes getting the local yakuza to let him have a game. After he died, I heard from people I knew here and there that he’d dropped in on them.

  So he drifted on from place to place, until one day he was holed up at a gambling joint in Senju. By sheer bad luck there happened to be a police raid that day, and every single player was rounded up, Tokuji along with them. When they searched him, they found the official summons in his pocket.

  I wonder why he hung on to it. Maybe he was thinking of the kid that Okyo was carrying, and told himself that he’d go and report eventually. Anyway, he was done for. Seeing as he was a sort of draft-dodger, the police could hardly not check up on him. They informed the military police, and he was placed in custody at their headquarters in Yokosuka.

  I don’t know what kind of interrogation they put him through. What’s certain, though, is that he got very rough treatment. As they saw it, I suppose, he was the worst sort of slacker—not just shirking his duty but gambling, of all things, at a time when everybody else, as they said in those days, “was united in a battle that would decide the fate of the nation.” So they tortured him, till in the end they killed him.

  When they told us to come and pick up the body, I decided to take only Kamezo with me. I had a hard job persuading Okyo to stay behind, but if she’d started howling and screaming in front of them, they might have decided to poke around in our affairs. For all I knew, as well, Tokuji might have broken down under torture and talked about the black-market business or the gambling, in which case we’d all have been arrested, too. So we left Okyo at home.

  “He just got sick and died,” they had the nerve to tell us when we turned up. “He said he wanted his body to be left with you. We’ll take it to your place in a truck if you’ll show us the way.”

  “Got sick and died”...! I took one look at him and knew he’d been tortured—bad enough to leave his face all twisted out of shape, and bruises all over his body. Still, if we’d looked shocked we’d have been hauled off ourselves on some trumped-up charge, so we just thanked them and climbed on board. It seemed Tokuji hadn’t said a word about us.

  We got an undertaker to put him in a coffin, offered up some incense for him, then fetched a priest we knew to say a service for him. Okyo, incidentally, held up pretty well. I don’t know how she was when she was alone, but in front of other people she didn’t even cry.

  The next day we took the body to be cremated at a local place. We had papers from the military police saying
he’d died of illness, and when we showed them to the people there they did it free of charge. Then we selected some of the ashes and went down to Chiba to hand them over to his parents.

  Well, time went by. Japan began to lose the war, and Tokyo started being bombed. In the summer of 1944, we set up what we called the “Two-Seven Circle.” It was for gambling, of course: we held sessions on dates with a two or a seven at the end of them, which meant six times a month. The customers were people who owned their own firms in Tokyo and round about—people we could trust to keep their mouths shut. We’d take them to an inn by the sea in Ibaraki prefecture, and let them play in peace and quiet for a while.

  When I sent one of my men over to tell them about a session, he’d take along tickets for the train there and back, and a small present as well. Then, when they left after the game, we’d give them something to take home with them—some pork or fish or whisky, say, or shellfish boiled in soy, dried plaice, or sesame oil—things that were in short supply. That impressed them, and we got a pretty good class of customer.

  One thing that was helpful in providing presents for them was that Hatsuyo—that’s my present wife, I was already having an affair with her at the time, though she was still a geisha then—anyway, she came from a fishing village called Isohama in Ibaraki, and her elder brother was a boatbuilder. When I first asked him if he couldn’t get hold of some fish or something, he said, “Right! No problem at all.”

  All the young men were away in the forces, and all the fishing boats, even the little wooden ones, had been taken over by the military, so almost the only people left in the village were women and old folk. It must have been tough for the women in particular, with no husbands to back them up, but they made what they could by fishing with nets, or diving for abalone, and selling their catch in town. Then, just as they were looking around for something more profitable, who should turn up but us. They were just as pleased as we were, and they brought us a steady supply of dried fish, different kinds of seaweed, octopus, squid, scallops, and so on. Of course, these were all officially off the market, so they were breaking the law.