Confessions of a Yakuza Read online

  It must have been about six months later that I went to Tokyo myself. My one aim was to see the woman—I had this idea that so long as I got there I was bound to meet her somewhere. When I told my father I wanted to find work in Tokyo, he agreed with surprisingly little fuss. Seems he felt it wouldn’t be a bad thing for me at that point to depend on someone else for a change. I mean, I was in fourth grade at middle school, but it was obvious I wasn’t going to pass my exams. In those days, it was normal to fail students who didn’t do their work, so he probably thought it would do me good to find some way to support myself away from home.

  “However tough things get, though, don’t come here complaining.” Those were his parting words; I don’t expect he had any inkling of why I wanted to go. The young woman’s first name was Oyoshi—it’s funny, but I don’t remember ever hearing her surname.

  Fukagawa

  A cousin of my father’s was a coal merchant at Ishijima-cho in the Fukagawa district of Tokyo; the firm called itself the Nakagawa Coal Depot. That’s the place that took me on.

  The man stuffed some chopped tobacco into the tiny bowl of his long-stemmed pipe, lit it, and puffed at it in a leisurely way. He gazed at the burning charcoal in the brazier, the hand that held the pipe trembling slightly, so that the brownish bowl swayed to and fro.

  It was quite a big business in its way. Outside the office there were dozens of heaps of coal piled up way over your head, stuff that they’d bought in places like Hokkaido and Kyushu.

  When a ship carrying coal arrived in Yokohama, laborers would reload it onto wooden barges. These would be drawn by tugboats up and into the Sumida river, then from Mannen bridge they’d come down the Onagi river and along between the rows of factories and shops till they reached our depot. The depot had five wharves on the riverbank. The laborers then piled the coal up in the storage yard, ready to be shifted onto other boats or horse-drawn carts as soon as we had an order from some firm.

  They were a really scruffy lot, you know, the laborers. Apart from anything else, they were filthy. The skin on their faces was all dry, their teeth were yellow, and they had a mean look in their eyes. I asked my uncle once why they all had that look, and you know what he said? “Because they’re scum.”

  My uncle was rich, but he was stingy. He was always warning me to be careful how I recorded the amounts of coal the laborers had carried. “Rough estimates are no good,” he’d say. “They make a tremendous difference one way or the other in the long run, so you’ve got to record everything exactly.” He had a small moustache and always wore a cloth cap, with a broad-shouldered jacket and riding breeches, plus high leather boots. He kept a cloth in his pocket which he used to wipe the boots with whenever they got dirty.

  He was incredibly fussy about details. “Those laborers,” he’d say, “—their one idea is to slack off whenever you’re not looking. But just think what that means to us: if a man carries two pounds less every time than he says he does, that means a loss of a hundredweight on fifty trips. Or a loss of five tons if there are a hundred men. That’s why you’ve absolutely got to keep a sharp eye on the scales.”

  I soon got fed up with him harping on the subject, and only half listened to anything he said.

  Though I’d come to Tokyo hoping to meet the woman, I didn’t know my way around at all, and on top of that I was worked off my feet, so there just wasn’t time to go and look for her. My first job, as I just mentioned, was to jot down in a ledger how much coal the laborers carried. The amount for one trip was fixed at a hundred and thirty pounds. If we were loading a boat, they’d use hods to lug it over to the edge of the wharf, where I’d be waiting with a pair of scales.

  “Come on, get a move on!” I’d say. And I’d get the usual answer:

  “This is as fast as a man can manage!”

  I’d draw a line by the laborer’s name and hand him a bamboo stick. These sticks were called mambo; they were about a foot long and an inch thick. The laborer would hold it in his hand as he trotted up the gangway. Then he’d dump his coal down anyhow and hand over his mambo to another youngster like me waiting on board, who’d also put a mark by the man’s name.

  So my work brought me into close contact with these men. When you got to know them, most of them were OK. They tended to fly off the handle easily because they were always hungry, but they were basically nice enough. As I was the youngest at the site, they’d often ask me how old I was, or if I wasn’t going to school. And one of the old hands kept a friendly eye on me, so I soon began to feel more at home.

  It was about two months after I started working there that I was asked to act as a lookout when they were gambling. I’d noticed that at the midday break all the laborers went off somewhere, and I’d assumed they’d gone to have something to eat. But that didn’t quite seem to fit, so I decided to poke around among the coal heaps. As there were thirty or forty of these heaps in the storage yard, each of them as high as a two- or three-story building, it was like walking through a maze. I pressed ahead, though, and came across a lot of men squatting down in a ring. When they caught sight of me, they jumped up with a yell, and some of them started running. Then, when they realized it was only me, they suddenly looked relieved. “Come on,” one of them said, “it’s only Eiji.” This was a young lad known as “Balloon” Shinkichi. He had a wrinkled forehead like an old man, and he got his nickname because he looked as if his head had been pumped up with air.

  “Look, stay away from here,” he said. “Just shove off, and don’t go telling the boss or anybody about it, either. Here—this is for you.” And he gave me two sen.

  Just then the foreman strolled over and said, “Eiji—come over here for a second,” and he took me to the base of the biggest coal heap in the yard.

  “I want you to get up on top of that pile and keep a lookout. If anybody comes, let us know.”

  “What for?” I said.

  “You should know what for—if the police caught us we’d all be locked up. You’re not to come down till I tell you to. If you see anything fishy, chuck down a piece of coal.”

  “I might hit somebody on the head.”

  “Don’t worry about that.”

  “What do you mean by something fishy?”

  “You’ll know soon enough when it happens. But don’t go calling out—just chuck a piece of coal.”

  I did as I was told and climbed up to the top of the heap. It turned out to be a terrific height, higher than anything else around. At that time, even in Tokyo, about the only tall buildings were factories, so there was a good view in every direction.

  Anyway, I got through that day without any trouble and acted as a lookout the next day too. It made me take a real fancy to the old districts of Tokyo, looking at them like that from way up there. There were boats moving up and down the rivers and canals, making this steady drone that drifted up into the sky, and mixed in with it you could hear the railway and people’s voices and carts and other sounds. Listening to them gave you the feeling you were really in a big city, and I felt pleased with myself. I went on keeping watch for them, but luckily we were never caught by the cops, and I never once had to throw any coal.

  I even went to another gambling place on my own once. It was on a converted barge tied up alongside a jetty. They used it as a bathhouse, too. Below decks they’d made a bathtub, and the families of the boatmen round about came there for a good soak. Obviously, they had all the water they could use, and they made do with floating wood for fuel. There was no partition or anything between the gambling area and the bath, so the women and children took their clothes off right in front of you before getting in. And they’d sit there soaking, with their towels on their heads, watching the men play. It was summer, so the doors were left open, and you could see the moon reflected on the surface of the river.

  I’d been collecting the bamboo sticks for about half a year when my uncle told me I was to switch over to delivering coke, which we also dealt in. It was cheaper and easier to use than charcoal
, so most of the smithies and ironworks in Tsukishima were using it. The whole area was full of these little workshops—one man working a foot bellows to get the coke burning bright red, and three or four others hammering away at the red-hot iron from morning to night, turning out pots, stoves, nails, farm tools, and building materials.

  Carrying my ledger and briefcase, I had to go with the carts on their rounds, collect the cash, and hand over the receipt. My uncle seemed to trust me with the money, and was only worried that I’d lose the briefcase. If it was a small delivery, we used a handcart, with one guy pushing and another pulling; a lot of the time I went with two laborers in particular: “Balloon” Shinkichi and “Soldier” Tarokichi.

  Tarokichi had fought against the Russians—he’d got a medal to prove it, but he’d pawned it before I got to know him. Shinkichi, though, had been a tenant farmer until five years or so before. He told me he’d often come to our part of the city to get nightsoil for his fields.

  “You know, I used to be able to tell just what kind of food a family was eating,” he said. “At a house where they ate well, the shit was different—it was richer, had more body to it. The color was different, too. You could tell right away.”

  “So the rich and the poor even shit differently, eh?”

  “One time, though—it makes me feel a fool just to remember it—I got in an awful mess.”

  “What kind of mess?”

  “I upset a bucket of the stuff right in front of a restaurant—next door to the second-hand clothes shop by the canal, it was. They made a hell of a fuss, so I hadn’t much choice, I tried scooping it up with my hands and putting it back in the bucket, but that wasn’t good enough, so I took off my kimono and used that to get it up with. When it got full I washed it in the canal then started all over again, I did it any number of times, and in the end I was all covered with the stuff. I jumped in the canal to get myself clean, but—I mean, it was October—it was freezing! And all those goddamn people standing around watching, with funny looks on their faces because they didn’t know whether to laugh or complain about the stink.”

  “That must have been a sight!”

  “You’re telling me. At any rate, at least I know what they mean now when they tell you to ‘eat shit.’ ”

  In the days when I was carting coke around with Shinkichi, the nightsoil men were a common sight. A lot of them came by boat if they didn’t live nearby. You’d see them going around calling our “Nightsoil, nightsoil!” in the alleys, with a long pole on one shoulder and a bucket dangling on each end. If anyone indoors shouted “Nightsoil maaaaan!” they’d go to the little trapdoor on the outside of the house by the toilet, poke their pole inside with a scoop on one end, and draw the stuff up. When the buckets were full, they’d take them back to their cart, then hang a new set of buckets on the pole and set off again. And by the time they’d stowed a few cartloads of full buckets on board their boat—they slept there, too, when it got dark—the job was done and they sailed away.

  The Pox

  Getting on for a year after I was given the job in Fukagawa, a guy called Shinji—he worked at a shop making the rubber-soled socks that workmen used to wear—took me with him to the red-light district. He was fond of gambling, and whenever he had time to spare he’d turn up at the coal yard and lose some money before going home again. That particular day, though—I don’t know what came over him—he was in luck and won some money, so he said to me, “It’s on me today, so just keep quiet and come along.”

  Shinji’s idea was that once in a while I ought to get my hands on something else besides coke: all work and no play, as they say ...

  “A man should sow plenty of wild oats while he’s still young,” he said. “Get a whiff of the boudoir. Have some nice mature woman show you the ropes....” He was only just over twenty, though from his face you’d have thought he was past thirty.

  He used to sing as he walked along. Silly songs, like:

  He swaggers by—my former beau—

  In best kimono dressed,

  A pocketful of cash to go

  On women and the rest.

  I never will forget him—no,

  Where’er he comes to rest!

  But the place he took me to wasn’t one of the classier brothels, it was a cheap teahouse along the alley leading up to the Hachiman shrine. The real business of that kind of teahouse was to provide women, so they didn’t do any fancy food—only dumplings, sweet saké, rice crackers, cakes, and tea to go with them, at the most.

  “Is she free?” Shinji asked the proprietor, shoving a dumpling into his mouth.

  “Yes, sure.”

  “It’s not for me today, it’s for this youngster here. Look after him, will you?”

  The proprietor took me farther down the alley, where there were lots of small houses all jammed together any old how. We walked a way, then came to a house with a ginkgo tree in front of it. We went through a wooden gate in the fence and into the garden, where there was a separate cottage at the back.

  “Hey—I’ve brought you a customer!” he called out.

  “OK,” came a woman’s voice, so we opened the front door. Inside there was a poky little hall space; the sliding doors were wide open, and beyond them a young woman was sitting on a quilt, spread on the tatami.

  “Well! He’s young, isn’t he? What a nice surprise.”

  “Here you are, then, I’ll leave him to you. But don’t go thinking it’s all right to tire yourself out for the rest of the day, just because he’s young.”

  “Oh, get out of here—you talk too much!”

  She turned to me and said sweetly, “Come on in. How old are you?”

  I was putty, of course, in the hands of somebody like her. I mean, I wasn’t seventeen yet and the woman was obviously well over twenty, so she must have been a real veteran. When she undid her sash, she didn’t have anything on under the shift she was wearing, not even a waistcloth. She just sat there with it open at the front, inviting me. She might as well have pinned me down by the back of the neck—she couldn’t have done better if she’d tried.

  You know, I can’t remember her name however much I try. All I know is that I hadn’t been in bed with her all that long when someone started tapping on the front door, scaring the daylights out of me.

  “That’s enough—I can hear you!” the woman yelled. “Is it time already?”

  “You’ve had exactly thirty minutes.”

  “So what?”

  “You’ve got another customer. Can I open the door?”

  “Not likely! Who is it, this customer? A regular?”

  “No, it’s the gentleman’s first time.”

  “Well, shit—what about me? I’m human, too. Why can’t I take my time with a decent-looking man once in a while? Tell him to wait!”

  “He’s here with me now.”

  “Oh, go to hell! What d’you take me for? How many customers am I supposed to take? At this rate I’ll be dead before long.”

  “It was thirty minutes, wasn’t it?”

  “Don’t ask me—it was you fixed it, wasn’t it?”

  All the time she was shouting angrily like this, she still had hold of me. I tried to make her let go.

  “I’m off,” I said. “I feel bad about it.”

  “No you don’t!” she said. “Don’t worry about him—he’s making a fortune as it is.” And she wrapped herself around me like a snake.

  “You can have him wait over at the shop,” she called out again.

  “How long will you be?” the boss snapped back.

  “Half an hour.”

  “D’you think he can wait that long?”

  “The dirty old man—if he doesn’t like it he can fuck off!”

  She wasn’t going to let anyone get the better of her.

  The upshot of all this was that I took a kind of fancy to the woman. And I visited the place about three times altogether. At first I thought I’d really fallen for her, but then I suddenly took against her. For some reason
or other she started turning me off, and I stopped going. Just like that.

  I’ve known a lot of women in my life, but the thing about the professionals was that they were fairly cut-and-dried—they didn’t come chasing after you when you got tired of them. So they were convenient if you were just out for a good time.

  That reminds me of something else. The owner of a cheap teahouse like that was also a kind of police informer. There were two quite separate sides to his business, the legal and the undercover, so if the cops wanted to get awkward they could make it impossible for him to carry on. So whatever he did, he had to take care to make up to the local policeman. When it got to around lunchtime, he’d get the maid to make a bowl of pork on rice or something and have it ready. Then the cop would drop in with an official “wanted” notice in his hand to ask if anyone “answering that description” had been there.

  “Well, officer—hard at it as usual,” the proprietor would start. “Now, let me see ... no, I’m afraid I haven’t seen anyone like this around. But anyway, you must be tired, why don’t you come in and have a cup of tea at least?”

  He’d pour him what was supposed to be tea out of his little teapot. But it would be saké—he’d have a pot full of saké ready for such occasions, you see. They’d be at the back of the shop, so it would look like tea to the other customers. Then he’d produce a meal.

  The copper would say “I really shouldn’t let you do this,” or something of the kind, but he’d dig in just the same, with a satisfied look on his face. Then, when he’d finished, he’d say “Well, then, if anybody suspicious drops in, let me know at once, will you?” And he’d take himself off.

  The owner was actually rather proud of his connection with the police. Sometimes he’d appoint himself a sort of private detective, and make reports to them.