Confessions of a Yakuza Read online

  He’d check the number of men who were going to work that day and give them ten sen each. “Off you go, and be quick about it,” he’d say in his bossy way. “I won’t stand for any lateness.”

  And the men would dash off with their ten sen in their hands. You know where they were going? To the grub shop.

  The people who lived in those parts never had any more money than they needed to keep them going that day. So most of the men hadn’t had any breakfast. The first thing the scout did was give the guys he’d picked some money to have breakfast with; otherwise they’d be too hungry to work properly. As for the ones who didn’t get any work—there was nothing they could do, so they just stayed put till something turned up.

  The flophouses turned them out in the morning, so they had to stay out in the road. Whenever a scout came, they’d gather around him. If nothing came of it, they’d go on staying put. If there was nothing that day, they’d hope the next day would be better. And if it wasn’t, then they stayed put till the next day again. Anyone who still had a bit of cash could go into a flophouse at night, but the rest were turned away. What did the guys do who didn’t get work even on the third day? Nothing—just put up with not eating. Just stood around with their arms folded, drinking some water occasionally, making the best of it.

  In that world, there were a few things you just never said. One was “I’m hungry”; the others were “I’m cold” and “I’m hot.” As far as being hungry was concerned, they were all in the same boat, so it was a kind of competition to see who could bear it longest. If any of the men standing around there complained of being hungry, he’d be treated as an outsider, a slob who didn’t have the guts to stick it out. They were all barely keeping going as it was, and for somebody to talk about food would have been the last straw.

  It was the same with anyone who said he was cold. A loincloth more like a bit of rag, a single cotton kimono, and a small towel—that was all the property a man had. Even in winter with an icy wind blowing, they’d stand there in their loincloths and kimonos, putting up with it, trying to look as though they weren’t cold, even though their bellies were empty and a wind was blowing fit to knock you over. It was the only shred of pride they had left.

  After three days of steady rain with no work to be found and nothing to do, a man gets desperate. If your belly’s rumbling and your head almost reeling, you feel like eating anything you find lying around, whatever it is. But they wouldn’t let themselves become scavengers—they absolutely refused to pick up anything lying in the road, or take scraps from the grub shop. Anybody who gave in and did that would be sneered at for letting himself become a beggar. “I’d rather die than eat other people’s garbage,” they’d say. And if some guy who was doing OK said, “Here—I can’t eat all this, you have it,” they’d still refuse it, even if they hadn’t eaten for days on end. “What d’you take me for? I don’t want any leftovers!” That’s the kind of place it was.

  Don’t get the idea that all the people living there were men: there were women, too. Whores, every one of them—women who used to work in the brothels in Yoshiwara, or Suzaki, or Monzen Nakacho, then got old or caught the clap and lost their jobs and drifted down the scale till they landed up there. They’d latch onto some man who’d found work and was a bit flush, and sell themselves on a straw mat spread out behind the lumber down by the river. They couldn’t take time off just because they were a bit sick, or they’d got a temperature, or some skin trouble. Nobody helped them. So they went on selling their bodies till they rotted on them.

  There were cheap eating places in between the flophouses, and shops selling booze. I saw a general store too, with straw sandals and other stuff hanging up front. The road was all pitted, with no proper ditches, so there was raw sewage around everywhere as we walked along on our way to the Meigetsukan.

  Suddenly, we saw a man lying in the middle of the road. His hair was graying, and he was muddy all over. A policeman was standing there shouting at him, with people peering out through partly opened doors and out of alleyways, wondering what was going on. There was a whore with a cotton towel on her head and a face all shrunk and wrinkled, looking in their direction.

  The policeman was shouting, “Come on, you! You can’t sleep in the gutter! Get up, you bastard!” But the gray-haired man stayed lying where he was. It was icy cold out there.

  “Get up! D’you hear me, damn you?”

  The policeman began to kick the man in the side with his boot.

  “You can’t stay here! It’s no good pretending you’re sick!”

  The man staggered to his feet somehow, but he soon fell forward on his face again.

  “Get up! Come on!” yelled the policeman, giving him another sharp kick.

  “Let’s go,” Tarokichi said to me.

  “What’s he done?” I asked the cop.

  “And who might you be?”

  “Can’t you see he’ll die if he’s left like this?”

  “D’you think I don’t know that?”

  “Then why d’you have to kick him like that?”

  Yes, I really said it, you know—it makes me smile to think of it now; I must have been pretty cocky for my age. Anyway, before I knew it the copper had let fly at me with his fist. When I came to, I was lying by the side of the road.

  “You must be nuts,” somebody said.

  A woman laughed, showing her rotten teeth. Tarokichi was nowhere to be seen.

  “What are you doing here?” another said.

  “I’m looking for somebody.... What happened to the man who was here?” I asked.

  “The old man? I rescued him,” someone standing behind the woman said. “The cop told me to move him away, so I got him on my back and lugged him over to the other side of the road. Me, half starving as I am.”

  “So what happened then?”

  “Well, what d’you think? The copper shoved off, so I took him and left him out there in the road again.” And he laughed without making any sound, opening his mouth and showing his bad teeth. The thing was—according to what he said—it was a nuisance for the police if someone died in their own district. It meant they had to write reports, take care of the body, etc. So if there was any trouble on their beat, they moved it next door. If the person died there, it was the other district’s responsibility. Of course, the same thing might happen in reverse, so they had to keep their eyes open. A man who was on his last legs would be kicked from one side of the street to the other, till in the end he dropped dead on the side that happened to be unlucky.

  After a while I moved on, and by asking the way as I went, I managed to find the flophouse called the Meigetsukan. It was a makeshift building with a swarthy old man with a squashed-up face sitting at the entrance.

  “Is Shinkichi here?” I asked.

  “What business is it of yours?”

  “I’m a friend.”

  “Got any money?”

  “Has a man called Tarokichi been?”

  “He cleared out, the bastard. So you’ll have to pay the fellow’s lodgings, at least.”

  I gave him some money, and he took me to where Shinkichi was lying. But, you know, Shinkichi was dead: I touched his forehead and it was like ice.

  “He was alive till this morning,” the old man said. “What a fine thing to happen!... It’ll cost a bit more, if you’ve got any on you....”

  So I gave him another yen, and he went straight off and came back with two scruffy-looking men.

  The men talked to each other as they moved about the room.

  “He hadn’t been eating properly.”

  “This cotton coat isn’t bad at all.”

  “I’m having the loincloth,” said one of them, laughing, a pale flabby fellow with runny eyes. They stripped Shinkichi and put the body in a black bag. The smaller man put Shinkichi’s kimono over his shoulders, on top of his own rags.

  “Let’s go, then.”

  “Sure we haven’t left anything lying around?”

  They cackled at each
other, baring their yellow teeth, as they shouldered the bag and went out. I don’t know what they did with Shinkichi. Tarokichi never showed up again from that day on.

  Not long after Shinkichi died, I was summoned to my uncle’s other house in Koishikawa. The whole district was full of printers’ signs. My uncle’s family spent the weekends there.

  My uncle was waiting for me in his study.

  “I’m thinking of bringing you here next month to have you do a bit of studying. A friend of mine runs an accountant’s office, so you can go to learn the business. You can work as a houseboy here in the mornings and go there in the afternoons. Once you’ve learned accounting, I want you to work in my own office.”

  I agreed with this and left. I expect it was some word from my father back home that made my uncle come up with such a sudden suggestion. Personally, I didn’t much fancy the idea of sitting at a desk all day with a pen in my hand. All the same, I wouldn’t be able to stay in Tokyo if I disobeyed my uncle, and I didn’t have anywhere to go if I ran away, either, so on my way back to the depot I was wondering what to do. Just about then, though, something cropped up—I suppose you could say my stars were unlucky at the time.

  All kinds of people, and not just laborers, came to join in the gambling in the coal yard. One of them was a rather queer fellow. His name was Kenkichi, and he must have been about ten years older than me. He was a dark, skinny guy with bulging eyes and a mean kind of look. He hardly said a word all the time he was playing. He seemed to have plenty of money, and parted with it a good deal more freely than the laborers did.

  I asked Kyuzo what he did for a living, but the only answer I got was “A boatman, I expect”; it seems Kyuzo didn’t know much more than I did. I couldn’t help wondering where Kenkichi got all that cash.

  After a while he stopped coming, but then, on the day after I visited my uncle’s other house, he suddenly turned up again. Kyuzo asked him what had happened, and he said he’d had a nasty bit of trouble thanks to a woman. She’d given him syphilis, and he got the usual swellings. He’d had them cut out but there’d been complications and he’d had to stay in bed for quite a while.

  “Well, then, this lad beat you to it.” Kyuzo told him what had happened to me, and we all had a good laugh. And from then on he somehow seemed to approve of me.

  It was one day around the beginning of June when Kenkichi asked me to go out with him that evening.

  “Got anything interesting in mind?” I said.

  “I’ll tell you later,” he said. “Anyway, be in front of the Tomioka Fudo shrine at eight o’clock this evening.” There was something shifty about the way he said it, it made me curious, and I went to the place at the time we’d fixed. When I got there, there was a man standing half-hidden behind a ginkgo tree like he didn’t want to be seen, a wrinkled-looking guy in a workman’s half-coat.

  “You’re Eiji, right?” the man said, treading softly as he came up. He told me to follow him, and we started walking. He went incredibly fast. He had a cotton towel around his neck, but that was the only light-colored thing about him: everything else was black or gray; I’d have lost sight of him if I hadn’t kept close. Before long, we came to a canal with a lighter alongside.

  The man with me jumped down into the boat.

  “So he came, did he?” a voice said. I peered into the darkness and thought I could make out Kenkichi.

  “Come on board.”

  “It’s pitch-dark, this boat,” I said.

  “We couldn’t do business if it was light.”

  Kenkichi sat me down among the cargo. It was too dark to see anything.

  “What do you think—how about helping me out with my work?”

  “What kind of work is it?”

  “Work that makes money.”

  “You don’t mean stealing?”

  “Stealing isn’t my line.”

  “Then what do you do?”

  “I’ll tell you because I think I can trust you. This is a midnight boat.”

  A midnight boat

  I’d heard about these boats from the laborers, but it was hard to believe this was really one of them. Their main job was to ferry goods and people around so they didn’t get seen by the police. Nowadays, I guess, they use trucks, but it was all boats back then. According to Kenkichi, though, he ran a “clean” ship—no thieves in his business, apparently.

  “What do you do if you get caught?” I asked.

  “You worry about that when it happens. It’s safe enough so long as you stick to the routine.”

  “Sounds interesting,” I said.

  “It takes guts. But it’s profitable,” he said.

  That was how I came to work on a midnight boat, based in Fukagawa. We had various clients, some of them prosperous-looking men who you could see at a glance had their own businesses. Some people mightn’t believe any respectable person would have traveled on a boat like that, but you can’t be expected to understand unless you know how the police used to work.

  In the old days, they were really something to be scared of. If they thought there was anything at all suspicious about you, you were hauled straight off to a police box and given the once-over. So anybody who had anything on his conscience was always extra careful not to catch their eye.

  There were any number of rivers and canals in Fukagawa, and a lot of bridges to go with them. At one end of the main bridges, there was almost always a police box where they kept a watch on people who went by. In the daytime, of course, there were too many people passing by for them to question everybody, but if you were walking along late at night you were bound to get stopped.

  The way most Japanese lived before the war, you got up while it was still dark and went to work, went hard at it all day, then came home when it got dark, had a meal, and went to bed, which meant that in most families everybody was asleep by around nine. So if anyone was out on the streets at that time of night, they assumed he couldn’t be up to any good.

  “Hey, you there! Yes, you—come over here. What have you been up to to make you this late?”

  “Work.”

  “Work? What d’you mean, work? Why should you be working as late as this?”

  Once the cops had got their hands on you, they didn’t let go of you in a hurry. “Where do you work?” “Who’s your boss?” All kinds of things they asked, and if you couldn’t answer promptly they’d knock you around a bit and as often as not take you into custody till the morning. If it happened that you’d been gambling and had a fair bit of money in your pocket and got nabbed on the way home, you’d had it. You were arrested on the spot and sent straight to the lockup. So the regular players were always worried about how they were going to get home, and the guys running the games were always trying to find ways of getting them past the trouble spots.

  Fukagawa was more of a problem in that way than most places, because you couldn’t get home without crossing those bridges. So they got up to all kinds of tricks; one of them was tying a player’s purse up with string and throwing it across to him. The way it was done was this: you’d tie the thing up with a long piece of string, the kind you use on kites, and fix a stone to the other end. The guy then gave you the purse a good way this side of the bridge, and went on empty-handed. And, sure enough, the policeman there would stop him for questioning.

  “Where are you going at this time of night?”

  “Well, you see, a friend of mine wasn’t well, so I’ve been to see him.”

  “I’ve heard that one before.”

  “It’s true, I promise you.”

  “Then I’ll go and check up with him tomorrow. Put out all your belongings on the table here.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  The man would lay out everything he had on him for inspection. If asked to, he’d have to let them look inside his bellyband and even his loincloth, too.

  “Is that all?”

  “Absolutely.”

  “Right—and from now on, mind you’re not out this late again.”


  And with that bit of advice, they’d let him go. After crossing, he’d make a detour till he got to the bank opposite where you were waiting, then toss a stone in your direction. When you got the signal, you’d throw the stone tied to the string over to the other side. The guy would pick it up and give it a tug or two. That told you it was all right, and you’d let go.

  Actually, though, it wasn’t all that good a method. For one thing, the purse obviously got wet, and if it was too far across the river, you couldn’t reach the other side. Also, if you went past a police box too many times in the same month, they naturally got suspicious, whether you were carrying a purse or not. So people usually took a roundabout route home, using deserted alleys. Another way, with customers who had plenty of time, was to let them play on till morning, then ask them to leave as soon as it got light. But for people who absolutely had to get home in a hurry while it was still dark, there was a special method. That was the midnight boat.

  Most of these were set up for thieves, wanted criminals, smuggled goods, and anything else that needed hiding from the police; but Kenkichi specialized in gamblers.

  Somebody would call, “Passenger for you!” The boat would come alongside with a thump, and someone would jump on board. There’d be another call from up on the bank: “He’s yours, then, skipper,” and a “Right!” from down here.

  The passenger was then led in among the piles of cargo, and a big black cloth was pulled down so that it covered him completely.

  “Stand by,” Kenkichi would say, and the boat would glide away from the bank. The river would show up in little black, silver, or copper-colored waves. The houses would all be in darkness. There was a regulation saying that boats using the river at night should always carry lights, but this one didn’t. It slid along secretly, without a sound, in the pitch dark. Nobody spoke. The only thing you could hear was the sound of the water. For someone not used to it, the thrill was enough to make your balls shrink.