Confessions of a Yakuza Page 6

  “I won’t go on about it too much, because you can’t imagine what it was like unless you’d actually been there, but the toughest thing about our work was the blasting, using dynamite. Every time they set off a charge, it was like being inside the barrel of a cannon instead of a mine shaft. The dust swirled right through the shaft, blocking your nose so you couldn’t breathe.

  “To start with, I was put to work with an iron thing like a rake, using it to clear up bits of ore that had broken off, and waste rock; but I was scared all the time in case they were going to set off the dynamite. I kept this up for about two years, but then, around the beginning of February 1907, something happened that I’ll never forget.

  “A great chunk of the tunnel roof caved in, and I was one of the unlucky ones who got caught. Everything went black, you couldn’t see a thing. I was half buried, with my arms and legs trapped and steadily going numb. I told myself this was the end. Then there was another fall, a great rush of smaller bits of rock. I got a lot of dust or something in my mouth and up my nose, choking me. It was sheer torture.

  “This is it, I thought, I can’t put up with this. But something in me refused to give up. It got steadily worse. Hell, I thought, if dying is as bad as this, I’m damned if I’m going to die! I lay there struggling with my left arm, which I could move just a bit, then somehow I managed to cough out the muck in my mouth, so at least I could breathe. I yelled for help at the top of my voice. When I did, I heard voices coming from both directions. A dim light came close up to me and someone said,

  “ ‘You all right?’

  “ ‘The fuck I am!’ I said.

  “ ‘If you can talk like that you’re not going to die,’ the voice said. ‘There are some poor devils still buried. You wait where you are for a while.’ And they went off to look for the other men.

  “I stayed put—not that I could do anything else—but I was sure that if there was another fall I’d be a goner. I got really mad at them, wondering how long it’d be before they got me out.

  “They finally rescued me a few hours later—but we were still in the tunnel; the fall had blocked the way out, and it was impossible to get up to the surface. There’d been a lot of men working with us, and a hell of a lot of them, it seems, had been killed. Less than thirty had survived altogether.

  “One of the survivors was Kihachi, the sub-foreman, and he took charge of everything. It was he that decided who was going to use the batteries we had left, who was going to look for escape routes, and what the daily ration of water would be. Everyone held on grimly, doing just as Kihachi said.

  “It was two days later that they got us out. We’d all been telling ourselves we’d never breathe the outside air again, so I can’t tell you what it was like when we finally knew we were safe.

  “The other men, up above, were pleased to see us looking livelier than they’d expected. We were telling them about how the cave-in happened and what it was like in the tunnel, when someone began talking about the miners who’d been killed. That gradually got everybody worked up, and they started cursing the officials in the mining office. Then, before long, they decided they ought to have a drink in memory of their dead mates.

  “ ‘Let’s go to the office,’ someone said. ‘We’ll get the people there to come up with some saké.’

  “ ‘That’s right,’ everybody shouted. ‘We’ll get the office bastards to provide it!’

  “ ‘That’s not enough—we ought to shave their heads for them!’

  “By now they’d worked up a real head of steam, and more and more men were joining them. In the end, we all marched off toward the office, with the miners who’d been rescued in the lead. But we found a couple of dozen security guards standing in the road there, blocking the way.

  “ ‘No entry! Break it up there!’

  “ ‘Who d’you think you are to order us around? Get out of the way!’

  “ ‘No, get back!’

  “The same kind of shouting match went on, with us gradually shoving the security people back, till a line of police suddenly came bursting in.

  “That only got everybody more excited, and it was just about to turn into a real fight when suddenly behind us there was this terrific explosion. I looked, and there were flames shooting up. Some of the miners had blown up the stables with dynamite. Kihachi set off running, with us following. He crept into the office from the back, where the guards weren’t watching, and got up onto the fuel storage sheds.

  “ ‘Break the roof in!’ he yelled.

  “We made a hole in the corrugated iron and jumped down inside—ten of us in all, I’d say. Kihachi handed each of us a bundle of dynamite, fuses, cans of kerosene and so on, then splashed kerosene over the floor and led a fuse from it outside.

  “ ‘Go and smash things up,’ he said to us, ‘—the other buildings, the town hall, anything you come across. Just let yourselves go!’

  “He set light to the fuse, we cleared out, then a great flame shot up and there was an almighty explosion. After that it was like a hurricane had hit the place. We overturned trollies and blocked the road, cut power lines and telephone cables. We set fire to anything we could. Several hundred miners attacked the boss’s official residence, smashing up everything that came in reach. The boss himself was beaten up, and anybody who was any kind of official at the mine got clobbered too. The rioting went on like that for three days. I was by Kihachi’s side all the time, but toward the end he told me to get out, it was getting too risky.

  “ ‘I’m not going to run away,’ I said.

  “ ‘Don’t be dumb. The troops’ll be here before long and you know what’ll happen then, so get out while the going’s good.’

  “ ‘What about you?’

  “ ‘I’m leaving too, of course. But I’m the one who started it all, so they’ll hunt all over for me. You’re OK—your name’s not known. Take to the hills and keep going, straight south. If you do that and can get away to Tokyo, nobody’s ever going to find you. When you get to Tokyo, go to the end of Namida bridge in Senju, there’s a place there where the day laborers hang out, and ask for a man called Shugoro. Tell him I sent you, and he’ll take care of you. I’ll be following you before long, so get going.’

  “So I made a break for it, over the hills. I heard later that soon after that the troops went into Ashio to put down the riots. I went on running for all I was worth, not even bothering to eat or drink, till I got to the foothills of Mt. Akagi, where I felt just too tired and hungry to go on. I was wandering about in a kind of daze when I met an old woodcutter. He took one look at me and said,

  “ ‘You on the run from Ashio?’

  “I didn’t see any point in keeping it from him, so I nodded.

  “ ‘Follow me,’ he said, and he took me to a charcoal burner’s hut. There he gave me a riceball and some broth.

  “ ‘Where are you going next?’ the old man asked.

  “ ‘Tokyo,’ I told him.

  “ ‘Well, then, you’d better put these on,’ he said, and he gave me some farmer’s clothes. ‘If you wear these and carry a bundle of charcoal, nobody’s going to suspect you.’

  “I thanked him and moved on, heading for the plain below. I never knew what it was made him help me in that way.

  “It was about two weeks later that I met Shugoro near the bridge in Senju. He knew all about the Ashio affair. He told me I’d better lie low a while, so I worked there for about six months.

  “While I was there I met a boatman called Jimpei. When he heard who I was, he said it would be safer if he took me in himself. Shugoro, too, told me he thought that would be best, so he brought me here—to this boat. When I first started work on it, Jimpei was still the skipper, but he died and I took over from him.... I never saw anything more of Kihachi.”

  The Monkeys’ Money

  “How long did you stay on the boat?” I asked the man.

  “Not all that long.”

  As he spoke, he began to heave himself up off the cushion he was sitti
ng on.

  “Excuse me a moment, will you?” he said. Supporting himself on the edge of the hearth, he slowly started to get up, but the bottom of his kimono got tangled with his legs and he had trouble getting upright. Taking hold of a stick that stood propped against a pillar, he opened the sliding doors and went out into the corridor. Beyond the outer glass doors, I could see the rain pouring down from the eaves. A clock struck nine. I heard the man talking to somebody in the back room. After a while, though, the boards in the corridor creaked and he reappeared.

  “You can’t get around so well when you get older, can you?” he said.

  “Perhaps I’d better go soon,” I suggested.

  “Do you have some work to do?”

  “No, but you seem to be tired.”

  “Nonsense,” he said. “What would I be doing going to bed at this time of day?” He put his hands under the quilt over the sunken hearth and, sitting hunched up, coughed thickly again and again.

  It was in September 1923 that I stopped working on the boat. As you know, the first of that month was the day of the Great Earthquake.

  Kenkichi and me and a girl called Iyo, a worker in a spinning mill who was due to become Kenkichi’s wife, were having a meal in a place in Monzen Nakacho. Just then, there was this awful rumbling sound and the room began to sway. The china bowls and dishes and other things up on the shelves came raining down. A two-story house on the other side of the road lurched over to one side, then all of a sudden collapsed.

  We knew right off this wasn’t any ordinary quake. We’d have been crushed under the building if we’d stayed put, so we scrambled out, started running, and kept going till we got to the canal. But a warehouse right by the boat we’d left tied up there had collapsed, and the boat was half sunk. It was useless, and poor Kenkichi really took it hard. “God, look at that!” he kept saying. “I’ll never be able to use it again.”

  Before long the sky began to turn red.

  “It’s the mill!” yelled Iyo, and she began to run again; the Amagasaki spinning mill where she worked was pouring smoke. So we set off after her. The fires were spreading at a terrific rate.

  Morishita-cho was already a sea of flames. People were in a real panic, with old folk and children yelling at the top of their lungs.

  “It’s no good,” said Kenkichi, grabbing at Iyo to hold her back. “There’s nothing you can do even if we get to the mill.”

  A policeman was bellowing in a hoarse voice, “Go to the Army Clothing Depot!”

  We ignored him and went on running steadily in the opposite direction. When we got to Eitai bridge we found that the whole area on the other bank, for hundreds of yards from Nihombashi on to Asakusa, was like a roaring furnace. Looking back, we saw that the fires were right behind us, too. A whirlwind had got up, and we saw a cart being blown high up into the air. Bits of houses and roofs were being sucked up into the whirlwind too and were dancing about in the sky like leaves. A horse that had gone crazy was galloping about the street and finally jumped into the river.

  We decided we’d try to get to the Clothing Depot and went on blindly, forcing our way through the waves of people. It had got dark before we noticed, and the fires were getting fiercer and fiercer. Just as we reached a point slightly beyond the Oshima river, there was a great roar and a huge column of red flames went up. The Clothing Depot, which had also caught fire, had fallen in. It made your flesh crawl—the whole night sky rocking with screams and shrieks. There’d been thousands of people inside.

  The Great Earthquake

  I gave up any hope of getting through safely; whatever happened now, I thought, we’d had it. But it was too hot to stand around, so we let ourselves be carried on by the crowd, on in the direction of Aikawa bridge. It was packed solid on the bridge too, so tight you could hardly move. Then, of course, people’s belongings started to catch fire. If we hadn’t done something, we’d have been burned alive.

  Just then, we noticed a barge below us, under the bridge.

  “I’m going in!” Kenkichi shouted, and jumped in with Iyo in his arms. I went in straight after them. There were dozens of people already on the barge, and someone soon helped us on board. But in no time hundreds of people were jumping from the bridge, with lots of them grabbing hold of the boat and trying to clamber in. A handful of them made it, but the barge looked like sinking at any moment.

  “Keep off! The boat’s full!” somebody on board bellowed.

  “Are you going to leave us to die?” someone in the water shouted back. But then a sudden wind got up, the barge was carried away like a chip of wood, and we drifted off in the direction of the Merchant Sailors’ School. That was on fire too, a big building, all ablaze. We panicked again for a moment, but the wind switched direction without warning, and we slowly drifted away till we fetched up at Tsukuda island, where the Sumida runs into the bay. It was one of the few places in that old part of Tokyo near the bay that were still standing quite undamaged.

  We got off the barge and looked back at the city. The flames were even more terrible by now, shooting right up into the sky. It hardly seemed possible that we could have got through all that, all three of us, without being separated.

  When dawn came, everywhere on the other side was just a blackened waste. Hundreds of bodies had been washed up at the water’s edge. The awful thing about human beings, though—the survivors, I mean—is that even at times like that their bellies need feeding just the same as usual. Our throats were dry and sore, too. Something would have to be done about it. Not that we could very well pester the people living on the island for food: far too many people had taken shelter there for that.

  So we decided to split up and hunt for something. I’d been there lots of times to deliver coke, and I knew the area. I walked steadily along the shore toward the east. After a while, I came to a bit of reclaimed land that was covered with thick grass.

  I searched in the grass, looking for something—insects, anything—to eat. And then I found them—locusts, whole swarms of them, just sitting there on the long stalks of grass. I went racing around, catching them. I didn’t have anything to put them in, so I took off my kimono, tied up the sleeves, and used them as bags. Two hours at it, and they were full. I brought them back, and the three of us ate them, raw. That took the edge off the hunger at least.

  The next day, there were other people in the grass, and the locusts had all been caught. Search as much as you liked, there wasn’t a single one left. I cursed and swore, but it didn’t do any good. Then Kenkichi suggested we go and see if any emergency food centers had been set up.

  Iyo said she couldn’t walk any more, so we left her lying inside a damaged boat. We crossed the bridge, which was badly burned, into Fukagawa. Everywhere you went there were piles of corpses; nothing but black ruins and bodies in every direction. I don’t know how long we walked, but though we heard plenty of rumors of relief centers we never actually got to find one. We only got steadily tireder and tireder and hungrier and hungrier, till we were almost fit to drop.

  It was somewhere around Koume-cho in Honjo, I suppose—Kenkichi suddenly said, “Look—monkeys!” He was right, there were three of them, lying all snug together under a tree. A big monkey and two small ones.

  “Maybe they’re having a nap,” he said as we went up to them.

  “It’s a funny place to find monkeys, though,” I said.

  But they weren’t monkeys, they were human beings. A mother and two children, burned to death. Their bodies had shrunk, you see, and made them look like that. The mother was holding the smaller kid tight in her arms.

  “Whatever happens, a mother never stops loving her kids,” Kenkichi said, and we both put our hands together and said a prayer for them. But just then we saw something shiny on the mother’s chest.

  “Hey—what’s that?”

  We lifted her up—she weighed next to nothing, like cinders—and a lot of silver coins clattered down from her. There were a hell of a lot of them—a good basinful, I’d say.r />
  “We’ve struck it rich!”

  “Watch it—there are people coming.”

  I looked around and saw a line of people in the distance with bundles on their backs.

  “If the emergency patrols find us that’ll be the end of it.”

  We picked up all the money in a hurry, but as we were doing this I got a glimpse of what looked like a wad of bank-notes down between her breasts.

  “Hey! There’s a fortune here!” I yelled. “How the hell did it survive?”

  She must have soaked the bills in water or something, then put them in a money belt, because only the outside ones were burned.

  “Shit! I can’t get at them,” Kenkichi said. “The kid’s in the way.”

  He’d got the bills between his fingers and was trying to pull them out, but they wouldn’t come. The kid clinging to its mother was stopping them.

  Kenkichi got impatient. “Pull them apart,” he said. I tried, but they were too firmly stuck together.

  “If I do it too hard, its arm’ll come off.”

  “What does that matter? They’re dead.”

  So I pulled again, and suddenly the kid’s scorched skin slipped off so you could see the pulpy red flesh underneath. I had something nasty sticking to the palm of my hand. I got the feeling the kid was sort of eyeing me—it gave me the creeps.