Confessions of a Yakuza (16 page)

I went home to Utsunomiya and loafed around for ten days or so. During that time the local Veterans’ Association gave a party to celebrate my return from army service—just as if I was a hero or something; I was tickled pink. But before long a letter came from Okada, one of the senior men in the gang. I knew he was the type that hardly ever wrote letters, so I felt a bit uneasy and opened it in a hurry.

“The boss has got something wrong with his chest,” he wrote. “He’s getting treatment, but things don’t look too good. You’re one of us he’s been specially good to, so why don’t you come and see him?”

That was a real shock. It was some time since I’d got back, but so far I hadn’t even dropped in to see them, and I’d been thinking it was about time I went and paid my respects. So I hopped on a train that day and went to Tokyo.

The boss was really pleased to see me safe and well. He noticed how the training had made me thinner, and teased me about it: going into the army had made me half as handsome again, he said. He seemed better, in fact, than I’d expected; it set my mind at rest for the moment. When I thanked him for the pocket money he’d sent, he said I could make up for it by telling them about life in Korea. So I told them how I’d been put in the lockup.

That interested them a lot. They all knew what it was like to be in jail, but nobody’d ever been in a military lockup before. I’d seen something even the older men hadn’t seen, and that made me the center of attention, I suppose. When I told them how I’d tried to desert they were disgusted. They made fun of me, said I ought to have known better than to trust someone who was a clever talker, and that I must have gone a bit soft in the head.

With one thing and another, I ended up staying on in the Dewaya, and never went back to Utsunomiya at all.

Well, things went on all right for a while, and then the boss took a turn for the worse again. It was the beginning of summer. He wasn’t bad enough to go into a hospital, but they told him he’d got to rest, so he went off to stay at his villa on the coast at Oiso. With Muramatsu taking charge of the games, there was nothing for him to worry about. I mean, Muramatsu was famous as a gambler, there wasn’t a single yakuza in Tokyo who didn’t know about him. So the boss could afford to recover in his own time. Once a month, Muramatsu would send him some spending money, and if anything else came up he’d send down one of the younger men.

One day he called me in and said it was my turn to go and see how the boss was getting on. “Right,” I said, “I’ll be off straightaway.” But he gave me a lot of instructions before I left. “Listen,” he said, “the people who live in Oiso aren’t your ordinary locals. The big political and company bosses have all got fancy villas there; if you get into a quarrel or make any other sort of trouble, it’s the boss who’ll suffer for it, so mind what you’re doing. And you can’t go looking like that, either. Put on your best clothes, and go and get your hair cut good and short.”

It sounded a bit funny, coming from him, but orders are orders, so I went and got myself trimmed up. Then, when I was ready to leave, he gave me some money and said, “This is to buy a present for him. Go to Sembikiya in the Ginza and get some Alexandrias to take with you.”

I hadn’t a clue what Alexandrias were, so I asked him. He said they were grapes.

You know, in those days, in the late 1920s, almost nobody ate things like that. I imagine they grew them in greenhouses or somewhere; most ordinary people, though, would never even have
seen
them. Muramatsu handed me twenty yen to buy them with. I couldn’t believe it.

“But—how am I going to carry as many as that?” I asked.

He laughed. “You stupid bastard,” he said, “you’ve no idea what things cost, do you? Listen—just go along to Sembikiya and ask for twenty yen’s worth—you’ll find you only get a handful.”

“You’re kidding!”

“Stop messing around and go and see for yourself.”

So I went to Sembikiya, still only half believing him. But it was just like he said: all I got for my money was two measly bunches. I was so worried about squashing them, I kept them in my lap all the way down to Oiso, feeling like I was holding the crown jewels....

The boss’s place was a solid-looking house with a big garden. The garden had an artificial hill and a pond in it. Beyond it, I could see a grove of pine trees. And beyond them was the sea.

“It’s been a long time, boss,” I said. “How are you feeling?” He looked pleased to see me. He’d got a tan, so you’d never have thought he was sick. I handed him an envelope I’d been given for him.

“Muramatsu said this was to keep you going for the time being.” He nodded. “And these are a present—I bought them at Sembikiya on the way here.”

He thanked me, and Shiro, who was helping out at the villa, went and washed the grapes, then brought them back on a dish.

“Boss,” I said, “these grapes are something special, aren’t they?”

“What’s so special about them?”

“But they cost twenty yen!” I said, my eyes fixed on them. Shiro too was staring at them with a sort of half-starved look.

The boss laughed. “Haven’t you ever had them, then?”

“No.”

“Didn’t you get them in Korea?”

“Even the colonel probably couldn’t afford things like this.”

“I don’t suppose he could. Army officers are all moustaches and empty wallets.” He chuckled. “Here—try one, for the colonel’s sake.”

I hesitated, so he said “Go on.”

So I picked one grape and popped it in my mouth.

“Good, aren’t they?” he said.

“I’ve never had anything like it.”

“Well, have another.”

“You sure?”

“Go ahead. It’s more fun watching
you
eat them.” So I helped myself to another grape. Shiro was positively drooling as he watched all this.

“You want some too, Shiro?”

“Well, I wouldn’t say no.”

The boss was grinning, and the grapes sat there on the white dish like bunches of jewels.

I went to visit him any number of times after that. Maybe he was worried in case I was stopped and questioned by the police, as he didn’t much like it if I went out to look around the neighborhood. Anyway, the other villas there were all as quiet as the grave, even in daytime; the only sound you heard was the wind in the pines. Rich people actually seem to like lonely places, but not me—give me a crowd, every time.

That summer, though, things started to look up. The doctor had been to visit the boss one day, and I’d gone to see him off at the gate, when I saw this girl walking in our direction from the beach. She had a parasol, and was wearing a lovely summer kimono, and there was an elderly woman with her who must have been her nanny. The girl glanced at me as she went by, and her face was so pale and pretty it looked almost transparent. But she’d gone a few steps past the gate when a car came around a corner on the other side. As it went whizzing past, it brushed against her parasol, sending it spinning to the ground. The girl had a hand up to her forehead.

“What’s wrong, miss?” the nanny asked her in a worried way.

I ran over to pick the parasol up, then looked at the girl. Her face was as white as a sheet.

“She doesn’t look too good,” I said. “I should take her straight home if I were you.”

But the old woman was in too much of a flap to be any use, so I told her I would help.

“It’s not far,” she said, “—just over there, where that big pine tree is.”

Since the girl didn’t seem up to walking, I offered to carry her on my back. When I picked her up, though—well, it came as a surprise: not just how light she was, but how nice she smelled. She was obviously high-class; in fact, I found out later that her family was related to Egawa Tarozaemon, the scientist who built a special furnace for making some enormous kind of cannon.

Anyway, you won’t believe me when I tell you this, but the girl took a fancy to me. The nanny came every day after that to fetch me. I’d hear her voice calling for me at the entrance, and Shiro would go out to see her, then come back with a big grin on his face.

“The young lady would like the honor, Eiji,” he’d say, kidding me. So I’d ask the boss if I could go, and—bad-temperedly, telling me not to stay too long—he’d usually agree.

On the way over, the nanny would ask me things about myself, how I spent my time. And I’d fob her off with something like, “I don’t work, but I dabble in the theater now and then.” The bit about not working went down well, you know. Most rich people don’t do a stroke of work, they live off the fat of the land, and it seems she thought I was the spoiled son of some wealthy family. Another thing was, I’d been sort of toughened up in Korea, so I expect I seemed different from the other young men-about-town. Either way, she swallowed the story whole.

“Mr. Ijichi is in the
theater
,” she told the girl, all goggle-eyed, when we arrived.

“How nice. And what kind of plays do you appear in, Mr. Ijichi? Foreign ones?”

“Oh, I’m just a dabbler,” I said, “not a real actor.” Since I didn’t know a damn thing about the theater, I
had
to say this in case they asked me any more questions.

It was a big place they lived in, but apart from the girl the only people there were the nanny and two maids and an old gardener. Sometimes a piano teacher and a man who looked like a university professor dropped by. But as for where her parents were, or how long she was going to stay, I’d no idea. Whenever I went there, the whole place was neat and tidy, not a speck of dust. Through the windows you could see a fine Western-style garden, with an old-fashioned cannon standing on a rock.

The girl sometimes suggested a game of cards, so I joined in, but all we played was Sevens—no betting at all; it was a complete waste of time as far as I was concerned.

They asked me to go to the beach with them, too, and we went, all three of us. There was a small cove, and people from the villas were swimming. There were men in red loincloths standing around on the beach as well, and others sitting on the rocks, all staring hard at the people swimming.

I asked what they were doing, and the old woman said, “They’re keeping watch to see the young ladies don’t drown.” They were hired for the summer, she told me, just to keep an eye on them, one for each family. I don’t know how it got that way, but those lifeguards all wore the same red costume.

On the beach in Oiso

The girls who’d finished swimming came up the beach, each with a guard in tow carrying a parasol over his shoulder and a basket. The men had deep tans—they looked almost black against the blue sea.

“Shall we go?” the nanny said, and the girl and me walked side by side along the sand toward the house. On the way, she kept giving me little glances from under her eyelashes, but every time I looked back she glanced away again. She seemed to want to say something, but couldn’t because the other woman was right behind us.

It went on like that for days, with us doing the same things over and over again. I couldn’t work it out: a couple of youngsters, boy and girl, going for walks on the beach with a chaperone, and
nothing happening
. It seemed unnatural. Still, she was as pretty as a picture, just the right age, and a type I wasn’t used to, either, so you couldn’t really say I didn’t enjoy it.

One day, we got back to find a pile of Alexandrias on the table. More than ten bunches there were, and beside them was something that looked like a watermelon, only it wasn’t. I was wondering what it was when the old woman asked the maid who they were from.

“They sent them over from Mr. Dan’s place,” she said. That was Dan Takuma, the father of the famous composer; one of the big shots in the business world—Mitsui, or was it Mitsubishi? His summer bonus alone would have been a couple of hundred million in today’s money. Even our boss couldn’t have matched that.

The nanny offered me a grape, but I was still puzzled by the watermelon. When I tried it, it was as sweet as honey, sweeter than the grapes ... and that was the first time I ever remember having muskmelon.

Anyway, not long afterward, the boss told me to go back to Tokyo. Didn’t even tell me why. But I had a good idea what was on his mind, so I said goodbye and took the first train into town. And I never saw the girl again, never even went to Oiso any more. The boss had told Muramatsu not to send me. And, on my own side, I wasn’t interested in meeting the girl in secret—the worlds we lived in were just too different.