Confessions of a Yakuza (22 page)

“That depends on how you handle them,” he said.

I was prepared for this—I’d had an idea it might happen even while I was still inside—so I thanked him and agreed. And that’s how I got my own gambling joint in Uguisudani.

“Are you familiar with Uguisudani, doctor?” the man asked.

“I’ve been there to visit the Kishimojin shrine,” I said.

“Oh yes?... They hold a morning-glory fair there nowadays, don’t they—selling the flowers in little pots.”

“Yes, I went last year. There was quite a turnout.”

“I rather like it myself. My joint wasn’t in that district, though, but over by the river. There used to be old mansions with big gardens and plum trees in the area, where people would bring their pet nightingales to have singing competitions with each other. There weren’t many left by my time, though.”

“How about the gambling place—is there anything of that left nowadays?”

“Not a trace of it. The whole area was burned down in the air raids, and the river was covered in later, so now there’s nothing but shops. Even I have a hard job finding my way around. A real shame it’s all gone....”

In getting my gambling place going, Muramatsu helped with the funds, and Kan-chan and Muraoka both helped as well, so somehow or other I managed to get it on its feet in fairly good time. I also managed to get married.

Her name was Omon. She was a geisha in Asakusa; we’d become lovers a while before, and ended up living together. I’d had quite a bit of trouble, though, getting to that stage.

What happened was that her dancing teacher and her mother ganged up together to keep her out of my clutches. The mother, Tsuru, was an ex-geisha too, and she’d brought Omon up all by herself, and as she was obviously fond of her daughter she wanted to find her a good patron if she could —and live a comfortable life herself on the strength of it. That was
her
idea, and I suppose it was only natural, because Omon was popular as a geisha, and there’d been any number of men who wanted to make her their mistress. The thing was, though, that Omon said it was
me
she wanted to marry.

That sent Tsuru right up the wall. There were endless quarrels between them, and the mother came in tears to see me and beg me to give her up. Tears or not, though, that was too much to ask; I might have done it if Omon herself had said she wanted to split up, but she didn’t, so there wasn’t anything I could do. Anyway, after a lot of wrangling, Tsuru gave in, looking fit to howl.

That made
me
feel pretty bad about it, too, so I went to see her several times to try and bring her around. But she still hadn’t really given up the fight. Whenever I went, she had some complaint or other to make. The bitching just went on and on. If I kept quiet—she
was
the girl’s mother, after all —she just took advantage of it, got carried away.

In the end, I decided things couldn’t go on like that, there was no telling what would happen. So one day I stuck a knife in my sash and took Kamezo, with a coil of rope around his shoulder, and burst in on the dancing master and Tsuru just as they were having a nice cup of tea together. We looked pretty threatening, and it shook them up.

“What do you want?” they said, and tried to get away, but their legs just buckled under them. So we grabbed hold of them, bound them up, side by side, with the rope, then flung the end over a beam and hauled them up in the air. Then I drove the knife home into the tatami underneath them.

“Well—how about it?” I said. “D’you want to go on as you’ve been doing? Or will you stop complaining about us from now on?” They just hung there, too startled to say anything. So this time Kamezo said:

“See here, lady. Eiji’s a big man in our business. I mean, you’ll be much better off with him than if you’d made the girl some rich man’s mistress. Look—he’s offering to fix you up for the rest of your life, so why not relax and enjoy life together?”

Tsuru by now had gone quite pale and just nodded and grunted, again and again. So we pulled the knife out of the floor and let them down.

“Well, then,” I said, putting my hands in front of me on the tatami and bowing down low. “I’m sorry things got a bit rough. But that’s the way I am, and I just hope we can get on better for a long time to come.” And before I left I put an envelope with some money in it on the table.

She never made any more fuss, you know. I’d drop in occasionally to leave some pocket money for her, and she’d just sit there, all quiet and shrunk up. I was hoping she might call it quits and cheer up, but it wasn’t to be. So I left her to it, and Omon herself didn’t say anything more about her, either.

Without either of us wanting it particularly, we soon had another woman on our hands. It happened like this.

It was the end of 1937, when business was good at my place and I was getting to be a proper boss in the gambling world. One day, I had an early bath, then put on a kimono and went out for a stroll in Asakusa with Kamezo. We were walking along when I saw this Salvation Army man in an old-fashioned uniform standing at the corner of a little shopping street, beating a drum and asking for money. Even nowadays you still see them sometimes in the better parts of town, but in the old days the Salvation Army was very active everywhere, preaching and fund-collecting at the same time. So I got out my wallet and gave Kamezo ten yen.

Shopping street near the Kannon temple

“Here—go and put this in his box,” I told him.

That brought the man straight over. “Many thanks,” he said, “and God bless you—He won’t forget.”

As far as I was concerned, the more God forgot the better, and I wondered if I hadn’t gone a bit too far for once.

But then I noticed he had these terrible burn scars all over one side of his face. All swollen and purple—you couldn’t help feeling sorry for him. He got a card out of his pocket and said, “Please contact me if ever I can be of any help.” The card had the Salvation Army address on it, and the man’s name: if I remember rightly it said Hashiba somebody or other, and he was a captain in rank. The burn apart, he looked rather distinguished, with a good, strong sort of face. I was impressed; I’d never realized they had that kind of man in his sort of work.

But we’d come out to enjoy ourselves, so we said goodbye and left him, and we hadn’t been strolling around long before we’d forgotten all about the Salvation Army. We dropped in at two or three places for a drink and a bite to eat, and got fairly plastered, then I called a cab, sent Kamezo on home, and told the driver to take me across the river to a brothel I knew called Yamaki. But I must have gone to sleep, because before I realized it the driver was saying we were there. Feeling nice and comfortable I hauled myself up, paid the fare, and got out. I then made my way into the waiting room and called for them to bring me a cup of tea.

At this, the madam turns up and wants to know if I’ve ever been to her place before. So I tell her, rather sharp, that she must be half asleep or something, and not to be so unfriendly.

“No, really,” she says, perfectly serious, “this is the first time I’ve seen you, sir.”

I couldn’t believe it. So I took another look around me, and something didn’t seem to fit. Damned if I hadn’t got the wrong place!

“Hey—where exactly
am
I?” I asked.

“Why, at Komonjiro, of course.”

“Well, I really have screwed things up! Sorry.” And I got up to go.

“But it doesn’t really matter, does it?” she said—she was only doing her job, after all. “Maybe it was lucky in a way. So please—why not stay now that you’re here?”

“Well, then, perhaps I will...,” I said, and popped upstairs.

So I spent the night with one of the girls there called Okyo. But for someone in a place like that she was a real amateur. When I asked her how long she’d been working there, she said only three months. It must be pretty tough, I said. That made her look like she was going to burst into tears, and she began to tell me all about herself, things she’d never told anyone else, apparently. It was—well, a miserable story. But I’d come there for a good time, and I couldn’t afford to be too softhearted. So I just kept saying “I see ... oh, yes ... dreadful,” and so on, to make her feel better.

But that only made her more serious still. “If only I could get out of here,” she said, sitting on the quilt and crying, with this bright-colored shift draped over her shoulders. But what did she expect
me
to do about it? I was in a fix. She seemed to mean business, too, which made it all the more awkward.

So I told her: “OK, listen ... maybe it was fate or something, me coming here, so let’s talk about it again next time we meet. Then I’ll do whatever I can.”

I was just talking, of course—I wasn’t planning on going there again, and, after all, she was in the trade, she’d forget all about me as soon as the next man came along. But I was wrong there. You see—it must have been about two months later—she actually came to call on me, bringing another woman with her.

It was in the daytime, around noon, and I was reading the paper in the back room when one of my youngsters came in and said,

“Boss, there are a couple of women out front saying they’ve come to see you.”

“What kind of women?” I asked, puzzled.

“Personally, I’d say they were
that
kind of woman.” It was obvious what he meant, but by then I’d forgotten all about Komonjiro and hadn’t a clue who “
that
kind of woman” could be. So I told him to show them in, kept them waiting a while, then went out to see them. And, of course, it was the girl I’d been with in the brothel.

“Hey,” I said, surprised. “What’s up?”

“Well, actually, I came to ask your advice, I thought you might help.”

“What is it, then?” I said, and it turned out she’d run away.

“For a while after I saw you I tried to put up with it,” she said, “but just then a letter came saying my father was sick and they were in trouble at home. So I asked them if I could go back for a while, but they refused to let me go.”

Whenever one of the women in the red-light district went out, a man called a “minder” used to go with her, so usually there wasn’t any chance of running away even if the woman wanted to. I asked her how she’d managed it, and she told me that just around that time there’d been a circus in the area.

There was a pond with quite a big open space around it, and the circus had taken over this empty ground for a while. They had all the usual things: elephants and tigers, and trumpets tootling away, and a man at the wicket shouting, “The world’s greatest circus! Elephants! Acrobats! Just beginning! Roll up, roll up!” As she and another girl were going past the tents, they found a place where you could see into one of them, and they stopped and watched for a bit. The “minder,” too, got wrapped up in it, so she thought: it’s now or never. She signaled to the other girl with her eyes, and they ran for all they were worth.

“I get the picture...,” I said, feeling this was really awkward. You see, for a prostitute to run away in those days was a full-fledged crime. The brothel keeper had bought the woman for so many hundred yen, and if she ran off before she’d paid it all back the police were called in. Even if she reached her own home, they’d bring her back again, so there was no real point in escaping in the first place.

It put me, too, on the spot. It was out of the question to keep them there at my place, but, seeing them, I hadn’t the heart to kick them out, either. I was wondering what the hell to do, when all of a sudden I remembered Captain Hashiba of the Salvation Army.

In those days the Salvation Army had its headquarters in Kanda. They were very keen on the “emancipation” of prostitutes, and they’d already got some quite good results. What they preached was that prostitutes should be free to give up the job if they wanted to. And they spread the idea that women who tried to give up the work should be given protection.

Just the thing, I thought to myself, and I phoned them up right away. Luckily enough, Captain Hashiba was there at the time, and remembered who I was. So I explained the situation and asked him if he couldn’t do something.

“That’s a very good thing you’ve done,” he said. “I’ll come immediately.” And he arrived within the hour. They told him their story, and he listened carefully.

“I see,” he said finally. “I’ll try to fix things up.” The girls bowed happily and said “Please!” and went straight off with him. Later on—several weeks, I suppose it was—Hashiba turned up to say it had been arranged for them to get out, and I wasn’t to worry any more, and I was to get in touch if I ever needed him again.