Confessions of a Yakuza (26 page)

“Got sick and died”...! I took one look at him and knew he’d been tortured—bad enough to leave his face all twisted out of shape, and bruises all over his body. Still, if we’d looked shocked we’d have been hauled off ourselves on some trumped-up charge, so we just thanked them and climbed on board. It seemed Tokuji hadn’t said a word about us.

We got an undertaker to put him in a coffin, offered up some incense for him, then fetched a priest we knew to say a service for him. Okyo, incidentally, held up pretty well. I don’t know how she was when she was alone, but in front of other people she didn’t even cry.

The next day we took the body to be cremated at a local place. We had papers from the military police saying he’d died of illness, and when we showed them to the people there they did it free of charge. Then we selected some of the ashes and went down to Chiba to hand them over to his parents.

Well, time went by. Japan began to lose the war, and Tokyo started being bombed. In the summer of 1944, we set up what we called the “Two-Seven Circle.” It was for gambling, of course: we held sessions on dates with a two or a seven at the end of them, which meant six times a month. The customers were people who owned their own firms in Tokyo and round about—people we could trust to keep their mouths shut. We’d take them to an inn by the sea in Ibaraki prefecture, and let them play in peace and quiet for a while.

When I sent one of my men over to tell them about a session, he’d take along tickets for the train there and back, and a small present as well. Then, when they left after the game, we’d give them something to take home with them—some pork or fish or whisky, say, or shellfish boiled in soy, dried plaice, or sesame oil—things that were in short supply. That impressed them, and we got a pretty good class of customer.

One thing that was helpful in providing presents for them was that Hatsuyo—that’s my present wife, I was already having an affair with her at the time, though she was still a geisha then—anyway, she came from a fishing village called Isohama in Ibaraki, and her elder brother was a boatbuilder. When I first asked him if he couldn’t get hold of some fish or something, he said, “Right! No problem at all.”

All the young men were away in the forces, and all the fishing boats, even the little wooden ones, had been taken over by the military, so almost the only people left in the village were women and old folk. It must have been tough for the women in particular, with no husbands to back them up, but they made what they could by fishing with nets, or diving for abalone, and selling their catch in town. Then, just as they were looking around for something more profitable, who should turn up but us. They were just as pleased as we were, and they brought us a steady supply of dried fish, different kinds of seaweed, octopus, squid, scallops, and so on. Of course, these were all officially off the market, so they were breaking the law.

I remember they used to cook the abalone in soy sauce and make it up into eight-pound packages, dozens of them, which they’d bring around. Normally you couldn’t buy them in Tokyo for love or money, so they were fetching thirty yen a package. Now, that’s expensive, when you think that the monthly salary of a man who’d been to college was around fifty yen at the time. But with our games bringing in thousands of yen at every session, we weren’t going to quibble over the price of a few abalone.

Anyway, we paid the women about twice as much as they could get anywhere else, and we got the pick of the bunch. They brought us plaice, as well—big ones, a good two feet long, and fat, because the fishermen were all away and they had time to grow. It can’t have been easy to hide them from the policeman on the bridge they had to cross to get to our inn.

For once, my own business was doing so well that I actually had trouble finding somewhere to keep the profits. If I told you how much we made, you probably wouldn’t believe me. But I couldn’t put it in the bank, and, times being what they were, there wasn’t much to spend it on, either. It just went on piling up.

Okyo’s kid was literally brought up on wads of money. You remember those big bamboo baskets they used to have at the public bath in the old days, the ones you put your clothes in? Well, we used to put piles of ten-yen bills in one of those, then lay Masako down to sleep on them. They were soft and springy, and she slept well. Sometimes she’d wet herself, you know, and we’d use the spoiled bills to light the fire under the bath with.

Still, while we were having it easy, the war situation was getting worse and worse, and in the end we decided to move out to Kashiwa, just northeast of Tokyo. Nowadays it’s pretty built up around there, from what I hear, but back then it was real country, with no town to speak of at all. We rented a big house standing in the middle of the fields, and went to live there—me and Kamezo, and Okyo and her baby.

Village scene

Even in those days I still had seven or eight men left, though they were all a bit long in the tooth. And we kept up the Two-Seven Circle, right on into 1945 when things were getting really rough, with air raids every day. I remember the twelfth of February, around the beginning of spring. When I arrived at the inn where we held our sessions, the manager said to me:

“We’ve had it, boss.”

“What d’you mean?” I said.

“Japan’s just about finished.” He was looking more down-in-the-mouth than I’d ever seen him. According to him, there’d been a big B29 raid two days earlier, enough planes to turn the sky black, and Tokyo had been beaten to a pulp.

His assistant was looking pale, too. “We’d better stop the games, with things the way they are,” he said.

Well, I wasn’t any happier about the B29s than they were, but I didn’t see much point in packing up and hiding down a hole. It was carpet bombing; they flattened everything—ordinary houses, hospitals, the lot.

The assistant went on mumbling, till Kamezo spoke up. “Look,” he said, “I know some people—there was an air raid, so they all went into the shelter. There was a great shower of incendiaries and the house was burned down, but the shelter survived. They didn’t come out again, though. So the neighbors went and looked—and found every one of them dead, done to a turn. You might as well die doing something you enjoy. Come on, then—let’s play, and to hell with them.”

That cheered the manager up, and we decided to carry on. Then, on February 16, there was another terrific raid. This time they came over low in the sky: carrier-based planes, raking everything with machine guns and scattering incendiaries. Almost none of our planes went up to meet them, so they could do just as they liked.

The biggest of the Tokyo raids came on March 10, and from then on there were machine-gun attacks by carrier planes almost everywhere. The big Hitachi works weren’t far away from us at Katsuta; these were attacked in June, and more than a thousand people were killed. The planes were small fighter-bombers, so it looked as if there was a carrier somewhere close. Even so, we didn’t close down the Two-Seven Circle: we were past caring by then.

But then one morning, on July 17, something new happened. The game had just got into its stride when there was this low rumbling noise in the distance, like someone dragging a big millstone around. And it kept on coming. It was a deep, heavy kind of crunching that made you feel uneasy just to hear it. And then came the sound of horses—neighing, rushing around in a panic—from an open space quite near the inn where the army kept a number of them. Everybody half got up, then stopped there with the money in their hands, waiting. The rumbling got worse, and the next minute there was an almighty crash, as though the sky’d fallen in.

“That was over by the station, wasn’t it?” somebody said. There was a Hitachi arms factory near the station.

“Something blew up, I’d say.”

“No. More likely we’re making some new weapon to flatten the Yanks with, and they’ve started testing it.”

Surely no gun would kick up a row like that, people were just saying, when that awful rumbling started up again, followed by another great crash that turned your belly inside out. This time there was
really
something wrong, no mistake about it. It wasn’t any use putting on a brave face, pretending it was nothing—the sound would have put the wind up anyone. And it came again, and again, another fifteen or sixteen times.

“What the hell is it?”

“You know—it
could
be an enemy battleship.”

“You’re right. Yes, they’re shelling us from the sea.”

Everybody turned pale. So this is it, I thought, the American fleet’s coming ashore.

“There’s nothing we can do about it, anyway,” I said, trying to cheer them up. “If there’s a direct hit, it’ll be the same whether you’re in bed or up.” So we all moved into the inn’s biggest room and drank our way through several crates of saké.

It
was
offshore shelling, as it turned out; and they’d even been able to hear it deep in the mountains off to the west. A great fleet of ships—I don’t know whether they were battleships or cruisers—came sailing south, shelling the coast all the way. What was heartbreaking about it was that while they were slamming shells into our towns, not one of our own ships had been around....

Before long, the war was over. But we went on gambling, right to the end.

The man was lying flat between the quilts. The bright rays of a late winter sun were falling on the windowpanes. Inside the room, the kettle on the stove gave off a faint, soft plume of steam, and from the kitchen at the back came the sound of someone chopping something on a board.

“A patient gave it to my father,” I was saying. “One single apple. But I felt it would be a waste to eat it. So I left it on a shelf in the kitchen and gazed at it every day. In the end, of course, it went bad. I was only four at the time, but I remember I was so upset I cried.”

The man lay there, looking through half-closed eyes, listening with apparent pleasure.

“Anyway,” I went on, “where were you after the war?”

“I stayed in Kashiwa for a while. I mean, things were hopeless in Tokyo.”

“Did you organize any gambling?”

“Yes. All kinds of people turned up to play, you’d be surprised. With a lot of them, you had no idea what they did for a living. Some of them, even, stayed for a month or two. There were two who later got on in the world, became town councillors. They’re still in office now, so I can’t tell you their names.”

The beams of sunlight swayed in the steam, and, off and on, the sound of children playing on the riverbank could be heard.

“By the way,” he said, “have you ever been to a geisha party?”

“A lot of my patients are former geisha. Most of them are in their seventies or eighties by now. Why do you ask, anyway? Are there any particular geisha you remember?”

“Of course, lots of them. Tsuchiura wasn’t too far away, and it being a naval base, you found some real beauties there.” He gave a sidelong glance at the woman by his bed as he spoke.

It wasn’t long after the end of the war. I’d been having a game at a friend’s place in Tsuchiura, and I’d won some money, so I went to a geisha house. When the girls came in, there was one who was really stunning.

“What’s that girl’s name?” I asked the guy running the show.

“Ah. You’ve got a good eye, boss,” he said, “—just as I’d expected. Her name’s Kofuji, and she’s the girl that Yamamoto Isoroku, the commander of the Combined Fleet, took a fancy to when he was here in his younger days.”

I was kind of tickled by the idea that this was the woman the head of the whole navy had had an affair with. Anyway, that day I left without doing more than talk a bit with her. But somehow I couldn’t get her out of my mind. So I went there pretty often after that. One day, she said to me:

“Boss, there’s a favor I’d like to ask.... You see, I want you to take care of a sword for me.”

“Funny thing for a geisha to ask a yakuza to do, isn’t it? What’s this all about?”

“Apparently it’s a Bizen sword,” she said, perfectly serious still. “It scares me, and I don’t want it lying around.”

“You’ve certainly got something on your hands there! They’re valuable, those things.”

“I had a hundred of them until a while ago, but I got rid of all the rest.”

I was shocked. “I could understand, say, two or three,” I said, “but—a hundred! Where the hell did you get hold of them?”