Confessions of a Yakuza (6 page)

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.

At that time all the main waterways had lookout posts on them. They’d been there for centuries, and they kept a round-the-clock watch on anything afloat. Wherever two canals crossed or met in a T shape, there’d be a lookout, so there was no question of going via those places. It was the same with any bridge that had a police box: if anybody happened to look over the railing, you were obviously in trouble. Even without police boxes, though, there was always a chance of being caught by a cop on patrol. So we moved in the shadows close to the bank, slow enough to be able to stop at short notice; and we kept our own lookout men on shore, walking along on each side of us, a little way in front.

As soon as one of them saw a copper coming, he’d chuck a stone as a signal, and get himself hidden away behind something. Kenkichi would quickly pull in to the side and stay put. You see, there were so many other boats around that once we’d stopped we were usually safe. If helped, too, that we could count on the other boatmen to turn a blind eye. If they’d given us away, they risked—well, policemen poking around on their own boat, for one thing—but also being outlawed by the other people working on the river, and being driven out of business.

Then, when the coast was clear, we’d slip quietly away, and move on down the dark river.

There were no bunks on our boat, so Kenkichi arranged for me to stay at the home of a man called Tokuzo, who was in charge of a crew of raftsmen. By now the timberyards have shifted out into Tokyo bay and there’s no trace of the old Fukagawa left, but when I was there Fukagawa meant only one thing: timber. There were timberyards and timber wholesalers everywhere you went—hundreds of wholesalers alone.

Timber rafts in Fukagawa

Timber was floated down to Fukagawa from all over Japan; by the old way of reckoning it would have been worth millions of
koku
of rice. The logs were then left to float in the timberyards, where merchants bought and sold them. Whenever they towed the stuff they’d bought to the lumbermill, or when they wanted it brought ashore, the raftsmen would take care of everything that had to be done. Their foremen kept “stables,” where they trained the men.

Each foreman usually had about thirty people working for him, so they had to have big rooms for everybody to eat and sleep in. Those rooms were just the place for gambling. The raftsmen didn’t do much of it among themselves, though, and players came in from outside.

Serious gambling isn’t all that popular nowadays, but in my time all kinds of people—the owners of large shops or classy restaurants, for instance—used to go in for it in a big way. Gambling was a big thing at Tokuzo’s place too; there was hardly a day when there wasn’t a session.