Confessions of a Yakuza (18 page)

The next morning, the cold woke me up just as the sun was rising. I looked around, and the girl had gone: nothing anywhere but bare trees. If people’s hearts can really turn cold, as they say, that was just how I felt right then.

The idea that she’d run out on me gave me a queer feeling, part annoyed and part sorry for myself. I’d meant us to separate at any rate, but to have her go off of her own accord made me angry: people are funny like that. I pulled myself together and hunted around for her. No sign. Then, just as I was sitting on a stone in front of a little wayside shrine, I saw her in the distance, walking fast along a path between the paddy fields.

“Where the hell have you been?” I asked, but all the fire had gone out of me by then.

“I went and got some riceballs,” she replied.

With Omitsu, on the run

She opened a package wrapped in bamboo leaves, and there were four riceballs inside. I was surprised that somebody’d been good enough to give them to her, but it turned out she’d given the ivory toggle on her sash for them. That made me do some hard thinking as I was eating my share: it’s no good, I thought, we can’t go on like this. So I said to her, “I can’t stand seeing you like this any more. Before long I’ll be a proper yakuza, and then I’ll come and marry you, I promise. So you go back home for the time being.” She cried, but in the end it was decided she should go.

I went with her as far as Koiwa, then went on alone to Funabashi, found an eating place where they knew me, and asked them to lend me a kitchen knife.

“Haven’t seen you for ages, Eiji,” said a cook with a cotton towel bound neatly around his forehead. “What do you want it for?”

“I’m going to use it here, so don’t worry. I’ll give it back to you right away.”

He gave me the knife. I held one end of a bit of string I’d brought with me between my teeth, got hold of the other end with my right hand, and tied it around the little finger of my left hand. I pulled it as tight as I could. Then I chopped off the tip of the finger. The cook just stood there gawping, but it hurt too much for me to bother about him. I cut off one end of the clean white cotton of my bellyband, bound up the finger, then asked him for a sheet of paper. I wrapped the bit of finger in it, and left. I wasn’t at all sure that cutting off a finger would be enough to make them let me off, but there wasn’t any other way by now. So I set out for Makuta’s place in a sort of what-the-hell mood.

When I called out in the entrance, a maid came out, and a young man with her. I introduced myself and said I’d come to apologize, and held out the finger, still wrapped in its piece of paper.

“Just wait there a second, will you?” the man said, and disappeared inside the house. I didn’t know whether Makuta was in or not, but I could hear women talking at the back of the house. My hand by now was throbbing like hell, and my kimono was soaked with clammy sweat.

After a while the same man came out again and said, more politely than I’d expected,

“The boss says he understands. Now will you please leave?”

“I see,” I said. “I’m much obliged.” And I bowed and left.

It all went off so simply that I felt kind of let down. After that, I went straight back to Asakusa. On the way, I kept wondering why he’d made so little fuss, but I couldn’t make any sense of it. So I assumed my boss must have done the apologizing for me. The boss was back in town by then. He glanced at me when I showed up, and said, “Mind you take yourself a bit more seriously from now on.” And that was all he ever said about it.

I got a good talking-to from Okada, but Muramatsu wasn’t even particularly angry. I remember him saying, “You’re quite a character, aren’t you?” Then he noticed me trying not to show the pain, and was decent enough to put me onto a good doctor; he even wrote a note to the surgery at the Yoshiwara hospital.

Incidentally, I didn’t meet the girl again for years after that. I knew too well what would happen if I did, you see. A man’s no match for a girl crying. I heard rumors that she left home soon after, but I was in Maebashi jail around then, so I wouldn’t have been there even if she had come to Asakusa to see me.

I’d finished seeing my patients and was relaxing one Saturday afternoon when Hatsuyo dropped by.

“I wasn’t sure about coming on a weekend like this,” she told me, “but
he
said, the doctor always comes in the evening—it might be nice for once to give him a cup of tea while it’s still light. And he asked me to pop along and ask you.”

“How’s his temperature?”

“Normal. He’s gradually eating a bit more too. I was worried, I thought he’d never pull round this time, but he’s stronger than you think, isn’t he?”

Going into his living room, I noticed a flat dish lying on the low table. There was no water in it, but right in the center lay a large, lumpy black rock. The man had on a brown kimono of the kind they wear for tea ceremonies, tied with a black sash with a figured pattern.

“What’s this?” I asked.

“It’s a rock they use in what they call ‘tray landscapes.’ ”

I peered more closely at the black rock in its dish.

“Mind if I pick it up?” I said.

“Go ahead.”

It must have been a kind of lava. It was made up of a number of tight layers, with dark cracks in it here and there.

“There’s grass growing on it, isn’t there?”

“That’s because it’s a living thing. It was fifty years ago when I was given this. I was always making a mess of things in those days, and the boss was pretty disgusted with me, but one day he sent for me and said, ‘Here, Eiji, I want you to look after this.’ My mouth fell open. ‘What is it, boss?’ I asked. ‘What am I supposed to do with a lump of rock like this?’ ‘You give it water every morning and evening,’ he said. I was a bit puzzled, but it was the boss’s orders, so I took it back to my own room. And I gave it some water twice a day, but after a while I forgot to do it, and the next thing I knew it had gone. I forgot all about it for thirty or forty years, then all of a sudden it turned up again.”

“Recently?”

“Eight years or so ago. It was with Kamezo, my junior. Kamezo died of lung cancer, but a month or so before he went he asked me over and said, ‘Do you remember this?’ ‘Where on earth did you get it?’ I asked, in surprise. ‘When you were doing time in Maebashi I thought it would disappear if it was left where it was, so I put it away in a trunk, then forgot all about it. But as my wife was tidying up my things it turned up again. I thought that if I didn’t give it back to you in a hurry it would get lost somewhere again, which is why I got you to come here.’

“Kamezo was a good, warmhearted friend, I never thought he’d go before me.... Anyway, I was grateful to him for keeping it for me like that. Now I’m old myself, I sort of understand what the boss felt about it, and I make a point of giving it some water once a day at least.”

With a blanket over his bad leg and his arms folded lightly in his lap, he sat there gazing steadily at the rock.

I was twenty-six when they sent me to jail in Maebashi. I’d killed someone, you see, and I was in for over four years.

He was sitting with his feet in the sunken hearth, leaning against a back rest; he had a padded jacket over his kimono, and a muffler around his neck. The telephone lines were moaning in the wind above the roof.

Just north of the Ryounkaku in Asakusa, the twelve-story building like a pagoda that collapsed in the Great Earthquake, there used to be what they called “Gourd Pond.” The district near it was packed with brothels, and I’d been put in charge of a gambling place right there among them.

It was a boiling hot day at the height of summer, I remember. Around noon, Muramatsu sent for me and asked if I’d mind taking someone in for a while.

“What kind of guy is he?” I said.

“You know Tomi in Shinagawa, don’t you? He’s a brother who helped me out once. Well, this fellow’s the bookie at Tomi’s place, a guy called Kiyomasa. Seems he’s a good man, but from what I heard he caused some kind of trouble that put him on bad terms with the younger men. So they asked if we couldn’t take him in here in Asakusa till they get it out of their system.”

“I see.”

“Just keep him out of the boss’s way—you know how it is with him now.”

Muramatsu was my senior as well, so of course I agreed to do it. I could see its advantages, in fact. A good bookie makes all the difference in a gambling joint—it’s up to him whether a session comes alive or falls flat. At my own place, which was fairly small, Kamezo was the bookie, but with the best will in the world you could never have called him good at it.

When I actually met the guy, though, I had a feeling that something nasty was going to happen. The minute I saw his face, I felt we weren’t going to hit it off. The feeling was right, too: I was going to end up killing him. It makes you think, doesn’t it?... But it’s too easy to make the facts fit after the event.

Anyway, I realized right off that with Kiyomasa around the gang could come unstuck. It was no good pretending to be senior in rank, in front of the younger men, if I was going to lose control over my place. I’d be ashamed in front of the boss, too. So I knew I’d have to do
something
; not bump him off, obviously—you don’t kill a man just for that—but get him out of the way as soon as I could. But even kicking him out wasn’t as easy as that, not with someone who’d been sent to Muramatsu by one of his brothers. So I decided to wait a while and see how it worked out.

In the end, it was about two months later that anything actually happened, but the seeds of trouble were there right from the start. There’s a saying, “hate a priest, hate his cassock,” and it’s true: I took a dislike to every single thing about him. I expect it was the same with him as well.

On the outside at least, Kiyomasa was a good-looking guy, tall and with good features, straight nose, thick eyebrows, and a kind of brisk, convincing manner. And yet ...

“I hope I’ll be satisfactory,” he said to me when he first came, bowing his head as a junior should, but as he raised it again he flicked his eyes up at me as though to say, “You think I’ll take orders from a kid like you?”

I was still only just over twenty-five at the time, and Kiyomasa was a good seven or eight years older, so I suppose it hurt his pride. But age doesn’t matter in that business. As I said before, there are some men who are like the paneling in the john, however old they get, and there are others who become the main pillar of the house while they’re still young. Age by itself just doesn’t carry any weight.

That doesn’t mean, though, that he was a dead loss, that he was no use to anybody; it wasn’t as straightforward as that, which made it all the more awkward. To be fair, he had a real talent for organizing games, as you might expect in someone with such a punchy character.

When I first tried him out as our bookie, the way he called the betting and kept a general eye on things was all you could ask for. The games went like wildfire. He had a deep, husky voice and a good line in come-ons. The players lapped it up, and the bets came fast and furious. He made it exciting— made you feel you could almost
see
the spots on the dice in the cup.

Kiyomasa started getting popular, and the younger guys at our place were all behind him. The feeling was that he looked after them well, and for a while everybody got on fine. But it wasn’t long before he began to show his own spots.

He was good, no doubt about it, but he was too proud of it—that was obvious too. He’d never actually say anything, but his expression had something snide about it. You could tell he didn’t give a damn about you. I don’t know why he always looked like that. That being his nature, I suppose, he couldn’t stop it showing in his face. He’d do something to amuse the customers, then the next minute he’d give this nasty little smile. It’s fatal in a professional gambler.

Let me tell you what happened one day. It was an evening when there weren’t many customers, and he said to me:

“There’s not much action here, so how about it—why don’t we play some
chiipa
?”

“It’s an idea,” I said. “But not tonight, there aren’t enough of us. Let’s leave it to some other time.”