Confessions of a Yakuza (20 page)

There was a boss from Kiryu called Kanjiro in with me—Kan-chan, people called him. I soon got friendly with him, and we kept it up for years even after we were outside again. And there was another one too, who went by the name of Muraoka Kenji. With him, I struck up a brother relationship.

This Muraoka was closely connected with the Kodama organization, which, years later, got mixed up in the Lockheed scandal. He came in a while after me. Then there were two others, Tsunegoro and Namiji, who became sort of recruits of mine and helped me in all kinds of ways.

I never did find out just what Muraoka was in for, but Kan-chan was in because he was framed by the police.

“It was diabolical, what they did,” said Kan-chan as he stood next to me, pasting bags. “This dick turns up at my place and tells me to hand over a couple of pistols. Now, I ask you—have
you
ever had guns around? No? Of course you haven’t. After all, I hear you used a bone-sticker for the job that got you in this time. Smart, I call it.”

“What’s so smart about it?”

“No need to be modest, now.... Anyway, that was what this copper said to me, so I dug my heels in and said I didn’t have any. But he wasn’t having any of that. Well then, he says, you’ll have to go out and
buy
some, and then turn them in. In the end, he started threatening me—said if I didn’t come up with them he’d have my place raided. That really pissed me off. Go on then, do it, I said. And—sure enough, like good honest cops—raid us they did, the bastards, that same night. Right in the middle of a session. Caught red-handed. And here I am.”

Kan-chan seemed really burned up about it. The real reason why the police set him up, of course, was to improve the district’s anti-crime record. Sometime after I left jail—around 1938, I suppose it would have been—I had just the same kind of trouble myself at my joint in Uguisudani. Told me, in just the same way, to hand in my guns. This particular detective came straight from the Metropolitan Police Board—the very top. I expect they’d been tipped off that some yakuza somewhere had got hold of a few pistols, so they planned to make a clean sweep. But there weren’t any in my place to begin with, and there was nothing I could do.

So they told me to produce some even if I had to buy them. It was way out of line, but if I’d gone on insisting I didn’t have any, I’d have ended up the same as Kan-chan, so I got a brother to buy me a couple at three hundred and fifty yen apiece. That was enough to buy a house with in those days, but I couldn’t afford to think about that.

I turned them in to the police immediately. “Good work,” they said—and that was the last I heard about it: no letter of thanks, and no punishment, either....

Anyway, with one thing and another, Kan-chan and I got on together like a house on fire, and we were always talking to each other in whispers in the workshop. We went too far, though—the warders got pissed off, and we ended up in trouble.

It was the day after there’d been a fall of snow. It was always twice as cold after snow. At night, it got steadily chillier and chillier, and people had to take a leak all the time. You’d just be dropping off to sleep, and somebody would make a clatter getting up. Then as soon as one man had finished, another would get up. This went on all through that night, but in the end I must have dozed off, because I suddenly woke up to hear a warder calling me.

“What d’you want at this time of night?” I asked.

“Come on out,” he said, so I shambled out, only to find myself handcuffed on the spot.

“What’s this for?” I shouted. “I haven’t done anything, have I?” So another warder swiped me across the face. It turned out that my crime was communicating with another prisoner—i.e, talking to Kan-chan behind the warders’ backs. So I was hauled to my feet, marched along the corridor, and taken into a bare, concrete room. Kan-chan joined us on the way. In the middle of the room was a sort of small swimming pool. “Get in that,” they told me. There was a single light hanging from the ceiling.

“Hurry up!” the warder kept shouting at me. I was handcuffed, so there wasn’t anything I could do, but the night was already cold enough to make you shake, and a “swim” could easily have killed you. I glanced over in Kan-chan’s direction; he was looking over at me, too. That gave them the chance to give me a shove, and I found myself underwater before I even had time to yell.

It wasn’t as deep as all that, but the bottom was slippery, and it was hard to find your feet. Not being able to use my hands, I choked and swallowed a hell of a lot of water. Then the warder grabbed hold of my handcuffs and dragged my face up to the edge of the pool, so I managed to get some breath, but I was in a terrible state—I mean, I was past being just
cold
, I thought I was going to pass out.

“How about it?” the warder was saying above my head. “Are you going to do as we say?”

I was in no state to say anything, but I managed to get out a “Fuck you!” so he kicked me in the face and I went under again. The second time he hauled me up, I could hear him still saying “Are you going to do as we say?” I was past talking, though—I couldn’t even breathe. They finally dragged me out, but my body was all stiff, it felt as if I was wearing armor. The water was dripping in great drops from the bottom of my kimono. The funny thing is, I felt like I was hot, as though I’d been burned all over.

But when I got back to the cell and got in between the quilts, I started shivering and couldn’t stop. It’s a wonder you can be treated like that and not die. Kan-chan got a fever and couldn’t get up for a week.

It was cold at other times too—like when we came back from work every day. That was when you saw what we used to call “the jellywobbles.” Between the workshop and the cell-block, there was a changing room where the prisoners took off their work clothes and put their uniforms back on. The windows there were always wide open, and the outside air came blowing straight in, so that we had to strip off in a freezing draft.

First they had a roll call, and as soon as your number was called you stripped off. Then you had to put your hands over your head and stand there with your legs apart, while the warder circled you to make sure you didn’t have anything on you. When he’d finished checking, you put your prison uniform on. That was the roughest part of it. I mean, the clothes had been left out all day on a shelf. And they were dirty, too; we were allowed to wash them from time to time, but only with water, no soap. So they were thick with years of sweat and grime, which froze into something like ice, so when that came in contact with your skin, you couldn’t help starting to shiver. Your face, your jaws, your belly, your arms and legs—they all shook, there was no way of hiding it. People talk about it being so cold “you can’t get your teeth together”—well, that just about describes it. Even if you wanted to say something, your jaw was shaking too much to get anything out.

It’s a funny thing, that kind of trembling. It’s not something you can stop by sheer effort. You try to control it so it won’t show, but it’s just impossible. Even the toughest fellow trembles. That was what the prisoners used to call “the jellywobbles.”

In those days, prisons didn’t have glass windows or anything like that. There were sliding doors with bars, pasted over with paper like shoji. When the paper got old it turned yellow and cracked so that drafts came blowing in. Maebashi had been built in 1888, if I remember rightly, and everything in it was worn out.... The cells and corridor, too, were separated by the same kind of sliding doors—I suppose it was a kind of hangover from the old-style, all-wooden jails of the past.

There were four other men in the same cell with me. The one who’d been there longest was an umbrella repairman called Toyama. There was also a man who sold matches, a handsome guy who thought he looked like Gary Cooper, but I’ve forgotten his name. Toyama the umbrella man had been put inside for murdering his wife after she ran off with someone else.

Almost everybody gets a kind of run-down look when they’re in a prison cell, but Toyama looked particularly seedy. He had a round face, with a little nose sticking out of it like a nipple, and drooping eyes. He was a timid fellow, always kowtowing to the warders; I don’t think it was just because he was in jail, I’m sure he’d been like that even when he was working outside.

Toyama and his wife had been living for years in a cheap tenement behind a horsemeat store, but in the year it happened there’d been a bad drought, with next to no business even in the so-called rainy season. Umbrella men don’t get much work even at the best of times, so I reckon that when things got really bad they couldn’t make a living at all. So they were helping at the store, going around buying up horsemeat.

It seems the guy who stole Toyama’s wife was one of those men with a little stall on wheels who used to go around cleaning out the tiny pipes that people smoked tobacco in. When Toyama came home one day, after he’d been out buying up horses, his wife was out. Several days went by and still she didn’t come home. He’d just about given her up for good when one day—it was raining for the first time in ages—he heard the pipe-cleaning man going by on a back street near the house, blowing that funny little horn they used to have. Toyama happened for once to be busy repairing an umbrella, but he had a kind of uneasy feeling, so he put his work down and went outside to look. Just outside the entrance there was a stream, with a narrow road running along the other side. And there was the pipe-cleaning man, hauling his stall along through the mud, blowing his horn as he went. And walking along behind the stall was a woman.

“If I’m not mistaken, I thought, that’s my wife,” he told me. “My wife, holding up a little umbrella in the pouring rain, traipsing along behind him.

“I rushed out of the house in a kind of frenzy. I soon caught up with them.

“ ‘You come with me!’ I shouted, tugging at her.

“ ‘Hey, stop that!’ the man said, but I knocked him down and went off dragging her along with me, across the stream at the back of the stables, and into a graveyard that stood by the stream.

“It was raining buckets, and the drops were bouncing off the gravestones. I grabbed my wife by the scruff of the neck. ‘What’s all this about?’ I asked her.

“ ‘I’m fed up with you,’ she said. ‘I’m leaving you.’

“ ‘Don’t be a fool!’ I said, grabbing the front of her kimono and almost pleading with her. ‘We’ve been together ever since we were twenty!’ That made her look as if she was going to cry, and she said, ‘It’s all over.’ So I hit her.

“Then I asked, ‘Is it really over?’ and she just went on nodding her head—like a drowned rat, she looked—so I hit her again, hardly knowing what I was doing. I think I knocked her back over a gravestone. But however much I think about it, I can’t remember what happened after that. The first thing I knew, she was dead, and for some reason or other I was standing there with an umbrella in my hand.”

“Was it your wife’s umbrella?”

“She was lying on the ground in front of a grave with a little statue of Jizo on it. There was a puddle by it that was bright red. I was holding the umbrella, but why I was holding it I’ve no idea. There was blood dripping from the tip of it, and it was that, running down the gravestone, that made the puddle.”

He dreamed about his wife sometimes, Toyama said. The funny thing was, they were always pleasant dreams, and his wife was always in a good mood.

“I sometimes think, you know, that deep in her heart she was glad I killed her. I mean, would she ever have been any happier with the pipe-cleaning man than with me?”

Toyama had been sentenced to six years in prison; when I met him he was just starting on his fourth year.

I’d been in jail for about a year when the Dewaya boss died. He’d always had a bad chest, and we hadn’t really expected him to live to a ripe old age, but it came as a terrible shock when I actually heard that he was dead. Something more than just feeling sad. Kan-chan from Kiryu was quite concerned about me. “Pull yourself together, now,” he said. “It’s not like you, this isn’t.” Yes, it really hit me hard.

It never rains but it pours, though, doesn’t it? And only five or six days later, word came that the woman he lived with, the gang’s “elder sister,” had also died.

This time I could hardly believe it. The boss had already been sick, and I’d been half resigned to it, but she was only around thirty and quite healthy, and it didn’t seem possible she’d died of illness. If it wasn’t illness, then something must have happened, but I hadn’t a clue what it could be. I kept fretting about it. After a while, though, Kamezo came to visit me, and he gave me all the details.

According to Kamezo, the cause of the boss’s death had been morphine poisoning. “The doctor came every day and injected him with pain-killers, but the trouble in his lungs had spread all through his body, and he was in awful pain, it was terrible just to see him, and in the end she gave him enough morphine to put him out of his misery.”

The boss must have realized that he didn’t have much longer to live. He summoned Sekine—his chief brother boss —and the rest of the gang to his bedside. This Sekine was the man who started the Matsubakai, a big yakuza syndicate, and one of the most powerful men in the business. He and the boss of the Dewaya had been brothers of the same rank for years, and our boss must have felt there might be trouble afterward if he didn’t bring Sekine in to help.

What he said to Sekine was this: “It seems I’m not long for this world,” he said, “and there’s something I want to talk to you about. When I die, I want you to keep an eye on Muramatsu here, as the next head of the Dewaya. I’d like you to help him in his career, as your younger brother—it can be a six-four relationship, say, or seven-three if that won’t do.”