Confessions of a Yakuza (29 page)

“ ‘We could carry fingers or arms,’ he said.

“ ‘Fingers are no good. Let’s take their arms.’ ”

So the two of them, Nagano told me, used swords on the dead bodies. No fancy stuff—they were in too much of a hurry; they just hacked off the arms at the shoulder, then tied them all together, dozens of them, and slung them on a pole. When they got back to somewhere safe, they burned them. The only problem was, they’d have to hand over the right ashes to the right families. So, as they were cutting off each arm, they’d tie a rag around it with the man’s name on it; and later, when they laid them on the brushwood, one by one, the corporal wrote down the name in a notebook, before the things went up in smoke.

Nagano told me other stories about the war as well. There was nothing sentimental about
him
—it didn’t bother him at all that some of his pals had been killed. He said he’d been given any number of decorations, and I expect it was true. Let’s face it, it’s men like him that make the best soldiers, isn’t it?...

Anyway, a year passed in no time at all, and before long I was outside the gates meeting all the gang. But, for some reason or other, the train was delayed, and we missed the ferry across to the main island. I was furious; I’d wanted to get back to Asakusa as soon as possible. But it was dark by then, so we booked into an inn.

That was where we were lucky. We were pretty shaken the next morning when we heard that the ferry we were supposed to have taken had sunk. It was the
Toya-maru
disaster. A typhoon came that way unexpectedly, and more than a thousand people drowned. You never know your luck, do you?...

Ijichi Eiji was sitting on the sofa, his head swaying slightly from side to side. A soft spring sunlight shone through the glass of the sliding doors.

“Isn’t it time you lay down again?” said Hatsuyo.

“I’m all right. Bring in that thing I was telling you about, will you?” He lit a cigarette for himself and took a puff at it. The woman soon came back, holding a heavy-looking object wrapped in paper. She put it on the table and opened it, to reveal the black rock I’d already seen once before.

“I don’t want it to be a nuisance, doctor,” he said, “but I wonder if I could give you this.” He squinted at it sleepily. “If you put it in the right kind of shallow dish and pour clean water over it, it looks quite impressive, especially in the morning light.”

He poked lightly at the stone with a dry, brown finger, and it rocked a little in the sunlight.

On the way home, I stopped at a shop and bought a low, bluish-colored bowl of the right size. The following day, however, I had a cold and took to my bed. It continued for a week, and it still hadn’t cleared up completely when one day, quite unexpectedly, a letter arrived. According to the postmark, it was from Ishioka, about twenty miles northeast of where I lived.

When I opened it, this is what it said:

It’s turned a lot warmer, so I hope you’re better by now. I want to thank you for all the nice talks we had this winter. I’d been thinking that I’d stay in Tsuchiura for the rest of my time, but I suddenly decided to move to Ishioka. My health is much the same as ever. There’s a hospital near here where they said they’d send somebody over to have a look at me whenever there’s anything wrong, so please don’t worry about me. I’m sure you’re as busy as ever, so take care of yourself.

Yours sincerely,
Ijichi Eiji

That was all. It was so sudden that I couldn’t imagine what was behind it. I tried telephoning Hatsuyo, but she must have been away, because there was never any answer. So, once I’d recovered, I decided to go to Ishioka to find out for myself.

I had no trouble finding the place. It was a restaurant in the center of town, with a miniature wisteria stretching out its branches in a pot beside the entrance.

I asked for him at the cash register.

“Just a moment, sir,” the girl said, and trotted off toward the kitchen. Almost at once, a rather refined-looking woman appeared.

She seemed to be in her mid-fifties, though she might have been older. She bowed and said, as though she’d known me for years: “You’ve been so good to him. I’m afraid his room’s a bit cramped, but would you like to come upstairs?”

He was lying in an eight-mat room, with a flower arrangement in one corner.

“You shouldn’t have come all this way just to see me,” he said in a husky voice.

“How are you?” I asked.

“As you can see.” He then introduced me to the woman, saying that she owned the restaurant, and was now looking after him.

She bowed to me again, her forehead touching the tatami this time. Returning the formality, I found myself wondering what her connection with the man was, but he made no move to enlighten me. He changed the subject by saying I’d lost a little weight, and nothing further was said about the matter. There seemed to be some phlegm stuck in his throat, and with every breath he took there was a drawn-out wheezing sound.

“I haven’t forgotten to water the stone as you told me to,” I said.

“My old boss used to say it reminded him of Mt. Asama, but to me it looked just like one of the hills near our base in Korea.... Have you ever done any climbing, doctor?”

“I used to, but I’m a bit past it now.”

“Don’t be silly—you’ve hardly reached your prime!”

A grin passed over the dark, mottled cheeks, and he coughed moistly a couple of times. The woman brought a teapot and poured some fresh tea into my cup.

“Do you want some too?” she asked him.

“No, I’ll have it later. When I drink tea,” he explained to me, “I always have to take a leak; it’s a nuisance. By the way—do you remember me talking about Saburo?”

“The man who made a pile at the end of the war?”

“That’s right. He turned up suddenly just the other day. Five or six days ago, wasn’t it?”

“Four,” the woman put in.

“Was it?... Anyway, he hadn’t changed a bit. The same funny little man with shifty-looking eyes. ‘Nice to see you, boss,’ he said, ‘it’s been a while. You’re looking pretty well.’ But he went straight on: ‘To tell the truth, I heard a rumor you hadn’t long to go, so I hopped on a train to see you one last time before you croaked.’ And he roared with laughter, the little bastard. Then we got to talking, said what fun it’d been in the old days, when you could do more or less as you liked. Everybody’s so serious nowadays, there’s no fun in things at all. Anyway, I asked him what he’s doing now, and it turns out he’s got a job cleaning bars, snack bars—that sort of place. Not that he’s ashamed of it—oh no. ‘I like to do things properly,’ he said. ‘Once they’ve seen what I can do, they never ask anyone else. I do two places before lunch, and two more in the afternoon. Then I get on my bike and go fishing. Or go to the races if I feel like it.’ ”

“So he hasn’t changed much?”

“Just the same as ever. But he’s getting on, too, like the rest of us. If you want to hear his story, you’d better hurry up.”

“I
would
like to meet him, actually.”

“I thought you might, so I got him to leave his phone number. If you’re interested, I’ll call him for you.”

“I’d appreciate it. Still, it’s more important to me that
you
get better. I haven’t heard all you have to tell me yet.”

“You mean you don’t want me to die till you’ve heard the end of the story? You’re more of a stickler than I thought, doctor. Actually, though, nothing much happened after I came back from Abashiri —nothing worth telling you about, at least. Well, there was one little incident that ended up with me cutting off another finger, but ...”

“When did it happen?”

“No, don’t ask—honestly, it was a silly business.... Anyway,” he went on, “Kamezo died soon after I got out, and I was getting a bit decrepit myself, so I decided to retire.... You must have thought at first that, being kind of well known in the yakuza world, I’d have some pretty exciting tales to tell. But, you know, the yakuza live on the shady side of life—it’s not half as flashy as people think. I feel a bit bad about letting you come so often to that shack of mine, and not being able to tell you anything really interesting.”

“Nonsense! You’ve no idea how much it’s meant to me, getting to know you.”

The woman put a little plate in front of me, with a cake in the shape of a nightingale on it.

“I don’t know if you like sweet things, doctor...,” she said.

“It’s clever how they make them, isn’t it?” I replied, looking at the cake admiringly.

“I went to Fukagawa yesterday,” she said, “to the Tomioka Hachiman shrine. I bought them on the way back.”

“Do you often go to Tokyo?”

“No, hardly ever.”

She smiled and poured me another cup of tea.

“I remember, doctor,” the man put in, “you had a picture in your place. Asakusa in the old days. They said your father did it. Is that right?”

“Yes. He didn’t start painting till he was well into his sixties. That one was done when he was around seventy. And he’s still working as a doctor, too.”

“It’s just like the Asakusa I knew when I was young. The slum area, with the wives squatting outside their shoddy little tenements, gossiping as they cooked some fish for supper on little charcoal grills.... The kids behind the shoji with their tattered paper.... And the men in cotton half-coats, walking home along the boards that covered the open drains.... When I worked at the coal depot, I used to see that kind of scene every day, but almost before I realized it, the whole thing had changed. Then, after I retired, I came to see you—and there was that picture. It really took me back.... Is it still there?”

“Oh yes.”

“I’m glad.”

It was past two o’clock by the time I called a halt to the conversation and, with a promise to come again soon, went back downstairs. The woman came out into the road to see me off. I was still completely in the dark as to who she was.

Ijichi Eiji died less than a month later. The funeral was a very quiet affair. I met Saburo there, and was astonished to find him exactly as Eiji had pictured him. I introduced myself, and he told me that Eiji had phoned him about me. “Come and look me up sometime,” he said.

I also saw Hatsuyo at the funeral, for the first time in several months.

“How are you getting home?” I asked.

“Well, I came by train,” she said, so I offered to take her in my car. This gave me a chance to ask her about the woman in Ishioka.

“That was Omitsu,” she said. “The girl he ran off with all those years ago. Didn’t he tell you?”

“Who’d have thought it.... I had the impression they never saw each other again.”

“To be quite honest, I didn’t know much about it myself. I only took up with him during the war, years later.”

She glanced over at me as we drove along.

“So you’d never met her before?” I asked.

“When Kamezo died—it’s quite a while ago now—she came to the wake.... I heard later that she’d had a rough time after that business with Eiji, but in the end she went back to the inn her parents ran, married a decent man who was adopted into the family, and kept the inn going after both her parents died. I expect Eiji knew about it, but he doesn’t seem to have gone to see her. When Kamezo died, though, she turned up at the wake, alone. And it was only a few months later that he cut off the other finger.”

“What did he do it for?”

“He went to visit her, and got into a quarrel there. It was all so stupid.... He just went out in the morning, and when he came home the finger was gone.”

“It must have been quite a quarrel.”

“If only it had been, I wouldn’t have minded so much.... Anyway, after Kamezo’s funeral he went over to her place, and found her alone. So they were sitting there chatting, just the two of them, when the husband got home. According to Eiji at least, the man seemed to be a bit peculiar. He’d checked up on her, and knew all the details.

“Anyway, Eiji introduced himself, and the husband—apparently he was fairly drunk—got Omitsu to bring them some more saké, then started rambling on about the past. Eiji felt a bit awkward and tried to leave, but the other man wouldn’t let him go. Before long, he’d got himself worked up and began to shout, laying into Eiji for showing up suddenly like that when he wasn’t there.”

“It took some guts to do that, knowing Eiji was a yakuza.”

“I expect he thought his wife had cheated on him. And he wasn’t sober, either. Anyway, he ended up punching Eiji.”

“That bad, was it?”

“And you know what Eiji did then? Of all the stupid things—he went and cut his finger off—there, on the spot, the middle finger of his left hand. I ask you!”