Confessions of a Yakuza (4 page)

Things didn’t last long, as I said, with the woman at the teahouse, and only a month or so after that I took up with someone called Oyone. There are some things in connection with her that I’m not likely to forget in a hurry, so I’d better tell you about it....

Next to my uncle’s firm lived a carpenter called Kyuzo. He was a regular at the dice games in the coal yard. His missus was a dark little woman with slanting eyes who was always on the go. She worked as though she was desperate—maybe if she’d given herself a break, the thought of her husband’s bad habits would have been too much for her.

Anyway, they had six children, so they were poor. The children were always hungry; whenever Kyuzo sat himself down for a drink of saké, they’d all come and sit around him. They’d watch him drink, wide-eyed, sucking in their cheeks and giving great gulps from time to time. If there was, say, a bit of pickled radish to go with the saké, their mouths would come open as they watched him chew it, and you could see spit trickling down their chins.

Sometimes he’d say, “D’you want some?” And they’d all nod together, more like a row of puppets than human beings. So Kyuzo would pick up one slice of radish and give it to the oldest boy, who was about ten. The boy would bite off half and give it to the next oldest. Then he’d give it to the third one, who’d bite off half of what was left, and so it went on till by the time it reached the fifth kid there’d be less than the tip of your little finger left. So the smallest kids would start bawling.

“That’s enough of that,” he’d say, but it wouldn’t stop them. So he’d give them another piece, this time starting with the smallest. But then, as like as not, that kid would eat the whole piece himself, and there’d be a fine old fuss. Poor Kyuzo couldn’t even have a drink in peace. On days when he didn’t have any work, he’d usually turn up at the gambling place, to work off his frustration.

Every day when it wasn’t actually raining, Kyuzo’s wife would be doing some washing. It wasn’t the family’s clothes: it was the underwear of the local whores and the cotton kimonos they kept for their customers. The red-light districts produced a tremendous amount of washing every day, so it was farmed out to women outside.

An alley in Asakusa

There was a woman they called the Boss, a kind of supervisor; every day she’d load the dirty clothes the brothels had given her onto a cart and go around distributing the stuff to the washerwomen, who’d wash it at so many sen apiece and deliver it to the Boss by nightfall. That was the kind of work Kyuzo’s wife did, so she was always outside the house with her laundryboard and her tub. And there’d be another woman with her, helping her with the tarts’ clothes. Oyone, her name was; she was under twenty, and quite a charmer.

When they’d finished the laundry the women would hang it up to dry in a corner of the coal yard, which was my uncle’s property, so they were always quite polite to me, as if they had me to thank for letting them use the space. Before long, I began to take a liking to them—and in that way I gradually struck up a friendship with Oyone.

She was the daughter of a barge owner, and lived alone with her elder sister in a two-story house near us. Her parents lived on the barge; with seven children on board as well, the place had got so crowded that the two oldest girls had moved out and rented a room on the second floor of a shop selling fertilizers.

One day, though, there was a fire at the house next door, and the place where Oyone and her sister lodged caught fire too. This was in the middle of the night, but I was woken up by the shouts of “Fire!” and rushed out to have a look. I found the whole area ablaze—and there was Oyone, who for some reason hadn’t got out in time, clinging to the roof and crying and screaming for all she was worth.

Burning flakes were drifting down all around her, and she was certain to be burned to death unless she did something pretty quick. Her elder sister, who’d managed to escape, was screaming at her: “Jump, Oyone!
Jump
!” with her hair all hanging loose. But Oyone must have been too scared, anyway she couldn’t move. The whole place was in a complete panic, with people rushing around through the bits of drifting fire, all of them shouting like mad. I was wondering desperately what to do when I saw a big old-fashioned umbrella lying at the side of the alley.

It gave me an idea. I picked it up. “Here—use this to jump down with!” I shouted, and chucked it up at Oyone. If I’d thought about it calmly, I should have known that an umbrella wasn’t going to be any use, but that’s the kind of thing you do when you’re in a panic, isn’t it?

Anyway, I had this idea that it would save her. So I threw it up toward her, but I was in such a state that I threw it handle first, so that the umbrella opened up almost immediately and didn’t get as far as the second floor. I finally got the hang of it, and flung it again with all my might. Oyone grabbed hold of it and jumped with it gripped in her hand, still unopened.

Till then she’d been paralyzed with fright, but the moment she got hold of the umbrella, her strength somehow returned, and she just shut her eyes and jumped. So she was saved. And we were lovers from then on.

Oyone’s father was called Ichizo, and as it happened
he
was a great gambler, too. Sometimes he played with the laborers, but when he played with the boatmen it was always inside the boat.

His barge had a cabin about twenty square feet big, but that was where his wife and children stayed, so they set up a big thing like a tent on the deck where the cargo was piled, and played inside it, out of sight.

The police must have known about it, though, as there were raids once or twice a year at least. You should have seen the players when they turned up—they all dived into the river, like so many frogs—they’d be in the air almost before the lookout gave the warning. If somebody had called out “Police” as a joke, I expect they’d have jumped in without bothering to find out if it was true or not.

Anyway, Ichizo was a good-looking guy, in a hard sort of way, and quite a favorite with the women. Thanks to that, his wife got jealous. She gradually got more and more turned in on herself, and in the end she began to mess around with magic, praying to the fox-god and that kind of stuff. You’d often hear her mumbling what sounded like Buddhist prayers. This went on all the time Ichizo was out on the town. She’d be inside their boat, but you could hear it across the river and way into the distance. The river was always jammed with boats, but you could tell at once which one was Ichizo’s.

One day, I went to the barge with Oyone just as Ichizo was coming home. It was early evening, in summer, and the sky was still red over in the west.

He grinned at us and said, “That’s right—you have a good time while you’re still young,” so I suppose he was in a good mood. But then I saw that Otoshi, his wife, was standing bolt upright in the body of the boat glaring at him. Her face wasn’t normal. She was all tense around the eyes and her mouth was drawn up at the corners, so that she really looked a bit like a fox herself. And she said in this spooky kind of voice: “Ichizo! You’ve been with that Tamayo from the teahouse again, haven’t you?”

Ichizo didn’t pay her any attention. He went on board and headed for the cabin, but his wife shoved him back and shouted in this weird, high voice, “A while ago the two of you went into the noodle shop by the Fudo shrine in Tomioka, didn’t you?”

“Bullshit,” muttered Ichizo, not to be drawn out.

“You both ordered tempura noodles there, didn’t you?”

“What the hell are you talking about, woman?”

“But you found a fly in Tamayo’s noodles when they brought them, didn’t you? So you bawled them out and the owner apologized and brought you a new bowl and gave you ten sen back, didn’t he?”

Ichizo just stood there looking startled; his face was all pulled out of shape. And then, with us watching him, he grabbed hold of an iron kettle that was on the deck. “Take this, you old fox,” he yelled and flung it at her head. My girl gave a shriek, but almost before she got it out, the kettle had hit Otoshi full in the face. There was a terrific clang, and then—you’d hardly believe it, but the kettle split clean in two and fell on the deck. Otoshi stood with her eyes wide open and her face all tight and pinched like a fox still. Ichizo didn’t move, he was so shocked; then he suddenly went limp and plumped down on the floor.

It was completely dark by now, and there were lights on some of the boats. After a while, Ichizo picked himself up and went into the cabin, but he was laid up for the next three days with a fever.

Of course, that didn’t mean that he gave up playing around. But he must have got scared of going out with Tamayo, because he seems to have dropped her in a hurry. They didn’t throw the broken kettle away, they kept it as it was. It still beats me how something like that could have happened.

Talking of fox’s curses, there was another thing, too. I’d been going with Oyone for barely three months or so when I began to get fevers from time to time. I was wondering what was the matter, but then I got this pain in the crotch, and the glands there started to swell up. Even so, I thought it would clear up of its own accord and didn’t do anything about it.

But it got more and more painful, till I couldn’t even walk properly. If my kimono so much as touched my thighs, I’d jump with the pain. The laborers all cackled when they saw me walking about with bandy legs. After a while, though, I wasn’t even walking—I was flat on my back in bed, with a high fever and my whole body shaking like a leaf.

It must have dawned on my uncle that this wasn’t an ordinary fever, because he went and fetched the doctor. The doctor took one look and said “Syphilis.” My uncle was furious.

“I didn’t think you were such a slob!” he said. “I’ve a good mind to send you back to your father. What women have you been with, to get like this?”

“I haven’t been with any women—it just happened,” I said.

“You get syphilis having sex with women—who ever heard of somebody getting it by himself?”

He had a point, but I couldn’t believe I’d got it from Oyone. She was such a clean and decent girl, you just couldn’t imagine her with that kind of disease. Most likely it was the woman at the teahouse who gave it to me. But if so, I might have passed it on to Oyone. If I had, it would be awful. The idea really bothered me....

Anyway, the medicine and injections brought the fever down so that I was able to get up, but the swellings in my crotch went on getting bigger till they were as big as hens’ eggs. They were incredibly painful; if I touched them by mistake, the pain just froze my brain.

“You’ll have to get a specialist to look at this,” my uncle grumbled. So I was taken to see a VD specialist in Kawagoe. My uncle got Kyuzo to go with me.

What surprised me was that when we went in at the gate, there were so many patients they were spilling outside from the entrance hall. All of them men. I don’t know what they were doing to him, but you could hear a man screaming inside. It made my skin crawl. This is one hell of a place they’ve brought me to, I thought.

When my turn came and I went in, an elderly doctor with a beard had a look at me, and I was whisked onto an operating table right away. Three great brutes of assistants wound a leather belt around me, then lay down on top of me to hold me down.

“Listen—this is going to hurt a bit, but you’re not to move, d’you hear?” the doctor said, in what you’d never have taken for an old man’s voice. “You struggle, and you might find yourself with something important cut off. So make up your mind and grit your teeth. No moving now, whatever you do!”

I mean, hell—there was no anesthetic or anything in those days! He took a great slash at me with the knife right next to the balls, then twisted it sideways. I was prepared for the worst, but even so I felt faint, everything went black in front of my eyes, and I couldn’t help letting out a shout.

Not that the doctor could have cared. In no time he’d carved out the buboes on both sides of my groin, then he stuck a thing like a metal spoon in the holes he’d made and dug around inside. I expect he was getting out the pus and rotten flesh. That was even worse than being cut with the knife; I just can’t tell you what it was like.

The doctor gave me some medicine, and I went off with it, with Kyuzo holding me up. I was much too far gone to walk, so we got a rickshaw and I somehow made it home. I was more dead than alive, but you needn’t think I just curled up and went to sleep. No—it was only after that that I came near to losing my life.

The Kawagoe doctor had told me to take some pills as soon as I got home. So I took them—but they must have been arsenic: it was hardly ten minutes before my whole body felt like it was on fire. My belly hurt as though it had molten lead in it. I just couldn’t stand it.