Confessions of a Yakuza (19 page)

“When exactly is ‘some other time’?” he asked with a little sneer.

This made me tense up, but I just told him not to worry, we’d do it soon, and that was the end of it for the time being. Even so, I couldn’t help feeling it wasn’t very bright of him—I mean, to say that kind of thing openly, in front of the customers. He was testing me, and, particularly with us yakuza, if somebody suggests in front of other people that you’re not up to doing something, you’re almost obliged to have it out with him. But maybe I’d better explain this all a bit more.

Just occasionally, if only a few customers show up, the professionals will have a game themselves, and one of the games they play is
chiipa
. When this happens, the ordinary players are asked to move away from the action and have to be satisfied with watching. In fact, once in a while, they’ll hold a session specially to play
chiipa
, with nobody but yakuza in the room. Though I doubt whether any yakuza nowadays know the proper way to play it....

In ordinary games, you have two dice and gamble on the odds or evens, but in
chiipa
you have four. All different sizes, too. The biggest of them is called daito. The second, which is yellow, is
nishuku
. The third has its eyes painted red, so it’s called
akappa
. And the smallest of the lot is
chibiri
. All different, both in size and color. The players stake their money on one particular dice or the other, in various combinations.

Everybody present is a professional, so you don’t have to work up an atmosphere. The bookie, for example, never calls out “Place your bets, then, place your bets.” Nobody talks at all, in fact. And the stakes are higher than usual, too. The people around you are all professional gamblers, so there’s a different look in their eyes. About the only thing you can hear is the sound of money being put down and the rustling of kimonos.

A dice game

After a while, when he thinks the time is right, the bookie says, “That’s all, gentlemen,” and everybody has to take their hands away from the cash. Once they’ve done that, he says “Play,” in a quiet voice. And that’s when the money moves.

Anyhow, that was the game Kiyomasa suggested we should play. But you see, the guy knew perfectly well that it wasn’t possible at my place. Serious gambling never goes right unless you’ve got the right people. To play
chiipa
, you’ve got to have solid bosses or professional gamblers who come regularly to your place.

“Listen, Eiji,” Kamezo said to me later. “Are you going to let him get away with that? He’s getting above himself, the bastard.”

“Never mind,” I told him. “He just said what he felt without thinking. In fact, why don’t we do as he says sometime soon?”

Actually, though, I’m not as cool or forgiving as I might have sounded. I was furious, and tucked the incident away at the back of my mind.

With things as they were, I was just thinking of telling Muramatsu that I couldn’t take responsibility for this man any more, when there was a bit of trouble, and over a very minor thing at that. One evening, Kiyomasa got drunk and pissed on a brothel signboard. It was late at night, and I suppose he thought there wasn’t anybody looking. Actually, the place was shut, and they didn’t realize what was going on. But a woman in the vegetable shop on the other side of the road saw him at it. Even so, if it had happened only once there wouldn’t have been any fuss, I suppose, but it seemed Kiyomasa was always pissing on signs in the area whenever he got a bit drunk. Word of it got around, and one day, when one of the lower-ranking members of our outfit—“Little Mitsu,” we all called him—was going by, the woman stopped him and complained.

“Here, you—” she said, “there’s one of your people goes about every night peeing on the signs around here. The sort of thing even a dog would be ashamed to do. If your boss goes on letting him get away with it, it’s going to ruin his reputation.”

Little Mitsu was a bit shaken by this, and the least he could do was ask her to lend him a bucket so he could get some water from the well and wash the signs down. He went around to the other establishments near there, apologizing to the owners, then came to tell me what had happened.

“I see...,” I said. “I was already thinking of talking to Muramatsu about him myself. So hang on till I can do something about it.”

But Mitsu was too upset to be calmed down as easily as all that. He went and found Kiyomasa and complained to him directly:

“Look, Kiyo—I know you were drunk, but if you go around doing that kind of thing, it’s going to hurt Eiji’s reputation, right?”

Now, any normal member of the gang would just have apologized and that would have been the end of it, but Kiyomasa wasn’t like that. He just flared up, and since there wasn’t much he could say as an excuse, he shouted something about Mitsu teaming up with the woman to spy on him.

This got Little Mitsu going too, of course.

“OK, you shithead,” he yelled back at him. “You think you can pull rank on me?
Nobody
talks to me like that.”

So Kiyomasa ups and belts him in the face. Mitsu then lets him have it, saying he’ll kill him.

Luckily, that time, Kamezo went in and separated them, and Kiyomasa came to me later and apologized, down on his knees. Which settled things for the moment. But Kamezo kept on telling me to get rid of him, and the others felt the same way too. So I thought: well,
that
should be enough to convince Muramatsu, and I made up my mind to go and see him, the next day if possible.

Before I could get around to it, though—that very same day, in fact—there was another row. I wasn’t there when it started, but from what I heard later Kiyomasa suddenly picked on Little Mitsu and insisted he take him to see the woman who said she’d seen him pissing. When Mitsu asked what he meant to do, he just glared at him and told him to mind his own business—shut up and take me to her, he said.

That made Mitsu really start slanging him. And
that
made Kiyomasa come in fighting. The other guys there tried to hold him back, but he was too strong for them. So Kamezo ran out to get me.

As for what happened next—well, I’ll just stick to the main points, as it got really messy. Kiyomasa must have gone completely off his rocker. He rushed out into the kitchen, grabbed hold of a gimlet, and set on Mitsu with it. (It was a three-pronged thing we’d got to break up the ice for the little pillows we used when we took a nap in summer.) Then, when I waded in to try and stop him, he suddenly turned on me instead.

“I’m going to kill you!” he shouted, coming for me, so I picked up a kitchen knife that was lying around—the “bone-sticker,” we used to call it, a kind of stiletto—and stuck him in the chest. It went clean through a rib and into his heart. The blood spurted out, and I got splashed red all over.

It was a dancing teacher, who happened to turn up just then, who called the police. A whole crowd of them came rushing over. They took in what had happened, and an elderly detective asked me:

“Eiji, was it you that did it?”

“Yes, it was me,” I said.

They all knew me well enough, so they didn’t use the handcuffs.

I was sent from the police lockup to Ichigaya. And then there was the trial. It was only then that it really came home to me just what a big man the Dewaya boss was. Nobody else could have done what he did: running all over the place, getting up a petition to present in court, and so on.

He and Muramatsu covered everywhere they could think of in Asakusa—all the shops along the approach to the temple, for example—getting hundreds of people to sign. When a detective told me about him going around from shop to shop—and he was sick, you know—bowing his head to people for their signatures, it brought the tears to my eyes. I actually put my hands together, there in the lockup, and said a little prayer of thanks to him.

And it wasn’t just signatures, either. He actually went to Kiyomasa’s parents and got them to put in a plea for man-slaughter, not murder.

It seems Kiyomasa was the son of a timber wholesaler. But he got mixed up with a gang of young hoods, and one thing led to another till he was stealing his parents’ money, getting women into trouble, and generally getting so out of hand that his father asked the boss in Shinagawa to take him over.

The father must have given him up as a bad job, because when he wrote to the court he said he’d been half resigned to something like that happening. It was a miracle, in fact, that Kiyomasa had lived as long as he had, he said. In a way, he’d brought it on himself, making a nuisance of himself at the first place he was taken in, and ending up pulling a knife on someone. His father didn’t bear me any grudge, and his other children didn’t either, so they hoped they wouldn’t charge me with too serious a crime....

The boss even got a politician in on it, too, a man called Okubo, who had a lot of support in Asakusa. This Okubo, apparently, introduced him to a lawyer and did all kinds of other things to help as well.

It took a year before they reached a verdict. I wasn’t charged with murder, but with inflicting bodily injury resulting in death, and I got five years. So, after keeping me in Sugamo for a while, they sent me on to Maebashi with a handful of other prisoners—by train, in a coach we had to ourselves. I’d been in detention for a year already, which left four years to do in Maebashi.

“I don’t suppose you know what it’s like inside a jail, do you, doctor?”

“I know a bit about it.”

“
Really
? How’s that, then?”

“Sometimes, if a prisoner gets hurt or sick, I get called in to see him.”

“And how about it—I mean, your impression of what you’ve seen inside?”

“It’s interesting, in its way. They can be pretty tricky.”

“Pretending to be sick?”

“Yes. Most of the time, of course, they really are sick, but there are some of them who try to fake it. They’re quite good at it, too. Groaning with pain, even making themselves break out in a sweat—if you’re not careful, you can fall for it.”

The man chuckled. “I’m not surprised,” he said; “some of those guys are pretty sharp. A young doctor could easily get had. But there are all kinds of doctors too, you know. The Maebashi jail where I was had its own medic, and he was a real bastard. He’d never come straightaway, even if the prisoner was in real pain. Absolutely refused to get up if it was at night. He’d write the death certificates himself, but most other things he left to the warders. We didn’t dare get sick because of what might happen.”

The thing about Maebashi was the cold. Looking back on it now, I get the feeling it was always winter there. The jail was by the river Tone, on the edge of the town, and you could hear the water roaring past; it got on your nerves at night, when an empty belly kept you awake. Way up in the north there were the Akagi mountains, and a cold wind blew down off them. There was an eighteen-foot-high wall around the place, and the wind went round and round inside it. The sound of it alone was enough to make you feel cold.

At the Sugamo jail there were twelve men to a cell, but in Maebashi there was only six. At night, you slept on one thin quilt spread on the tatami; it was terribly small—not three feet wide, more like two foot eight or nine, I’d say. And about five foot six long. I’m tall, so my legs stuck out at the end. The top quilts were a bit bigger all around. But they’d all been in use for years, and they were so old there was hardly any cotton stuffing left in them. Actually, it was still there, but the quilt had been reserviced so many times it had gone flat and hard. It wasn’t an even thickness, either—there were lumps in places, like islands in the sea; where the islands were, the quilt bulged, but the other places were so flat they were mostly cloth and nothing else. Not much chance of a good night’s rest when even your top quilt was like that....

The warders put me to work making paper bags. There were other men doing the same job; fifteen of them were yakuza. They say a yakuza in jail is like a nightsoil dipper that’s lost its handle—the shit’s still there, but no way you can use it. A bad joke, but it’s not far off the mark.

The yakuza never do any proper work in ordinary life, so it’s no wonder they can’t do any when they’re put inside. I mean, you could hardly tell them to organize gambling sessions, could you? But you can’t leave them idle, either, so they get taught some simple job or other. Sticking bags together is just the thing for yakuza, as its only simple repetition.