Confessions of a Yakuza (2 page)

The young woman joined them outside and said something to her well-dressed friend, who just nodded and grunted. For some reason this really turned me off him.

That was the day the judge came to look at the house; the woman herself moved in about ten days later.

It was always on a Sunday, in the daytime, that the judge came to visit her, never on a weekday, not even Saturday. He used to turn up in a rickshaw. He was a stout, imposing-looking man somewhere around his mid-forties. He’d climb down from the rickshaw in his formal kimono, wearing wooden clogs and carrying a cane; and while he was standing there, the woman would have a quick word with the driver and give him a tip.

The judge stayed with her till it began to get dark, when the rickshaw came to fetch him again, with a paper lantern hanging on one of its shafts. As he moved off along the dark road, leaning against the cushions, the girl used to watch him go.

I had to go to the woman’s place once every month to collect the rent. Being a tradesman, my father couldn’t live in a good residential area himself. My younger sister and my mother lived with him over at the shop, but I myself was with my grandparents, who were living in retirement there in the suburbs.

So it was my job to get the monthly rent and take it to my father’s place. As she handed the money over, the woman would just say, “Here you are, thank you.” I never heard another word from her until one day in winter, toward evening. When I arrived for the rent and stepped into the hall, her voice came from the other side of the paper sliding doors: “Come on up, Eiji.”

I didn’t say anything, so a door opened, and there she was, sitting in the sunken hearth with a pair of chopsticks in her hand.

“I’m just toasting some rice cakes. Do you want some? Don’t just stand there—come on inside! Come and get warm. Come on, get in!... Tell me—how old are you?”

“Why?”

“It doesn’t matter. Just tell me.”

She looked me full in the face, smiling slightly. Then she picked up a rice cake that she’d just toasted in her dainty fingers.

“Now, open your mouth...,” she said.

The white fingers flashed in front of my eyes, I felt dizzy and couldn’t breathe properly.... And that was when my life started to come unstuck.

I went completely overboard, as you can probably guess. The woman was lonely, and I was fifteen at the time, so everything apart from her stopped existing for me. So far, my grades at school had been among the best, but now they suddenly crashed to somewhere near the bottom of the class.

When I was with her, I was always horribly on edge, my heart pounding with fright at the idea that the judge might turn up at any moment. I actually thought that if I was caught in the act there, a policeman would come for me and I’d be put in jail—sentenced to death, maybe.

This made her laugh, and she’d tease me about it: “If it bothers you so much,” she’d say, “why don’t you just shove off? The only thing is, if you do, I won’t let you in here tomorrow or ever again.” All it took was one tug on the leash and she knew I’d come trotting back to her.

Oyoshi

There were a couple of things, though, that bothered
her
as well: the judge’s wife and the big house they lived in. I used to pass the house on my way to school. It had a moat about six feet wide all the way around it—just like a castle. On the far side of the moat was a thorny hedge and a wall, to stop people getting in. A pine tree in a tub stood on each side of the front door.

Inside the entrance hall there was a big step-up made of a single piece of wood. There was always a rickshaw waiting to one side of the entrance, with a man sitting next to it. They had a tennis court on the east side of the grounds. This was in the 1910s, mind you, and I’d never seen
anyone
playing tennis in a country town like that. Socially, a judge in those days was really something; he ranked alongside the prefectural governor, so I expect this one wanted a residence to match his position.

But it wasn’t so much the house as the wife inside it that made her ask me all about it when I got home.

I remember a little thing that happened once. It was an early evening in summer with a hot wind blowing, and the woman, who’d had a bath, was lying on the tatami in the living room in nothing but a shift. I’d just got out of the bath myself too; I came into the room with nothing on but a loincloth and the steam rising all over me. All of a sudden, the girl chucked her fan down on the floor.

“She’s an awful nag,” she said. “She’s always going on at him. Like this—” She made a kind of frown between her eyebrows with her two forefingers.

I wondered who she meant.

“His wife!” she said bad-temperedly, picking up the fan again and fanning herself for all she was worth.

“I wish she’d just hurry up and die,” she added.

“You ever met her?” I asked.

“Oh, yes! Just the one time. He took me to the Kabuki once when I was still in Tokyo, and his wife and daughter were in the next seats. The daughter was about the same age as me.”

“That’s a funny thing to do, isn’t it?” I said.

“Funny? Ridiculous, I call it!”

She may really have been hoping the wife would die. But even if this had happened, there was no guarantee at all that she would have stepped into her shoes—which was another thing that made her fret. The judge had rented a house for her and gave her everything she wanted, but it didn’t seem to satisfy her. It made my blood boil when I saw her like that. I don’t know why, exactly—I was just furious.

Then, one evening near the end of summer, I was sitting there with my mind blank, trying to think of something to do about it but getting nowhere. Outside the window was one of those little bells that tinkle in the breeze in summer. I was looking at it when suddenly I felt I couldn’t stand things any longer. So I pulled the bell off its string and slammed it down on the paving stones outside in the garden.

“What’s up with
you
?” she said. “You scared the life out of me.” She glared at me as if she found the sight of me disgusting.

“What’s it matter to you?”

“Oh, cut it out!”

“I’m asking you.”

“Don’t be stupid!”

She took my chin in her fingers and twisted it sharply, then smiled brightly. Then she looked straight into my eyes and said it again, in a whisper: “You’re stupid,” she said, “like all the rest of them!”

Well, the same sort of thing went on for I don’t know how many months, till the woman suddenly upped and ran off to Tokyo. The judge had been shifted to a better post, and she was moving so as to be with him. When we said goodbye, she said she’d write after she got to Tokyo, so I was to be sure to go and see her there. But I waited and waited, and it was three months before a letter came—then when it did, it didn’t have any address on it.

It must have been about six months later that I went to Tokyo myself. My one aim was to see the woman—I had this idea that so long as I got there I was bound to meet her somewhere. When I told my father I wanted to find work in Tokyo, he agreed with surprisingly little fuss. Seems he felt it wouldn’t be a bad thing for me at that point to depend on someone else for a change. I mean, I was in fourth grade at middle school, but it was obvious I wasn’t going to pass my exams. In those days, it was normal to fail students who didn’t do their work, so he probably thought it would do me good to find some way to support myself away from home.

“However tough things get, though, don’t come here complaining.” Those were his parting words; I don’t expect he had any inkling of why I wanted to go. The young woman’s first name was Oyoshi—it’s funny, but I don’t remember ever hearing her surname.

A cousin of my father’s was a coal merchant at Ishijima-cho in the Fukagawa district of Tokyo; the firm called itself the Nakagawa Coal Depot. That’s the place that took me on.

The man stuffed some chopped tobacco into the tiny bowl of his long-stemmed pipe, lit it, and puffed at it in a leisurely way. He gazed at the burning charcoal in the brazier, the hand that held the pipe trembling slightly, so that the brownish bowl swayed to and fro.

It was quite a big business in its way. Outside the office there were dozens of heaps of coal piled up way over your head, stuff that they’d bought in places like Hokkaido and Kyushu.

When a ship carrying coal arrived in Yokohama, laborers would reload it onto wooden barges. These would be drawn by tugboats up and into the Sumida river, then from Mannen bridge they’d come down the Onagi river and along between the rows of factories and shops till they reached our depot. The depot had five wharves on the riverbank. The laborers then piled the coal up in the storage yard, ready to be shifted onto other boats or horse-drawn carts as soon as we had an order from some firm.

They were a really scruffy lot, you know, the laborers. Apart from anything else, they were filthy. The skin on their faces was all dry, their teeth were yellow, and they had a mean look in their eyes. I asked my uncle once why they all had that look, and you know what he said? “Because they’re scum.”

My uncle was rich, but he was stingy. He was always warning me to be careful how I recorded the amounts of coal the laborers had carried. “Rough estimates are no good,” he’d say. “They make a tremendous difference one way or the other in the long run, so you’ve got to record everything exactly.” He had a small moustache and always wore a cloth cap, with a broad-shouldered jacket and riding breeches, plus high leather boots. He kept a cloth in his pocket which he used to wipe the boots with whenever they got dirty.

He was incredibly fussy about details. “Those laborers,” he’d say, “—their one idea is to slack off whenever you’re not looking. But just think what that means to us: if a man carries two pounds less every time than he says he does, that means a loss of a hundredweight on fifty trips. Or a loss of five tons if there are a hundred men. That’s why you’ve absolutely got to keep a sharp eye on the scales.”

I soon got fed up with him harping on the subject, and only half listened to anything he said.

Though I’d come to Tokyo hoping to meet the woman, I didn’t know my way around at all, and on top of that I was worked off my feet, so there just wasn’t time to go and look for her. My first job, as I just mentioned, was to jot down in a ledger how much coal the laborers carried. The amount for one trip was fixed at a hundred and thirty pounds. If we were loading a boat, they’d use hods to lug it over to the edge of the wharf, where I’d be waiting with a pair of scales.

“Come on, get a move on!” I’d say. And I’d get the usual answer:

“This is as fast as a man can manage!”

I’d draw a line by the laborer’s name and hand him a bamboo stick. These sticks were called
mambo
; they were about a foot long and an inch thick. The laborer would hold it in his hand as he trotted up the gangway. Then he’d dump his coal down anyhow and hand over his
mambo
to another youngster like me waiting on board, who’d also put a mark by the man’s name.

So my work brought me into close contact with these men. When you got to know them, most of them were OK. They tended to fly off the handle easily because they were always hungry, but they were basically nice enough. As I was the youngest at the site, they’d often ask me how old I was, or if I wasn’t going to school. And one of the old hands kept a friendly eye on me, so I soon began to feel more at home.

It was about two months after I started working there that I was asked to act as a lookout when they were gambling. I’d noticed that at the midday break all the laborers went off somewhere, and I’d assumed they’d gone to have something to eat. But that didn’t quite seem to fit, so I decided to poke around among the coal heaps. As there were thirty or forty of these heaps in the storage yard, each of them as high as a two- or three-story building, it was like walking through a maze. I pressed ahead, though, and came across a lot of men squatting down in a ring. When they caught sight of me, they jumped up with a yell, and some of them started running. Then, when they realized it was only me, they suddenly looked relieved. “Come on,” one of them said, “it’s only Eiji.” This was a young lad known as “Balloon” Shinkichi. He had a wrinkled forehead like an old man, and he got his nickname because he looked as if his head had been pumped up with air.

“Look, stay away from here,” he said. “Just shove off, and don’t go telling the boss or anybody about it, either. Here—this is for you.” And he gave me two sen.