Confessions of a Yakuza (5 page)

I was groaning so loud that the maid heard me and gave a yell, which brought the chief clerk running. Before long I felt as sick as a dog, and threw up. It was all blood. I got the runs too; that was all thick and bloody too, and it wouldn’t stop. The next thing I knew, I was being bundled into a rickshaw and taken by my uncle to a hospital in Kanda. The doctor there took one look at me and said I hadn’t got one chance in ten of pulling through. He gave me a hell of a lot of injections. I gradually lost consciousness, and when I came to it was daytime.

There wasn’t anybody by my bed. I was lying by myself in a whitewashed room. The funny thing is, I didn’t have any pain at all. The bleeding had stopped too, and by the evening of that day I was able to slurp up a bit of broth. I suppose my luck was still holding and, besides, I was a lot younger and tougher in those days.

Kyuzo came to see me as it was getting dark. “You gave everybody a scare,” he said. “We thought you were a goner. But I’m glad you made it.”

I left the hospital on the tenth day. “You’re a tough fellow, I must say,” the doctor told me as I was leaving. “But be careful with the women from now on. It might do you in the next time around.”

Perhaps the Kawagoe doctor’s kill-or-cure treatment worked; anyway, the syphilis never recurred, luckily enough. Oyone went off somewhere by herself. I only hope the same trouble didn’t get her too. I’d never forgive myself if it did.

You know, there was an area they used to call “skid row.”

As he spoke, the man poured some hot water from a thermos into the little teapot. His hand shook, and some of the water spilled onto the quilt over the sunken hearth where we were sitting. “Here, have some tea,” he said. He handed me a cup and had a sip from his own before folding his arms and continuing his tale.

I’d got over my illness and gone back to my old work at last, but I’d not been back a month when something happened. It was early spring in the year of the Great Earthquake, so it must have been 1923.

I was going around with the coke every day as usual, but one day “Balloon” Shinkichi and “Soldier” Tarokichi, who normally went with me on deliveries, suddenly stopped turning up. I asked the foreman, but he didn’t know what had happened to them, nor did the others. Then, about ten days later, Tarokichi showed up again. His eyes were staring and his face looked as if he hadn’t had anything to eat for several days.

“What happened?” I asked. “Where’s Shinkichi?”

“He’s sick,” he said. Then, without any more explanation, “Can you lend me ten yen?”

“Where d’you think I’d get ten yen from?” I said.

“No—” he said, “I mean, I want to borrow it from your uncle, I’ll pay it back all right.”

“But where’s Shinkichi?” I asked again.

“Him?” he said. “He’s had it.”

“You serious?” I said.

“I know what a man’s face looks like when he’s going to die.”

I could tell he wasn’t kidding. So on condition that he took me to where Shinkichi was staying, an “inn” called the Meigetsukan, I told him I’d lend him some of the money my grandmother had given me when I left home.

The place they called “skid row” wasn’t all that far from my uncle’s firm, in Fukagawa. The whole area was crammed with flophouses; at the most there was only about a yard’s space between them, so you had to turn sideways to get through the alleys. There’s no telling how many of these “inns” there were altogether. The boards over the open drains had come off, and the sewage spilled over into the road; you got the stuff on you, all sticky and squelchy, as you walked.

There was only one time every day that really mattered in the area. Early in the morning, so early you could only just make people out in the dark, a scout would come and stand out in the middle of the road and yell “Hey, there!” and a couple of dozen men would come trickling out.

“There’s unloading work at such-and-such a place,” he’d shout. “Anybody who wants to go, put up your hand.” And the hands would go up. The scout would pick some of them out by name. “The rest of you’ll have to wait till next time,” he’d say, and those left would move off without a word.

He’d check the number of men who were going to work that day and give them ten sen each. “Off you go, and be quick about it,” he’d say in his bossy way. “I won’t stand for any lateness.”

And the men would dash off with their ten sen in their hands. You know where they were going? To the grub shop.

The people who lived in those parts never had any more money than they needed to keep them going that day. So most of the men hadn’t had any breakfast. The first thing the scout did was give the guys he’d picked some money to have breakfast with; otherwise they’d be too hungry to work properly. As for the ones who didn’t get any work—there was nothing they
could
do, so they just stayed put till something turned up.

The flophouses turned them out in the morning, so they had to stay out in the road. Whenever a scout came, they’d gather around him. If nothing came of it, they’d go on staying put. If there was nothing that day, they’d hope the next day would be better. And if it wasn’t, then they stayed put till the next day again. Anyone who still had a bit of cash could go into a flophouse at night, but the rest were turned away. What did the guys do who didn’t get work even on the third day? Nothing—just put up with not eating. Just stood around with their arms folded, drinking some water occasionally, making the best of it.

In that world, there were a few things you just never said. One was “I’m hungry”; the others were “I’m cold” and “I’m hot.” As far as being hungry was concerned, they were all in the same boat, so it was a kind of competition to see who could bear it longest. If any of the men standing around there complained of being hungry, he’d be treated as an outsider, a slob who didn’t have the guts to stick it out. They were all barely keeping going as it was, and for somebody to talk about food would have been the last straw.

It was the same with anyone who said he was cold. A loincloth more like a bit of rag, a single cotton kimono, and a small towel—that was all the property a man had. Even in winter with an icy wind blowing, they’d stand there in their loincloths and kimonos, putting up with it, trying to look as though they weren’t cold, even though their bellies were empty and a wind was blowing fit to knock you over. It was the only shred of pride they had left.

After three days of steady rain with no work to be found and nothing to do, a man gets desperate. If your belly’s rumbling and your head almost reeling, you feel like eating anything you find lying around, whatever it is. But they wouldn’t let themselves become scavengers—they absolutely refused to pick up anything lying in the road, or take scraps from the grub shop. Anybody who gave in and did that would be sneered at for letting himself become a beggar. “I’d rather die than eat other people’s garbage,” they’d say. And if some guy who was doing OK said, “Here—I can’t eat all this, you have it,” they’d still refuse it, even if they hadn’t eaten for days on end. “What d’you take me for?
I
don’t want any leftovers!” That’s the kind of place it was.

Don’t get the idea that all the people living there were men: there were women, too. Whores, every one of them—women who used to work in the brothels in Yoshiwara, or Suzaki, or Monzen Nakacho, then got old or caught the clap and lost their jobs and drifted down the scale till they landed up there. They’d latch onto some man who’d found work and was a bit flush, and sell themselves on a straw mat spread out behind the lumber down by the river. They couldn’t take time off just because they were a bit sick, or they’d got a temperature, or some skin trouble. Nobody helped them. So they went on selling their bodies till they rotted on them.

There were cheap eating places in between the flophouses, and shops selling booze. I saw a general store too, with straw sandals and other stuff hanging up front. The road was all pitted, with no proper ditches, so there was raw sewage around everywhere as we walked along on our way to the Meigetsukan.

Suddenly, we saw a man lying in the middle of the road. His hair was graying, and he was muddy all over. A policeman was standing there shouting at him, with people peering out through partly opened doors and out of alleyways, wondering what was going on. There was a whore with a cotton towel on her head and a face all shrunk and wrinkled, looking in their direction.

The policeman was shouting, “Come on, you! You can’t sleep in the gutter! Get up, you bastard!” But the gray-haired man stayed lying where he was. It was icy cold out there.

“Get up! D’you hear me, damn you?”

The policeman began to kick the man in the side with his boot.

“You can’t stay here! It’s no good pretending you’re sick!”

The man staggered to his feet somehow, but he soon fell forward on his face again.

“Get up! Come on!” yelled the policeman, giving him another sharp kick.

“Let’s go,” Tarokichi said to me.

“What’s he done?” I asked the cop.

“And who might
you
be?”

“Can’t you see he’ll die if he’s left like this?”

“D’you think I don’t know that?”

“Then why d’you have to kick him like that?”

Yes, I really said it, you know—it makes me smile to think of it now; I must have been pretty cocky for my age. Anyway, before I knew it the copper had let fly at me with his fist. When I came to, I was lying by the side of the road.

“You must be nuts,” somebody said.

A woman laughed, showing her rotten teeth. Tarokichi was nowhere to be seen.

“What are you doing here?” another said.

“I’m looking for somebody.... What happened to the man who was here?” I asked.

“The old man? I rescued him,” someone standing behind the woman said. “The cop told me to move him away, so I got him on my back and lugged him over to the other side of the road. Me, half starving as I am.”

“So what happened then?”

“Well, what d’you think? The copper shoved off, so I took him and left him out there in the road again.” And he laughed without making any sound, opening his mouth and showing his bad teeth. The thing was—according to what he said—it was a nuisance for the police if someone died in their own district. It meant they had to write reports, take care of the body, etc. So if there was any trouble on their beat, they moved it next door. If the person died there, it was the other district’s responsibility. Of course, the same thing might happen in reverse, so they had to keep their eyes open. A man who was on his last legs would be kicked from one side of the street to the other, till in the end he dropped dead on the side that happened to be unlucky.

After a while I moved on, and by asking the way as I went, I managed to find the flophouse called the Meigetsukan. It was a makeshift building with a swarthy old man with a squashed-up face sitting at the entrance.

“Is Shinkichi here?” I asked.

“What business is it of yours?”

“I’m a friend.”

“Got any money?”

“Has a man called Tarokichi been?”

“He cleared out, the bastard. So you’ll have to pay the fellow’s lodgings, at least.”

I gave him some money, and he took me to where Shinkichi was lying. But, you know, Shinkichi was dead: I touched his forehead and it was like ice.

“He was alive till this morning,” the old man said. “What a fine thing to happen!... It’ll cost a bit more, if you’ve got any on you....”

So I gave him another yen, and he went straight off and came back with two scruffy-looking men.

The men talked to each other as they moved about the room.

“He hadn’t been eating properly.”

“This cotton coat isn’t bad at all.”

“I’m having the loincloth,” said one of them, laughing, a pale flabby fellow with runny eyes. They stripped Shinkichi and put the body in a black bag. The smaller man put Shinkichi’s kimono over his shoulders, on top of his own rags.

“Let’s go, then.”

“Sure we haven’t left anything lying around?”

They cackled at each other, baring their yellow teeth, as they shouldered the bag and went out. I don’t know what they did with Shinkichi. Tarokichi never showed up again from that day on.

Not long after Shinkichi died, I was summoned to my uncle’s other house in Koishikawa. The whole district was full of printers’ signs. My uncle’s family spent the weekends there.

My uncle was waiting for me in his study.

“I’m thinking of bringing you here next month to have you do a bit of studying. A friend of mine runs an accountant’s office, so you can go to learn the business. You can work as a houseboy here in the mornings and go there in the afternoons. Once you’ve learned accounting, I want you to work in my own office.”

I agreed with this and left. I expect it was some word from my father back home that made my uncle come up with such a sudden suggestion. Personally, I didn’t much fancy the idea of sitting at a desk all day with a pen in my hand. All the same, I wouldn’t be able to stay in Tokyo if I disobeyed my uncle, and I didn’t have anywhere to go if I ran away, either, so on my way back to the depot I was wondering what to do. Just about then, though, something cropped up—I suppose you could say my stars were unlucky at the time.