Confessions of a Yakuza (9 page)

We decided we’d try to get to the Clothing Depot and went on blindly, forcing our way through the waves of people. It had got dark before we noticed, and the fires were getting fiercer and fiercer. Just as we reached a point slightly beyond the Oshima river, there was a great roar and a huge column of red flames went up. The Clothing Depot, which had also caught fire, had fallen in. It made your flesh crawl—the whole night sky rocking with screams and shrieks. There’d been thousands of people inside.

The Great Earthquake

I gave up any hope of getting through safely; whatever happened now, I thought, we’d had it. But it was too hot to stand around, so we let ourselves be carried on by the crowd, on in the direction of Aikawa bridge. It was packed solid on the bridge too, so tight you could hardly move. Then, of course, people’s belongings started to catch fire. If we hadn’t done something, we’d have been burned alive.

Just then, we noticed a barge below us, under the bridge.

“I’m going in!” Kenkichi shouted, and jumped in with Iyo in his arms. I went in straight after them. There were dozens of people already on the barge, and someone soon helped us on board. But in no time hundreds of people were jumping from the bridge, with lots of them grabbing hold of the boat and trying to clamber in. A handful of them made it, but the barge looked like sinking at any moment.

“Keep off! The boat’s full!” somebody on board bellowed.

“Are you going to leave us to die?” someone in the water shouted back. But then a sudden wind got up, the barge was carried away like a chip of wood, and we drifted off in the direction of the Merchant Sailors’ School. That was on fire too, a big building, all ablaze. We panicked again for a moment, but the wind switched direction without warning, and we slowly drifted away till we fetched up at Tsukuda island, where the Sumida runs into the bay. It was one of the few places in that old part of Tokyo near the bay that were still standing quite undamaged.

We got off the barge and looked back at the city. The flames were even more terrible by now, shooting right up into the sky. It hardly seemed possible that we could have got through all that, all three of us, without being separated.

When dawn came, everywhere on the other side was just a blackened waste. Hundreds of bodies had been washed up at the water’s edge. The awful thing about human beings, though—the survivors, I mean—is that even at times like that their bellies need feeding just the same as usual. Our throats were dry and sore, too. Something would have to be done about it. Not that we could very well pester the people living on the island for food: far too many people had taken shelter there for that.

So we decided to split up and hunt for something. I’d been there lots of times to deliver coke, and I knew the area. I walked steadily along the shore toward the east. After a while, I came to a bit of reclaimed land that was covered with thick grass.

I searched in the grass, looking for something—insects, anything—to eat. And then I found them—locusts, whole swarms of them, just sitting there on the long stalks of grass. I went racing around, catching them. I didn’t have anything to put them in, so I took off my kimono, tied up the sleeves, and used them as bags. Two hours at it, and they were full. I brought them back, and the three of us ate them, raw. That took the edge off the hunger at least.

The next day, there were other people in the grass, and the locusts had all been caught. Search as much as you liked, there wasn’t a single one left. I cursed and swore, but it didn’t do any good. Then Kenkichi suggested we go and see if any emergency food centers had been set up.

Iyo said she couldn’t walk any more, so we left her lying inside a damaged boat. We crossed the bridge, which was badly burned, into Fukagawa. Everywhere you went there were piles of corpses; nothing but black ruins and bodies in every direction. I don’t know how long we walked, but though we heard plenty of rumors of relief centers we never actually got to find one. We only got steadily tireder and tireder and hungrier and hungrier, till we were almost fit to drop.

It was somewhere around Koume-cho in Honjo, I suppose—Kenkichi suddenly said, “Look—monkeys!” He was right, there were three of them, lying all snug together under a tree. A big monkey and two small ones.

“Maybe they’re having a nap,” he said as we went up to them.

“It’s a funny place to find monkeys, though,” I said.

But they weren’t monkeys, they were human beings. A mother and two children, burned to death. Their bodies had shrunk, you see, and made them look like that. The mother was holding the smaller kid tight in her arms.

“Whatever happens, a mother never stops loving her kids,” Kenkichi said, and we both put our hands together and said a prayer for them. But just then we saw something shiny on the mother’s chest.

“Hey—what’s that?”

We lifted her up—she weighed next to nothing, like cinders—and a lot of silver coins clattered down from her. There were a hell of a lot of them—a good basinful, I’d say.

“We’ve struck it rich!”

“Watch it—there are people coming.”

I looked around and saw a line of people in the distance with bundles on their backs.

“If the emergency patrols find us that’ll be the end of it.”

We picked up all the money in a hurry, but as we were doing this I got a glimpse of what looked like a wad of bank-notes down between her breasts.

“Hey! There’s a fortune here!” I yelled. “How the hell did it survive?”

She must have soaked the bills in water or something, then put them in a money belt, because only the outside ones were burned.

“Shit! I can’t get at them,” Kenkichi said. “The kid’s in the way.”

He’d got the bills between his fingers and was trying to pull them out, but they wouldn’t come. The kid clinging to its mother was stopping them.

Kenkichi got impatient. “Pull them apart,” he said. I tried, but they were too firmly stuck together.

“If I do it too hard, its arm’ll come off.”

“What does that matter? They’re dead.”

So I pulled again, and suddenly the kid’s scorched skin slipped off so you could see the pulpy red flesh underneath. I had something nasty sticking to the palm of my hand. I got the feeling the kid was sort of eyeing me—it gave me the creeps.

“Let’s pack it in,” I said. “It’s looking at me as if it
knows
. No good’ll come of it, taking a woman’s money like this.”

“Don’t be dumb.”

“I’ve had enough.”

“Well, don’t come whining to me for money later, then.”

Kenkichi got the mother and the kid apart. A good deal of the skin came off its arm, but the arm itself stayed put, and one bit of it, all blackened and small, was still fastened to its mother’s body.

“There!” said Kenkichi, “we managed it, didn’t we?” He took off his underwear, stuffed it full of money, and tied it around his waist.

“With this much cash, you know, I can get a new boat made...,” he said. “Let’s get out of here.”

“You’d better go on your own.”

“What d’you mean?”

“I’m quitting. Don’t worry, I won’t tell anybody.”

Kenkichi walked off without so much as glancing back, and the mother and her kids, now separated, went on lying there on the ground.

Just as an afterthought: I might seem to be making excuses for Kenkichi, but I don’t think you can really blame him. Up until the time of the earthquake, the woman and her kids had probably had an easy life in the kind of family that could afford a crowd of servants. They wouldn’t have ended up like that if it wasn’t for the money. Without the money, I expect they’d have been left in peace after they died, without getting pulled apart.

Tokuzo, the raftsmen’s foreman, had got away to his other house, together with the people from his stable, and they were safe.

The man took an advertising flier from between the pages of that day’s newspaper, and used a felt pen to draw a map of the burned areas on the back.

This is where the fires were. It was the only place in his neighborhood that wasn’t burned down, so he was really lucky. By the time I’d split up with Kenkichi and went to have a look, the first house was gone without a trace, but they’d got a temporary shack up, and everybody was hard at work. You see, a good half of Tokyo had been destroyed, so it was obvious the timberyards were going to have more business than they could cope with. I don’t care what it is, I said, but let me do something to help. Tokuzo was really grateful—said they were so overworked they’d thought of asking the cat to lend a hand.

So they decided I should do odd jobs in the kitchen and around the house until things got back to something like normal. That bought me into contact every day with the fishmonger, the greengrocer, the tofu man, and the other people who came around selling things, and I was soon on good terms with all of them. Looking back on it now, I’d say I never had it so easy as around that time. But it didn’t last all that long, as the next spring, early in April, someone who changed the whole course of my life came to visit.

He was a gang boss called Momose Umetaro; his territory included the entire Yanagibashi district in those days, and it seemed he and our foreman were sworn “brothers.” That’s what they used to call two men from different organizations who’d promised to help each other whenever necessary. Anyway, he turned up in a rickshaw that day, bringing one of his men with him.

When I took some tea in to them, Momose glanced at me and said to Tokuzo, “Brother, who’s this young fellow here? I haven’t seen him around before, have I?”

Tokuzo told him who I was. It seemed to get him interested.

“I see...,” he said. “Quite a guy, eh? Tell me, then, how does he fit in with things?”

While he was asking this sort of thing, I was out in the corridor again, sitting just out of sight behind the sliding doors, as a youngster like me was expected to do.

“You there—” Momose said, turning toward me, “what’s your name?”

“Ijichi, sir.”

“Not your
surname
, you fool—don’t you know nobody calls himself by his surname in our business.”

“Eiji, sir.”

“And what do you want to do with yourself?”

“That’s the trouble—I haven’t made up my mind yet.”

He grinned. Then, out of the blue, he said: “How’d it be if you became a gambler?”

“A
gambler
?”

“Don’t look so surprised! Listen: if you ask me, you’ve got the face of a yakuza, not an honest workman.”

“Now you say so,” put in Tokuzo, “you
might
be right at that. We hold a session here sometimes, and I can tell he’s got what it takes. I’ve often thought so myself.”

Momose took out a long small-bowled pipe and stuck it in his mouth. His deputy, who was just behind him, promptly came up with a light for him. He took a good drag at the pipe, then blew the smoke out through his nostrils, staring at me all the while.

“Something about your face tells me you’re not going to stay here. Once you get stuck in a place like this, you could be here a hundred years and never get anywhere. Every man’s got his own nature, which decides what he’s best at. The guys in this place were cut out to be raftsmen. But with someone born to be a yakuza it wouldn’t work out, and I’ve got this feeling you weren’t made for the straight and narrow.”

I hadn’t had any idea of becoming a professional gambler till then, but once it was put to me it seemed right, somehow. So I bowed and said, “Thank you, sir. I hope you’ll arrange things for me as you see fit.”

Momose nodded. “In that case, I’ll see what I can do. There are reasons why I can’t have you at my place, but luckily there’s an outfit called the Dewaya whose boss is a pal of mine. I’m sure he’d be willing to take you on.”

About a month later, with this gang leader as my sponsor, I joined the Dewaya as an apprentice yakuza.

It was the day of the Boys’ Festival, in May 1924, when Momose took me there. The boss of the Dewaya lived in the center of the entertainment district of Asakusa, just behind the street where all the little sushi shops were. This was after the Great Earthquake, of course, but new buildings were already going up—not any of those temporary shacks, either, but properly built shops as you might expect in Asakusa. The whole area was humming with activity—I suppose they’d call it a building boom nowadays....