Fireflies (25 page)

29

THE YAKUZA

(HIROSHI TAKARA)

From the top of the old railway bridge, I scanned the market through the sight of my sniper rifle.

Captain Takara — deep behind enemy lines.

Slowly, I swept from side to side, as the huge American flag flicked on its pole, casting a shadow over the GIs who were ambling amongst the stalls below.
Easy targets
, I thought.
One bullet left. Aim for the heart —

There was a flash of colour over by the station as three girls flounced toward the market. I fumbled with the aperture of my Leica and urgently twisted the rangefinder. Through the lens, I focused on the stocky one in the middle, the one they called Yotchan.

I could almost make out the shadow that curved between her breasts.
Fire!

I pressed the shutter and the flutter lens closed.
Bull's eye!

A hand cuffed me on the back of the head and I spun around to see Mr. Suzuki, laughing at me, hands on his hips. The shoulder holster of his pistol showed beneath his grey silk jacket.

“Getting some cute pictures up here, are you, little shit?” he said. “No wonder you spend so much time up here.”

My cheeks began to throb.

“Put your dick away. It's lunch time.”

Mr. Suzuki wasn't a man to argue with. The market boss had almost killed me two weeks before, when I'd been at the station, trying to drum up portrait business. I'd spotted him at the mouth of the market, looking up and down the road as if he was waiting for someone. The grey felt fedora was pulled low over his forehead, and a white silk handkerchief ruffled from his breast pocket.

I ran over and held up my Leica in question.

“Sir —”

I didn't get a chance to finish.

“You want me to break that thing in your fucking face?” he snarled.

I backed off right away — I got the message all right. He glared at me, and I noticed a faint squint in his eye. Suddenly, a memory came to me, of an afternoon long ago, years before the Pacific War had even broken out.

Back in the days when our shop had been open, my mother had sometimes asked me to deliver box lunches to especially important customers in the neighbourhood. One afternoon in July, a huge order had arrived just after midday. It was the very busiest time of the year — the real dog days when the line snaked all the way down the alley, with everyone desperate to eat their fill of unagi-don to revive their flagging spirits.

My father glanced at the name card, then raised his eyebrows and wiped the sweat from his brow. Politely, he told the customers out front that there would be a short delay in serving them, and he tightened the cloth around his head. He piled up charcoal on the grill, and started brushing the sizzling strips of eel with sauce from his pot as fast he could, calling to my mother to pile them onto rice in our best lacquered boxes.

As she loaded the parcels into the carriage of my delivery bicycle, she grasped my arm and wiped my face with her sleeve. “Go as quick as you can,” she said. “And keep a civil tongue in your head!”

When I reached the address on the card, up in the tenements near Sengen Shrine, I thought I was lost. There was nothing but an abandoned house with broken shutters, stray cats stretched out asleep on the roof. Then from inside, I heard faint voices shouting out numbers, rattling and slamming noises. Nervously, I tapped on the door. A moment later, a half-naked man slid it open, waving a silk fan against his upper body. He squinted down at me. The rippling torso was completely inked over with colourful tattoos.

Mr. Suzuki stepped toward me.

“Do I know you?” he said. His voice was slurred like a proper yakuza.

I bowed my head. There was no way he could remember me, I thought, not a chance.

“What the fuck happened to your face?”

I stared at him, hardly able to believe it.

“I got burned, sir,” I murmured.

“You don't say.”

He peered at the camera around my neck. “You know how to use that thing?”

I nodded.

“So come over here.”

On the other side of the station, a huge sign was hoisted up alongside the overground train track, made of high-powered electric light bulbs that spelled out the name of the market, so that people could see it from miles around. Mr. Suzuki stood underneath it, and tipped his hat over his eye, almost daintily.

“Be sure you get the sign in the picture,” he said, jerking his thumb into the air.

As I twisted the lens, his blunt face came into focus. A ribbed, crescent shaped scar dimpled one of his cheeks.

“And make it a good one, kid,” he called. “I might not be here so long.”

I stifled a grin. This was exactly the kind of thing that gangsters were supposed to say! I held up my hand in a professional manner, and pressed the shutter firmly. He strode back over and roughly pulled the camera from around my neck, grunting as he turned it about in his clumsy hands.

“You really know how to use this?”

“It's not so hard.”

He stared at me for a moment. Then he draped the camera back around my neck.

“Hungry?”

My eyes lit up as he jerked his head toward a stall just inside the market. Clouds of fragrant steam were billowing from the pots and my mouth started to water. The spry old chef welcomed us in like royalty: he hurried out to wipe down our stools and poured a frothing bottle of beer that he set on the counter in front of Mr. Suzuki.

“Make yourselves at home, young sirs,” he said as he bustled around his pots and pans. “You're very welcome!”

“What filthy soup are you using today, granddad?” Mr. Suzuki drawled.

“Dog and crow, sir.” The man giggled and stirred the big metal vat on his makeshift stove with a long ladle. Mr. Suzuki grunted.

“Two of those, then, granddad. Extra chives, extra jewels, hard-boiled egg.”

“Coming right up!”

As I shovelled the almost unbearably delicious noodles into my mouth, I wondered what the man could possibly want with me. I didn't want to be any part of the yakuza, I thought, even if I had stolen the camera. My father would have been ashamed of me. But even so, it was pretty exciting to be sitting next to a real live gangster. People going past glanced at me with interest, and I cocked my head casually, as if eating with Mr. Suzuki was something I did every day of the week.

“Where do I remember you from, kid?” he said, taking a sip of his beer.

“My father used to own a food shop, sir. Not far from your old office.”

He grinned, as if remembering far-off, sunlit days. “Takara Eels?”

My heart almost burst with pride — my dad's shop!

“Fucking great,” he said. “Shame it closed down. All dead now, I guess?”

A pit opened in my stomach. I bowed my head. “Yes, sir. I'm sorry.”

“Even that cute girl? She your sister?”

I suddenly glowered at him. Mr. Suzuki raised his eyebrows and held up his hands in apology.

“Alright, little shit — don't go upsetting yourself. Where'd you get that contraption from in any case?”

He pointed at the camera, and I drew it closer to my chest, fingering the knot in the leather strap.

“Steal it?” he smirked.

I stayed silent.

“Suit yourself.”

He drew a big pile of noodles onto his chopsticks and gazed at the steam that came off.

“No family left at all?” he asked, stuffing the noodles into his mouth.

I shook my head.

“That makes two of us.”

He slurped down the last of the soup, then lit a cigarette.

“Want to take some pictures for me?” he asked as he squinted through the smoke.

“Photographs, sir?”

“I could use someone with sharp eyes.”

There was something about him that made me nod straight away.

“Good boy,” he said. “Work hard for me and I'll see you're treated right.”

There were little wrinkles on his forehead. As I stared at his blunt features, I realized that he was older than he looked. He snapped his fingers in front of my face.

“See?” he said with a grin. I found myself grinning back at him. “Now you've got a friend in the world.”

~ ~ ~

I had left the inn soon after the children had gone away. It felt too lonely after that, the paper screens torn, the tatami littered with dead moths and butterflies. The grass was waist high in the garden when I went, the cracked statue of the tanuki still lying grinning on the threshold.

Now that the weather was warmer, I slept in Ueno Park, beneath a tarpaulin stretched from a tree not far from the shogun's graveyard. The lotus plants in the pond were leafy again, and green and black ducks dabbled in the water. I hung around the clapboard bars in Yurakucho where the Americans drank at night, and held up the camera as they lurched out. They drunkenly posed for me, arm in arm with their friends, or hoisting Japanese girls up on their shoulders. They scribbled their names and their billet in my exercise book, and I circled the number showing on the exposure counter. An old chemist developed the film for me at the back of his tiny studio in Kanda, and I delivered the prints to the Americans a week later and collected my fee. I stood in the marble lobbies as they flipped through the shots, trying to smile as they patted me on the head and I waited for my money.

~ ~ ~

Mr. Suzuki gave me a ninety-millimetre screw-mount lens for my camera and a big pair of field binoculars that must have belonged to some officer during the war. At the top of the old railway bridge, he showed me a series of flags to run down a wire stretched over the market if there was ever a sign of trouble — white for American military police, red for Koreans or Formosans. I stood there watching every day from dawn until noon.

For the rest of the afternoon, I was free to roam wherever I wanted. The market turned into my personal cinema, as I squinted through the rangefinder of my camera, the cool, heavy frame a comforting weight against my face. I took pictures of the traders laying out piles of old boots, the drunken ex-students who ran the liquor stall. Then, there were the pan-pan girls, who strutted through the market as if they owned the place, shrieking like vixens and calling out insults. They grabbed any man that they fancied by the arm, or by the crotch, and dragged him away to the wasteground beneath the railway arches.

The girl in the purple dress gave me a sharp thrill whenever I saw her. She must have been about eighteen, and her hair was cut in a straight line so that it fell just above her eyes. There was something about her thick legs and giant breasts that made my stomach melt; so much so that I had to scramble up the ladder to the top of the railway tracks and helplessly relieve myself. As I watched her through my camera, day after day, a stealthy plan began to form in my mind.

Mr. Suzuki had told me that I was getting paid at the end of the week, fifty yen. Yotchan cost ten, I'd heard. Finally, I decided. It was time.

Mr. Suzuki must have noticed that I was distracted, because toward the end of the week, he called me into his office, a wooden hut on the edge of the market. He told me to sit down. A crisp pile of black-and-white photographs lay on the desk in front of him, and he grinned as he flicked through them. At the end of the stack was the blurry shot of Yotchan.

“Cute,” he said. “Not my type, though.”

He leaned forward. “You want to see some real pictures of girls?”

My heart began to thud as he took an envelope from his desk drawer and slid it over to me. I quickly stuffed it under my shirt as he gave me a wink.

“Don't worry, kid. I was just the same at your age. Though I'm guessing you're a man already, right?”

I swallowed, glancing down at the picture of Yotchan. He grunted. “No? Well. I'm disappointed in you. It's about time, isn't it?”

My pulse started to race.

“You've worked hard all month,” he said. “You could do with a break. I'll tell you what, next weekend, we'll go to a place I know in Shinjuku. They'll show you the hills and the valleys.”

I started to tremble.
This was it.
I bowed my head, clutching the envelope beneath my shirt. He called to me as I was leaving the office.

“They're all good girls,” he said. “Not like real geisha. More like
Daruma
dolls.”

I stared up at him, lost. He started to wheeze with laughter. “You can roll them over as much as you like!”

~ ~ ~

I kept my head down as I shuffled through the market, painfully aware of the envelope hidden beneath my shirt. I didn't see the girls until I had walked straight into them. Something soft bumped against my head and I was suddenly surrounded by a choking cloud of perfume.

“Hey, look where you're going, scorch!”

Clouds of coloured nylon and cotton swirled around me. The girl's faces were plastered with makeup and they grinned at me like jackals. Yotchan jerked her hand up in a brutal sexual motion.

“Gone blind have you?”

My cheeks pulsed. It was as if she could see right through me.

A nasty grin came over her face. “Oh well. I don't suppose you get much with that melted face of yours. How old are you anyway?”

“Fifteen,” I muttered.

Her eyes narrowed as she edged closer. “Well. You're practically a man already, then, aren't you?”

My face was nearly touching the pale skin between her throat and her breasts, my nose filled with the sour animal smell of her sweat.

“Want to take me on, kid? You've got money, don't you?”

Despite my panic, I felt an almost excruciating excitement.
Please
, I thought,
don't let me lose control, not right here and now.
Yotchan was staring at me slyly, her bright red lips moving round and round as she chewed her gum.

Suddenly, her hand shot out and she gripped my privates. She squeezed as I gasped and her eyes grew wide.