Confessions of a Yakuza (3 page)

Just then the foreman strolled over and said, “Eiji—come over here for a second,” and he took me to the base of the biggest coal heap in the yard.

“I want you to get up on top of that pile and keep a lookout. If anybody comes, let us know.”

“What for?” I said.

“You should know what for—if the police caught us we’d all be locked up. You’re not to come down till I tell you to. If you see anything fishy, chuck down a piece of coal.”

“I might hit somebody on the head.”

“Don’t worry about that.”

“What do you mean by something fishy?”

“You’ll know soon enough when it happens. But don’t go calling out—just chuck a piece of coal.”

I did as I was told and climbed up to the top of the heap. It turned out to be a terrific height, higher than anything else around. At that time, even in Tokyo, about the only tall buildings were factories, so there was a good view in every direction.

Anyway, I got through that day without any trouble and acted as a lookout the next day too. It made me take a real fancy to the old districts of Tokyo, looking at them like that from way up there. There were boats moving up and down the rivers and canals, making this steady drone that drifted up into the sky, and mixed in with it you could hear the railway and people’s voices and carts and other sounds. Listening to them gave you the feeling you were really in a big city, and I felt pleased with myself. I went on keeping watch for them, but luckily we were never caught by the cops, and I never once had to throw any coal.

I even went to another gambling place on my own once. It was on a converted barge tied up alongside a jetty. They used it as a bathhouse, too. Below decks they’d made a bathtub, and the families of the boatmen round about came there for a good soak. Obviously, they had all the water they could use, and they made do with floating wood for fuel. There was no partition or anything between the gambling area and the bath, so the women and children took their clothes off right in front of you before getting in. And they’d sit there soaking, with their towels on their heads, watching the men play. It was summer, so the doors were left open, and you could see the moon reflected on the surface of the river.

I’d been collecting the bamboo sticks for about half a year when my uncle told me I was to switch over to delivering coke, which we also dealt in. It was cheaper and easier to use than charcoal, so most of the smithies and ironworks in Tsukishima were using it. The whole area was full of these little workshops—one man working a foot bellows to get the coke burning bright red, and three or four others hammering away at the red-hot iron from morning to night, turning out pots, stoves, nails, farm tools, and building materials.

Carrying my ledger and briefcase, I had to go with the carts on their rounds, collect the cash, and hand over the receipt. My uncle seemed to trust me with the money, and was only worried that I’d lose the briefcase. If it was a small delivery, we used a handcart, with one guy pushing and another pulling; a lot of the time I went with two laborers in particular: “Balloon” Shinkichi and “Soldier” Tarokichi.

Tarokichi had fought against the Russians—he’d got a medal to prove it, but he’d pawned it before I got to know him. Shinkichi, though, had been a tenant farmer until five years or so before. He told me he’d often come to our part of the city to get nightsoil for his fields.

“You know, I used to be able to tell just what kind of food a family was eating,” he said. “At a house where they ate well, the shit was different—it was richer, had more
body
to it. The color was different, too. You could tell right away.”

“So the rich and the poor even shit differently, eh?”

“One time, though—it makes me feel a fool just to remember it—I got in an awful mess.”

“What kind of mess?”

“I upset a bucket of the stuff right in front of a restaurant—next door to the second-hand clothes shop by the canal, it was. They made a hell of a fuss, so I hadn’t much choice, I tried scooping it up with my hands and putting it back in the bucket, but that wasn’t good enough, so I took off my kimono and used that to get it up with. When it got full I washed it in the canal then started all over again, I did it any number of times, and in the end I was all covered with the stuff. I jumped in the canal to get myself clean, but—I mean, it was October—it was freezing! And all those goddamn people standing around watching, with funny looks on their faces because they didn’t know whether to laugh or complain about the stink.”

“That must have been a sight!”

“You’re telling me. At any rate, at least I know what they mean now when they tell you to ‘eat shit.’ ”

In the days when I was carting coke around with Shinkichi, the nightsoil men were a common sight. A lot of them came by boat if they didn’t live nearby. You’d see them going around calling our “Nightsoil, nightsoil!” in the alleys, with a long pole on one shoulder and a bucket dangling on each end. If anyone indoors shouted “Nightsoil maaaaan!” they’d go to the little trapdoor on the outside of the house by the toilet, poke their pole inside with a scoop on one end, and draw the stuff up. When the buckets were full, they’d take them back to their cart, then hang a new set of buckets on the pole and set off again. And by the time they’d stowed a few cartloads of full buckets on board their boat—they slept there, too, when it got dark—the job was done and they sailed away.

Getting on for a year after I was given the job in Fukagawa, a guy called Shinji—he worked at a shop making the rubber-soled socks that workmen used to wear—took me with him to the red-light district. He was fond of gambling, and whenever he had time to spare he’d turn up at the coal yard and lose some money before going home again. That particular day, though—I don’t know what came over him—he was in luck and won some money, so he said to me, “It’s on me today, so just keep quiet and come along.”

Shinji’s idea was that once in a while I ought to get my hands on something else besides coke: all work and no play, as they say ...

“A man should sow plenty of wild oats while he’s still young,” he said. “Get a whiff of the boudoir. Have some nice mature woman show you the ropes....” He was only just over twenty, though from his face you’d have thought he was past thirty.

He used to sing as he walked along. Silly songs, like:

He swaggers by—my former beau—
In best kimono dressed,
A pocketful of cash to go
On women and the rest.
I never will forget him—no,
Where’er he comes to rest!

But the place he took me to wasn’t one of the classier brothels, it was a cheap teahouse along the alley leading up to the Hachiman shrine. The real business of that kind of teahouse was to provide women, so they didn’t do any fancy food—only dumplings, sweet saké, rice crackers, cakes, and tea to go with them, at the most.

“Is she free?” Shinji asked the proprietor, shoving a dumpling into his mouth.

“Yes, sure.”

“It’s not for me today, it’s for this youngster here. Look after him, will you?”

The proprietor took me farther down the alley, where there were lots of small houses all jammed together any old how. We walked a way, then came to a house with a ginkgo tree in front of it. We went through a wooden gate in the fence and into the garden, where there was a separate cottage at the back.

“Hey—I’ve brought you a customer!” he called out.

“OK,” came a woman’s voice, so we opened the front door. Inside there was a poky little hall space; the sliding doors were wide open, and beyond them a young woman was sitting on a quilt, spread on the tatami.

“Well! He’s young, isn’t he? What a nice surprise.”

“Here you are, then, I’ll leave him to you. But don’t go thinking it’s all right to tire yourself out for the rest of the day, just because he’s young.”

“Oh, get out of here—you talk too much!”

She turned to me and said sweetly, “Come on in. How old are you?”

I was putty, of course, in the hands of somebody like her. I mean, I wasn’t seventeen yet and the woman was obviously well over twenty, so she must have been a real veteran. When she undid her sash, she didn’t have anything on under the shift she was wearing, not even a waistcloth. She just sat there with it open at the front, inviting me. She might as well have pinned me down by the back of the neck—she couldn’t have done better if she’d tried.

You know, I can’t remember her name however much I try. All I know is that I hadn’t been in bed with her all that long when someone started tapping on the front door, scaring the daylights out of me.

“That’s enough—I can hear you!” the woman yelled. “Is it time already?”

“You’ve had exactly thirty minutes.”

“So what?”

“You’ve got another customer. Can I open the door?”

“Not likely! Who is it, this customer? A regular?”

“No, it’s the gentleman’s first time.”

“Well, shit—what about me? I’m human, too. Why can’t I take my time with a decent-looking man once in a while? Tell him to wait!”

“He’s here with me now.”

“Oh, go to hell! What d’you take me for? How many customers am I supposed to take? At this rate I’ll be dead before long.”

“It was thirty minutes, wasn’t it?”

“Don’t ask me—it was
you
fixed it, wasn’t it?”

All the time she was shouting angrily like this, she still had hold of me. I tried to make her let go.

“I’m off,” I said. “I feel bad about it.”

“No you don’t!” she said. “Don’t worry about
him
—he’s making a fortune as it is.” And she wrapped herself around me like a snake.

“You can have him wait over at the shop,” she called out again.

“How long will you be?” the boss snapped back.

“Half an hour.”

“D’you think he can wait that long?”

“The dirty old man—if he doesn’t like it he can fuck off!”

She wasn’t going to let anyone get the better of
her
.

The upshot of all this was that I took a kind of fancy to the woman. And I visited the place about three times altogether. At first I thought I’d really fallen for her, but then I suddenly took against her. For some reason or other she started turning me off, and I stopped going. Just like that.

I’ve known a lot of women in my life, but the thing about the professionals was that they were fairly cut-and-dried—they didn’t come chasing after you when you got tired of them. So they were convenient if you were just out for a good time.

That reminds me of something else. The owner of a cheap teahouse like that was also a kind of police informer. There were two quite separate sides to his business, the legal and the undercover, so if the cops wanted to get awkward they could make it impossible for him to carry on. So whatever he did, he had to take care to make up to the local policeman. When it got to around lunchtime, he’d get the maid to make a bowl of pork on rice or something and have it ready. Then the cop would drop in with an official “wanted” notice in his hand to ask if anyone “answering that description” had been there.

“Well, officer—hard at it as usual,” the proprietor would start. “Now, let me see ... no, I’m afraid I haven’t seen anyone like this around. But anyway, you must be tired, why don’t you come in and have a cup of tea at least?”

He’d pour him what was supposed to be tea out of his little teapot. But it would be saké—he’d have a pot full of saké ready for such occasions, you see. They’d be at the back of the shop, so it would look like tea to the other customers. Then he’d produce a meal.

The copper would say “I really shouldn’t let you do this,” or something of the kind, but he’d dig in just the same, with a satisfied look on his face. Then, when he’d finished, he’d say “Well, then, if anybody suspicious drops in, let me know at once, will you?” And he’d take himself off.

The owner was actually rather proud of his connection with the police. Sometimes he’d appoint himself a sort of private detective, and make reports to them.

“If you ask me, officer,” he’d say, “this man who’s always coming to see Oharu at our place acts a bit suspicious. Something tells me he’s got a pile of money he didn’t come by honestly. Perhaps you’d better keep an eye on him.”

“I see...,” the policeman would say. “Well, then, the next time he turns up, have the maid let me know immediately.”

Then, the next time the man appeared, the teahouse owner would secretly send someone to inform the police. Of course, they’d never barge in on the man while he was actually with a woman. They wouldn’t arrest him inside the shop, either. They’d wait till he’d left and gone far enough for it not to cause trouble for the teahouse, and for the man not to realize that the owner had snitched on him, then they’d hail him: “Hey, you—come over here a minute, will you?”

They’d go through everything he had on him. And they’d ask him his address, his job, how much he earned, the names of the people he went around with—far more detail than with a routine checkup on someone’s background. So if a man was up to anything at all fishy, they’d be onto it in no time. Personally I was never caught at the teahouse itself, but I was often stopped for questioning in the street, so I know from experience just what the local cops were like.