Confessions of a Yakuza by Saga Junichi

Author:Saga, Junichi [Saga, Junichi]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 1995-07-15T06:00:00+00:00

Alexandrias

I was in Hoeryông for something over a year after that, but nothing much worth mentioning happened.

I was discharged at the end of 1927. I celebrated it by drinking all night in the red-light district. As we were sailing east on the ship, Japan came into sight, a line of green hills; my eyes got damp, and I stood there gazing and gazing at it. We played cards for cash to kill time on board—games organized not by a soldier but a professional gambler. Quite a few of the men were completely cleaned out, and had to send a telegram from the ship: “Please meet at Osaka with money.” When I was discharged, they’d given me back the twenty yen the boss had sent me, and I used it to make a hundred and seventy-five yen in all.

My mother and sister were at the harbor in Osaka to meet me. We stayed in Kyoto that night, then did some sightseeing the next day; I bought a couple of bolts of best Nishijin brocade for my sister to have a kimono made, and a kimono sash for my mother. That was the first and last time in my life I did the decent thing by my family.

I went home to Utsunomiya and loafed around for ten days or so. During that time the local Veterans’ Association gave a party to celebrate my return from army service—just as if I was a hero or something; I was tickled pink. But before long a letter came from Okada, one of the senior men in the gang. I knew he was the type that hardly ever wrote letters, so I felt a bit uneasy and opened it in a hurry.

“The boss has got something wrong with his chest,” he wrote. “He’s getting treatment, but things don’t look too good. You’re one of us he’s been specially good to, so why don’t you come and see him?”

That was a real shock. It was some time since I’d got back, but so far I hadn’t even dropped in to see them, and I’d been thinking it was about time I went and paid my respects. So I hopped on a train that day and went to Tokyo.

The boss was really pleased to see me safe and well. He noticed how the training had made me thinner, and teased me about it: going into the army had made me half as handsome again, he said. He seemed better, in fact, than I’d expected; it set my mind at rest for the moment. When I thanked him for the pocket money he’d sent, he said I could make up for it by telling them about life in Korea. So I told them how I’d been put in the lockup.

That interested them a lot. They all knew what it was like to be in jail, but nobody’d ever been in a military lockup before. I’d seen something even the older men hadn’t seen, and that made me the center of attention, I suppose.

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