Confessions of a Yakuza Read Online Free

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