Confessions of a Yakuza Read Online Free Page B

for her.
    Anyway, they had six children, so they were poor. The children were always hungry; whenever Kyuzo sat himself down for a drink of saké, they’d all come and sit around him. They’d watch him drink, wide-eyed, sucking in their cheeks and giving great gulps from time to time. If there was, say, a bit of pickled radish to go with the saké, their mouths would come open as they watched him chew it, and you could see spit trickling down their chins.
    Sometimes he’d say, “D’you want some?” And they’d all nod together, more like a row of puppets than human beings. So Kyuzo would pick up one slice of radish and give it to the oldest boy, who was about ten. The boy would bite off half and give it to the next oldest. Then he’d give it to the third one, who’d bite off half of what was left, and so it went on till by the time it reached the fifth kid there’d be less than the tip of your little finger left. So the smallest kids would start bawling.
    “That’s enough of that,” he’d say, but it wouldn’t stop them. So he’d give them another piece, this time starting with the smallest. But then, as like as not, that kid would eat the whole piece himself, and there’d be a fine old fuss. Poor Kyuzo couldn’t even have a drink in peace. On days when he didn’t have any work, he’d usually turn up at the gambling place, to work off his frustration.
    Every day when it wasn’t actually raining, Kyuzo’s wife would be doing some washing. It wasn’t the family’s clothes: it was the underwear of the local whores and the cotton kimonos they kept for their customers. The red-light districts produced a tremendous amount of washing every day, so it was farmed out to women outside.

     
    An alley in Asakusa
     
    There was a woman they called the Boss, a kind of supervisor; every day she’d load the dirty clothes the brothels had given her onto a cart and go around distributing the stuff to the washerwomen, who’d wash it at so many sen apiece and deliver it to the Boss by nightfall. That was the kind of work Kyuzo’s wife did, so she was always outside the house with her laundryboard and her tub. And there’d be another woman with her, helping her with the tarts’ clothes. Oyone, her name was; she was under twenty, and quite a charmer.
    When they’d finished the laundry the women would hang it up to dry in a corner of the coal yard, which was my uncle’s property, so they were always quite polite to me, as if they had me to thank for letting them use the space. Before long, I began to take a liking to them—and in that way I gradually struck up a friendship with Oyone.
    She was the daughter of a barge owner, and lived alone with her elder sister in a two-story house near us. Her parents lived on the barge; with seven children on board as well, the place had got so crowded that the two oldest girls had moved out and rented a room on the second floor of a shop selling fertilizers.
    One day, though, there was a fire at the house next door, and the place where Oyone and her sister lodged caught fire too. This was in the middle of the night, but I was woken up by the shouts of “Fire!” and rushed out to have a look. I found the whole area ablaze—and there was Oyone, who for some reason hadn’t got out in time, clinging to the roof and crying and screaming for all she was worth.
    Burning flakes were drifting down all around her, and she was certain to be burned to death unless she did something pretty quick. Her elder sister, who’d managed to escape, was screaming at her: “Jump, Oyone!
Jump
!” with her hair all hanging loose. But Oyone must have been too scared, anyway she couldn’t move. The whole place was in a complete panic, with people rushing around through the bits of drifting fire, all of them shouting like mad. I was wondering desperately what to do when I saw a big old-fashioned umbrella lying at the side of the alley.
    It gave me an idea. I picked it up. “Here—use this to jump