Kamikaze Read Online Free

the cup, he looked inside and declared, “Evens.”
    In the far corner of the club, a sumo-sized man was being fawned over by bowing underlings who reacted to every order he gave with “Hai! Hai!” “Yes! Yes!” The comfort women massaging his shoulders were young enough to be his granddaughters. Both wore unbuttoned white blouses over short, pleated schoolgirls’ skirts and knee socks. The girls covered their mouths and giggled at something the old yakuza said, and feigned surprise when he ran his fat hands up their thighs. On spying Makoto and Kazuya, he dispersed his hangers-on with a brusque wave of his hand.
    The door beside the fat yak’s chair opened into a backroom. Not a word was uttered as the three men crossed the threshold and the door closed behind them. Two knives and two lengths of string lay on a table scarred by hundreds of gouges. Without hesitation, Makoto went straight to the chopping block, picked up one string and clenched itbetween his teeth, then wound a tourniquet around the pinky of his good hand to cut off circulation. Having numbed the finger and reduced its flow of blood, he grabbed the nearer knife and whacked it down like a headsman’s ax. Yubi o tobasu. He “made his finger fly.”
    Yubitsume, “finger cutting,” went back to the days of the samurai. It’s how a warrior made amends for misdeeds to his boss. When a samurai sword is held properly, most of the strength in the grip is applied by the pinky finger. Without that finger, a samurai was weaker in battle and more dependent on his master for protection. Old yaks thought they were modern samurai, so they stuck to that tradition.
    But not Kazuya.
    There’d be none of that shit for him.
    The pain must have been excruciating, yet no sign of it showed on Makoto’s face. The fat yak passed him a towel to bandage his hand and a sheet of paper in which to wrap the severed finger. An old fridge stood against one wall. Back when Genjo Tokuda had ruled with an iron grip, that fridge was where he was rumored to store the fingers his men had chopped off to quell his wrath.
    Crazy fuckers, Kazuya thought.
    Come into the modern age.
    The modern trend was to do away with yubitsume. When yaks went under cover, missing pinkies stood out. The funniest story Kazuya had ever heard was about a yakuza boss who wanted to stop finger cutting among his thugs. He gave the order to his middle men to eliminate thepractice. When one of those underlings made a wayward thug mutilate himself for some infraction, the boss was furious. So what did the middle man do to atone for infringing the no yubitsume order? He performed yubitsume on himself!
    Crazy fuckers.
    Putting a pearl in your penis: that Kazuya could understand. When his uncle Makoto had gone to prison—that record was why he couldn’t make the trip to Vancouver—he’d cut into the skin at the tip of his cock and inserted a pearl to create a bulge in his manhood. A pearl for every year he was in jail. That, they say, gives women pleasure when you fuck them, so it makes up for the time a yak has spent away from his sexual partner.
    A ladies’ man like Kazuya could see the logic in that. But when it came to fingers, that seemed stupid. He required all the fingers he had to keep the ladies happy.
    Because Makoto wasn’t directly responsible for the mishap in Vancouver, the finger on the table was an iki yubi. A “living finger.”
    What these old-school yaks really wanted was a shinu yubi. A “dead finger” from the one who was directly responsible—namely, Kazuya.
    “No,” Kazuya said.
    “Fool,” his uncle snapped.
    The door at the rear of the room accessed an elevator that took them up the face of the skyscraper backing the two-story building. The city of Tokyo bowed down at their feet while they were carried all the way up to the top floor.There, the doors were opened by someone who controlled a ring fence of security devices—metal detectors, bomb-sniffing sensors, hidden cameras,