Kamikaze

by Michael Slade

  Banzai!

  “The emperor is divine. Heaven favors us. So as the battle onshore reached a climax, a wind howled out of heaven and attacked the Mongol ships. For two days, enormous waves pounded our coast. Ships rammed together or slammed against the cliffs. Swamped ships foundered on the rocks. Ships by the hundreds sank into the sea, drowning Mongols by the tens of thousands. Those who clung to splintered wrecks were picked off by our archers. Those trapped ashore were slaughtered or surrendered to become our slaves. A fifth of the vast fleet retreated home to China in defeat, and the myth of the invincible Khan was shattered throughout the Mongol Empire.”

  “We won,” Genjo repeated.

  “Yes,” replied his father. “We never lose a war. The Divine Wind. That’s what we called it. That storm of heavenly favor sent by the gods to save us.”

  Kamikaze.

  That was the name of the sword.

  Kami for Divine.

  Kaze for Wind.

  Kamikaze. The Divine Wind.

  His next lesson in bushido took place inside the Shinto shrine that bordered the garden. Father and son entered through the torii gate, a pair of upright wooden poles topped with two crossbeams. As he passed from the outside world to the divine realm, Genjo eyed the lion-like stone dogs on either side of him. One with mouth open, the other closed, the komainu guarded the sacred shrine. Pausing at the water trough, father and son purified themselves by rinsing out their mouths and washing their hands to show respect to the gods. In the worship hall, they tugged a rope attached to an overhead bell to let the kami know they were present. To show gratitude, each threw a coin into the offering box. After bowing deeply, they clapped their hands twice, also to ask the gods for attention.

  Before them stood the honden, the main hall, where the gods were in attendance.

  Genjo couldn’t see them, but he knew they were there.

  His ancestors.

  Samurai.

  Warriors turned into gods.

  On this side of the threshold, the daisho was mounted on a wooden rack. The big sword—daito—and the small sword—shoto—fused together as daisho, the sign of a samurai. Others were allowed to carry one sword or the other, but only samurai carried both.

  Reverently, with both hands, Genjo’s father raised the big sword off the rack. In the stillness of the shrine, amid the serenity of the garden, the boy heard the glistening steel sing as the blade slipped free of its curved scabbard.

  “Kamikaze,” his father said, invoking the name of the sword. “We make the best swords in the world. This sword began as iron mixed with carbon. Then fire, water, anvil, and hammer forged it into this. See how it curves? That’s for strength and sharpness. See how it shines? Polishing adds perfection. Etched into the blade are the words ‘Four Body Sword.’ Do you know what that means?”

  “No,” said Genjo.

  “It means that the sword tester stacked the corpses of criminals one on top of another and—starting with the small bones, then moving up to the large ones—cut through them with this blade. ‘Four Body Sword’ means Kamikaze will slice through four men.”

  “Why does it have a name?”

  “The katana,” his father said, “is the battlefield sword. This sword is a samurai’s most treasured weapon. It’s part of him. It’s the soul of his warriorship. So he gives it a name.”

  “Kamikaze?” Genjo asked. “Why name it that?”

  His father moved several feet away from his son and took up the stance of a samurai poised to strike.

  “Close your eyes,” he said, “and listen well.”

  Genjo closed his eyes.

  Not a sound.

  Then—shhhhewwww—he heard the blade whip past his face.

  “Did you hear it?”

  “Yes, Father.”

  “That’s Divine Wind.”

  Years later, just before Genjo went off to war, his father had summoned him to the Shinto shrine. On seeing the younger Tokuda arrive in his uniform, the man who had taught him the Way of the Warrior smiled from ear to ear. In the presence of the kami, their ancestral samurai gods, the elder Tokuda raised the katana once more from the wooden rack and, with pride in his eyes, passed it to his son.

  “Kamikaze,” his father invoked. “Strike down the barbarians with your Divine Wind.”

  Genjo stuck the battle sword through his belt.

  Returning to the rack, his mentor lifted the wakizashi off the lower hooks. The shorter sword was less than two feet long. It was the sword a warrior used to commit seppuku.

  Seppuku.

  Hara-kiri, in other words.

  His last lesson in bushido had taught Genjo how to regain honor if he should lose a battle or shame himself. With his sword in front of him, sitting on a special mat, he would open his white kimono to bare his abdomen. Taking up the wakizashi, he would plunge the blade deep into his gut. The initial cut would slice from left to right, then he would yank the steel upward to spill out his intestines. A bow of his head would signal his assistant to decapitate him with a sweeping stroke of the katana.

  “Come home victorious,” Genjo’s father said. “Or do what must be done.”

  He gave his son the short sword to stick through his belt.

  Genjo had the daisho.

  He was samurai.

  It used to be that you could spot a yak a mile away. In fact, the name yakuza says it all. Ya means 8, ku means 9, and sa means 3 in Japanese. Those numbers add up to 20, a losing hand in a game of hana-fuda (flower cards), so yakuza members enjoy being the “bad hands” of society.

  Kazuya had laughed at paintings of the first yaks—the “wave men,” the “crazy ones”—of the 1600s. Their flamboyant clothes, hairstyles, and extra long swords were a hoot. Theirs was a time of peace, when samurai were idle, so leaderless ronin had wandered Japan, committing thefts and causing mayhem.

  The yaks of the 1950s had looked outlandish too. The sunglasses, dark suits, white shirts, dark ties: they dressed like hoods enforcing black-market deals for Al Capone. Tough guys who endured hundreds of hours of pain for full-body tattoos shaped like long underwear. Thugs with less than ten fingers.

  The rat pack was in by the 1990s. It was cool for yaks to flaunt punch-perm hair, shiny tight-fitting suits, and pointy-toed shoes, all so long out of style in America. With gang pins on their lapels and logo signs on their social clubs, they wheeled through the streets in big, flashy Lincolns and Cadillacs.

  Until they got hammered.

  As Japan’s national proverb says, “The nail that sticks up must be hammered down.”

  Kazuya was a yak for the new millennium. That he was born to be yakuza was obvious from his name: in English, it had the same six letters as the Japanese mafia. Ostentation was a luxury of the past. It had died when Japan’s economic bubble burst—thanks to the yakuza undermining the banking system through loans that swiftly turned into bad debts. Pissed-off politicians had passed a 1992 act aimed at dismantling groups with a certain percentage of members with criminal records. No longer could the yakuza depend on their open alliance with right-wingers in the political and corporate arenas. Japan’s National Police Agency had the teeth to go after them, so twenty-first-century yaks would have to blend in.

  Yaks like Kazuya.

  The new ninjas of Japan.

  There wasn’t a tattoo on his body, and he had all his fingers. A lot of toned-down yaks dressed according to a code: Shiro nara shiro. Kuro nara kuro. If you wear white, wear all white, from your hat to your shoes. If you wear black, wear all black. Kazuya, however, was into deep, deep cover. So in a country where conformity was highly valued and outward signs of individuality raised suspicion, he dressed like a well-paid salariman, the sort of corporate high-roller who paid Kazuya handsomely for “comfort women.”

  Kazuya was a business-suit yak.

  His business was to cater to the kinky side of Japan’s overstressed, buttoned-down “salary men.” The hard-core pornography: he imported it. The sex tours to Bangkok, Manila,
Taipei, Seoul: he ran them. When it came to “selling spring”—a Japanese euphemism for pimping young girls—he was without equal. Some were unwanted children from China, where boys were preferred in the one-child system. Others came from the Philippines, where girls lured out of poor villages with the offer of good jobs ended up stripping and hooking in the bars and clubs of the mizu shobai, Kazuya’s “water business.” But what raked in the biggest bucks were his “date clubs,” places where, for a hefty membership fee, doctors, lawyers, and corporate execs could select and fuck a North American blonde.

  Blondes are big in Japan.

  Hollywood South and Hollywood North are magnets for buxom young actresses desperate to break into films. Fluent in English, Kazuya knew L.A. and Vancouver as well as he did the head of his cock. A couple of times a year, he flew to both to scout for undiscovered talent willing to perform “comfort work” on the casting couch between screen tests for Asian films.

  He figured that’s why they’d assigned him this job.

  Because he spoke English.

  And because he knew Vancouver.

  The yak who met him at Tokyo’s airport was his uncle. He could tell from the squint of the old guy’s eyes that he was none too pleased. His uncle was one of the old-school yaks with the full-body tattoos; he’d been recruited by the gurentai hoods who had sprung up after the war, back in the days when Genjo Tokuda ruled the Ginza district. Originally, yaks had inked tattoos to boast about their crimes: a black ring was added to the arm for every offense committed. Later, tats became both a test of enduring pain and the mark of the misfit who refused to adapt. His uncle Makoto’s inking—a mural of dragons, gang insignias, flowers, and Noh masks—covered his torso, front and back, both arms to below the elbow, and his legs to mid-calf. Also, his pinky was gone.

  “What went wrong?” Makoto asked.

  “I lost control of the car.”

  “Were you speeding?”

  “So they say.”

  “Who?”

  “Vancouver police.”

  “Did they charge you?”

  “A traffic ticket. I paid the fine.”

  “How late were you?”

  “An hour,” Kazuya replied. “There was no one by the figurehead when I arrived.”

  “Fool,” his uncle said, ushering him to the car. “You shamed yourself. And you shamed me.”

  The instructions had been simple. He was to fly to Vancouver, just as he did to scout blondes, and drive around Stanley Park to the Empress of Japan’s figurehead, which was mounted on the seawall walk alongside the harbor. There, moments after the boom of the Nine O’Clock Gun, he would be met by a man with the code name Kamikaze. The stranger would hand him a vial of blood to smuggle into Japan.

  But with time to kill before the meeting, Kazuya had indulged his passion for blondes and fast cars. He was a good-looking guy, if he said so himself, and he liked to use the bedroom to collect his finder’s fee from the blondes he selected for Japan. Blondes like the one he’d met over a drink in a bar that afternoon. Japan was a crowded country—not like Canada—so Kazuya had rented a fast car to enjoy the wide-open spaces with the sexy blonde. Unfortunately, the yak had spun out on his way back into town. And that was why he’d failed to meet Kamikaze.

  The Ginza district is the Times Square of Tokyo. Destroyed by bombing during the war—only the Wako Building, with its clock tower, and a few structures in the side streets survived—it was now, by day, the swankiest shopping spot in Japan and, by night, a dazzling, neon-lit fantasy of restaurants, clubs, and bars.

  The club where the car stopped occupied the upper floor of a two-story building that fronted a towering skyscraper of sun-splashed glass. The stubby structure had once been the headquarters of Genjo Tokuda, back when he was the most feared hood in Tokyo. It was now a private club for fossils like Makoto, old-time thugs who were quickly giving way to slick yaks like Kazuya.

  Clang ...

  Clang ...

  Clang ...

  Relentless clanging filled the pachinko parlor on the floor below the club. Walking through the gambling den, Makoto and Kazuya passed by rows upon rows of people whose eyes were locked on the tiny chrome balls of the pachinko machines. An elevator at the back wall ascended to the top floor, but the doors wouldn’t slide open until Makoto fed an electronic card into a slot.

  Smoke swirled through the air of the private upstairs club. Here, the game was cho ka han ka, “odds or evens.” The player shook a pair of dice in a black bamboo cup, then set the cup down on a mat. Compared with the pachinko parlor, the private club was deathly quiet. The gamblers surrounding the table, their drinks held by comfort women, slapped cash onto the mat and bet “odds” or “evens.” Because all the men were yakuza, ten thousand dollars was bet on a single play.

  “That’s all,” said the dice man.

  The thugs withdrew their hands from the cash mat.

  “Play,” said the dice man.

  Opening 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 it between 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 the practice. 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, Taser darts, knockout gas jets.

  The doors slid open.

  The three stepped out.

  And Kazuya got the shock of his yakuza life.

  So sunlit was the penthouse that he might have been in heaven. In front of them, a man was seated on an ornate chair. He appeared to have samurai warriors guarding him. The suits of ancient armor were genuine and belonged in a museum, as did the thirteenth-century Mongol War antiques that were on display for this modern shogun’s exclusive pleasure. Traditional Japanese instruments—a banjo-like koto and a wood flute—played soft music. Two samurai swords hung in a rack on a foot table set before this octogenarian. Adorned with the crest of his family, a tanto knife slung through its belt, his kimono was gray, in keeping with his dignified age.

  Tokuda! thought Kazuya.

  The kumicho—the supreme boss of the post-war yakuza—had lived in seclusion for so long that he’d taken on a mythic status. But here he was in the flesh, the burned half of his face an ugly scar. The old yaks on either side of Kazuya were moving toward their master, heads bowed and thumbs tucked under their palms as a sign of respect, so the young yak approached too. The thumb was the most important finger, the last to be cut off by a disgraced underling.