by Nick Tanner
Fujiwara looked upon this incredibly glamorous lifestyle with envy but regardless of his possible resentment, until now, he had carried out his activities and used his organized power to guarantee his leaders’ sumptuous lifestyle on the understanding that he would either inherit or grow his own organisation enough so that he too, in his own right, could become Oyabun. It was this dream, this promise, that Fujiwara was still clinging to but meanwhile the burden of having to pay the tribute money was having undesirable, negative consequences and he was coming to severely begrudge his hand-to-mouth existence.
He wondered, not for the first time, about how his life had become so pressurised and so stressful and how it was that his dreams of an effortless slide into affluence and high living had become so horribly complicated and monstrously derailed. At what point in his life did he begin to stop trying he wondered and at what point did an expectant future dissolve into a helpless nothingness? At what point did the dreams begin to warp? Of course he had sadly realised some time ago that he was neither cut out for business nor, for that matter, management nor organisation either. This latter realisation he had found difficult to accept as it signalled, after all, that in all probability he would not be offered a higher position in the organisation. He would not be made Oyabun. Duty, deference, hard work and loyalty had been the key tenets which he had religiously followed, but each one, he now recognised, was wholly beyond his abilities and inclinations. He was no longer sure where his future lay.
On the other hand he had only ever known work for the Yakuza – he had only really known the work of an enforcer. He considered himself good at that - violence and intimidation. He was good at it and he enjoyed it.
He disturbingly recalled the fate of Sazaki and Miyagi two of his colleagues who had found the pressure to be so great that they had committed suicide. Fujiwara had not reached such a denouement, but he knew that something would have to give - soon. He was by no means a coward, but neither did he have much stomach left for the fight. Both the stress and the shame could lead him quite easily into suicidal thoughts.
He picked up the newspaper that was lying on his desk and skimmed over the headlines – unable to focus much beyond the bold print. One story in particular smashed into his consciousness – ‘Strangled woman mystery’. He read a little of the story amused at the stumbling description and pallid guesswork of the journalist who without an adequate range of facts had limped to the conclusion that it was all a pitiful indictment on the change for the worst in Japanese society that could see an innocent woman taken down without anyone coming to her rescue.
He grinned maliciously and then laughed out loud. Fujiwara’s conclusions were far more brutal.
The bitch deserved it. It was as simple as that.
He laid down the newspaper. Reading hurt his eyes. Reading hurt his whole body.
He glanced at his watch and traced the second hand as it crawled slowly from four around to eleven.
Nine forty-five!
Time was dragging. He was sick and tired of sitting in the dingy little office and sick and tired of staring at a computer screen that resolutely refused to tell him what he wanted.
Reparations were due to his Oyabun by Monday and he desperately had to get some money from somewhere and given his present lack of credit he was sure not to receive any special favours or allowance for deferral.
He picked up his leather jacket that was lying on the floor and wandered down the long, dark corridor and into the main reception. The place was empty – they didn’t really open until ten, and anyway the time of day seemed to be becoming increasingly irrelevant. Ten p.m., ten a.m. – it didn’t matter. The place had lost its hum. The clientele were simply not coming in the numbers they used to and there wasn’t a damn thing he could do about it. He realised that he’d become quite passive in the face of adversity.
Behind the small bar Ishimura was polishing some glasses.
‘Last night’s takings any good,’ asked Fujiwara.
Ishimura grimaced – just like he did every morning.
‘I’m going out for a while,' added Fujiwara.
Ishimura just nodded.
This was also part of the problem. Aside from the girls Fujiwara had no-one he could talk too. Ishimura was next to useless – hardworking but useless and monosyllabic at the best of times. It pained Fujiwara to admit it but he saw a lot of himself in Ishimura – plenty of muscle and precious little brain. A man who had volunteered under the impression that his life would be overflowing with ready cash and girls but above all a life that would be radically different from the monotone, commuter nine-to-five of every-one else. What he had found was that he was cleaning glasses just like any other bakayarou. Fujiwara had been there. He knew exactly how he felt.
‘We’re all baka,’ he thought – Bakayarou with tattoos and ceremonial cups.
He took the elevator down to the ground floor, exited through the electronic doors that shut quickly and firmly behind him and walked a few blocks down the street immediately feeling the biting cold and regretting not wearing something a bit thicker than his leather jacket, but he wasn’t going far. A minute later he turned into a glass-fronted, garishly painted building and was immediately hit by a wall of noise – pachinko noise!
He walked through the lines of machines and made his way to the back of the parlour. Using a prepaid card he purchased a tray of balls – small metal balls resembling ball-bearings and then took up his customary position slumped in front of his favourite machine. He preferred the older, traditional ones, not that he was particularly against the newer digital variety with their LCD displays playing colourful animations if you hit the jackpot, and where in this particular parlour the owner had opted for noisy, erotic anime. But he wasn’t in the mood. If he’d wanted sex and titillation he would have gone to one of the girls. The older machines were just as noisy though with their bells and lights and of course the sound of the metal balls slipping through the machine and rebounding off the pins. He also knew that in the old style machines the positioning of the pins greatly affected the payout and unless they were tapped into less forgiving locations by the operator they generally offered good returns. Fujiwara was after an easy win, not that he was seeing this as salvation for his financial woes – pachinko didn’t pay that much, but he just wanted to have the feeling of being successful again.
He looked up and down at the vertical machine in front of him and released the first series of steel balls and watched passively as they fell through the maze of nail-like pins. Some balls fell into slots where they accumulated, in turn activating the winning or losing combinations of pictures. So far he was losing. Like playing a slot machine the pictures had to match and so far they weren’t. Most of the steel balls just slipped through and were lost. The only thing Fujiwara was doing was controlling the speed at which the balls fell.
It had never struck him before but it did now. Pachinko had become a horrible metaphor for his life.
The player was passive and very rarely won!
He stayed for over an hour, caught up in an almost trance-like state, experiencing little emotion and in time his senses became dulled to the noise of the balls, the buzzers, the bells and even the thunder of the jackpot as the steel balls tumbled joyously into the winnings tray beneath the machine.
On many occasions he’d used pachinko as a method to steady his mind, to clear the clutter and sometimes it had helped him to make decisions. But not today! Eventually he decided that he’d had enough. He’d experienced no epiphany, no startling revelation or shining light to show him the way. He felt disappointed.
He scooped up his winnings with neither joy nor sadness and walked to the back of the parlour once again to the
‘ball exchange area’ where he swapped them for some perfume. He then exited the parlour turned quickly to his right and down a dingy, dark side alley. He tapped at a window pushed the perfume bottle back through the window where it was exchanged for cold hard cash. He’d come out about even.
He returned to his office and once again stared fixatedly at the bottom line of his spreadsheet. As always it repeated the same pitiful story and generated the exact same dull ache in the pit of his stomach. To accompany his analysis he took the inevitable swig out of the whiskey bottle, not even bothering to pour it into a tumbler.
He noticed, for once, that it did little to alter his condition. He was becoming immune to its effects. Something stronger was called for.
He slowly got to his feet, edged out from behind his desk and went to the filing cabinet next to the door. He opened the top drawer and pulled out a small, decorative wooden box, opened the lid with the anticipation of an excited puppy but was disappointed at what he saw. Nothing ever seemed to be where it should be. A flash of anger struck from his eyes as he tossed the box back into the drawer. He then walked down the corridor and banged on Rumi’s door. He also noticed that he was breathing heavily – he was out of condition. No! That was an understatement. He was seriously out of condition. It was something else he had let slide, something else that he could no longer take pride in, something else he would have to put right.
‘Yes?’ said Rumi, calling from within the room.
‘It’s me. Are you busy?’ he replied gruffly.
‘Just a second.’
Rumi came to the door and let him in. She smiled delightfully and her eyes were large and alive.
‘Are you starting or finishing?’ He looked around the small and tidy room and nonchalantly picked up a small object that was on the sideboard.
‘Starting – first client at eleven-thirty.’
‘What’s this?’ He examined the object with suspicion creasing his eyes.
‘It’s just a present.’ She hoped she sounded casual and was all too aware of his tiger-like jealousy. In the same way, she hoped she’d done her best to appear thrilled at his entrance.
‘Yes, but what is it?’
‘Just an ornament from Xian – it was painted from the inside, apparently.’
‘Really?’ He replaced the ornament back where he’d taken it from. He wasn’t remotely interested, and the less said about the Chinks, the better. He knew the organisation was as concerned as the rest of the country about their menacing tentacles sliding across the water.
‘Do you need anything?’ Rumi tried this time to hide both the sound of impatience and the sound of fear in her voice. Whenever he was around her she knew that she had to be on guard at all times. To be sloppy could prove to be fatal.
‘Just a line.’ He looked at her hopefully. There were times when he could appear to be totally child-like.
‘Oh – right, sure. Just a minute.’
She closed and locked the door and went over to her dressing table.
‘You having one yourself?’
‘No – maybe later.’
She watched quietly as Fujiwara snorted up the white powder. She was still afraid at what might come next. He was so unpredictable and every aspect of this man repulsed her - his drunken bad breath which stank of whiskey, the stale sweat of his armpits and the oily smell of his hair.
He stood up and wiped his nose with his thumb and forefinger, evidently pleased, and turned to face Rumi. To his surprise he was delighted to see her watching eagerly over him. Of course he knew that she was good-looking, but he rarely saw her without make-up. She really was quite naturally beautiful. There were many women that had passed through the books of the Millennium Massage Salon. Most were forgettable, being plastic facsimiles of the hundreds of girls who had been cajoled into the ‘trade’, with their artificial beauty. It made him sick - in the same way that their panting dependency on drugs also made him sick.
He was nothing if not a hypocrite.
Rumi Park however, was different. She had a natural class about her, together with an understated intelligence. She was really far too good a girl to spend her time in a shabby massage salon-cum-brothel.
Of course he knew about her circumstances – intimately. There were reasons why she couldn’t leave. She was one of many women who were here under special measures – a payment for the debts of their fathers. Rumi was Korean as was her father - a business man who had failed to pay. Once under his wing these women were easy to control. It was simply a matter of enforced drug addiction, until they reached a point when they knew neither who they were nor why they were here. Rumi had been no different – at first.
He knew however, that deep down that their love making was a sham. Naturally he didn’t view it as rape, as it should more properly be called. But whatever you called it, it would have been more preferable if she genuinely loved him. Usually revelations of this kind would trigger an impetuous anger within him but as regards Rumi, his own feelings for her were too deep for him to see her in anything other than a positive light. Other girls had paid for their insolence but he couldn’t bring himself to do the same with Rumi. Perhaps he was becoming too soft.
‘Show us your tits!’ he demanded suddenly. There was always a quick antidote to any accusations, self-inflicted or otherwise, of being too soft.
‘What?’
‘Misete! (show me).’
She did as she was told, slowly unbuttoning her tunic and then unclipping her bra. She stood, feeling vulnerable, in the centre of the room. She had perfectly shaped breasts, topped by strikingly pert nipples.
‘You’re aroused,' he smirked, pointing to her nipples.
Rumi didn’t reply.
‘Play with your tits! Come on – sexily. And play with your pussy, too.’
Once again she did as she was told, but she felt far from aroused and did what she could, albeit in a perfunctory manner. She was, however, all too aware that she needed him to believe that she was enjoying it. Her nipples could work for and against her. He kissed her roughly and she responded as if turned on by his actions. In actual fact it was a defence mechanism. In moods like this she had learned that the best policy was to submit. In moods like this it was best to summit – with desire.
She didn’t think of it now but all the girls were aware of an incident when the chosen one at the time had not submitted. She had opted to resist and as a consequence was left badly beaten and slashed across the face with a razor blade. No-one ever forgot. No-one was allowed to forget.
Fujiwara stood back and looked at Rumi who continued to play with herself. He waited for a couple of minutes until he was hard and then masturbated all over her breasts, face and into her hair. For some couples this might be an ultimate act of shared eroticism. For Fujiwara it was a method of underlining his dominance. It left her utterly degraded.
A minute later he was back in his office.
He was however, still not satisfied.
9 - In which a fallen aid plots the way back home
Friday 31st December 11:15am
Shinsuke Kinjo sat in deep contemplation, nursing a cup of coffee that had long since gone cold. He considered ruefully the last twenty-four hours. So much had happened. Things he just couldn’t believe. Things he couldn’t believe he could do. Things he couldn’t believe other people could do. As a consequence too many thoughts had crowded into his already saturated mind and it had taken him a great deal of time to think through them all; to order them neatly, to establish how he felt and to consider what the best course of action should be.
To say that he felt rejected and betrayed would be putting it mildly and the deep emptiness that was now his life was profoundly real and overpoweringly hurtful. The cold coffee was just a front. He had already downed a number of whiskies in a knee-jerk and rather fruitless attempt to come to terms with his predicament. At the epicentre resided his attitude towards Watanabe, his Party and his job, and where minute by minute he had squeezed out any remaining positive thoughts concerning them all, leaving behind just a hard, metallic ball of pure bitterness and bile.
Fuck the lot of them!
He couldn’t count the number of times that he had saved that pathetic bastard and now, without a second’s thought,
he had been thrown to the wolves and dumped on the scrap heap.
Think of all the things he had done!
He took a sip of the cold coffee, immediately wishing he hadn’t and spat it back into the cup before gaining the attention of the waitress and indicating that he would like another – with a whiskey on the side. She brought them across immediately. He didn’t smile nor make any acknowledgement for her service, slugged the whiskey back and then ordered another.