Fishing for Stars

by Bryce Courtenay

  The yakuza, like the mafia, are formed into families, the oyabun [godfather] taking in or adopting youngsters, usually from poor and disadvantaged families, who begin as kobun, advance through wakagashira to oyabun if they are able and lucky.

  The yakuza pride themselves on being followers of bushido, the Samurai code of honour that involves the concepts of giri, honour, and ninjo−, compassion, though both characteristics appeared to be seldom present in yakuza in the seventies. Nonetheless, despite being little more than organised thugs for hire, in the eyes of Japanese society they still retained something of the aura of Robin Hood.

  Like so much in Japanese society that is inexplicable to Western minds, the yakuza played a very real, public and even recognised role in society. For instance, they acted as so−kaiya to banks and organisations. This involved terrorising shareholder meetings where their presence encouraged shareholders to agree with the decisions of the board. They were often used by these same organisations to frighten small landholders into selling their property for large-scale developments. They also had and still have all the usual criminal involvements with standover and protection rackets, transport, gambling and labour unions, and they owned or controlled many of the thousands of pachinko and pinball parlours and hostess bars, as well as running most of the brothels and street prostitutes.

  There was very little that was covert about the yakuza in the seventies, when they were at the height of their power. They maintained close and open ties with senior political entities, as well as the corporate giants, and were an integral part of the post-war power structure. Some went as far as maintaining offices with signs advertising their services to the public as openly as any legitimate organisation.

  The personal appearance of individual yakuza was striking, too. Most were heavily tattooed with elaborate designs and mystical symbols, usually covering one shoulder and upper arm but sometimes the entire body. They wore only black suits and white shirts, cropped their hair short, wore dark sunglasses and walked with a calculated swagger and pronounced gait, arms slightly bent at the elbows, like a boxer patrolling the ring prior to a fight. Their peculiar code of honour required them to sever a finger at the joint each time they made a mistake that might lead to repercussions or harm their organisation. It was not unusual to see older yakuza with several fingers missing joints.

  It was almost ten in the evening when I returned to our rooms. I turned on the television, preparing for a long and anxious wait for Anna. The program was about the crew of Apollo 13, who had miraculously managed to bring their craft back into the earth’s orbit and were about to plummet into the Pacific in their capsule. Despite my concern for Anna I watched fascinated as the greatest rescue in space history reached its climax, the three red and white striped parachutes seeming to allow them a soft landing at sea. Hooray! Elated by the rescue I told myself how much more difficult their mission had been than Anna’s. But the euphoria didn’t last long. The Apollo crew hadn’t had to deal with drug pushers and criminals, and in my mind I saw Anna being raped, robbed and left for dead in some dirty needle-strewn alley. It was going to be a long night.

  I had arranged a morning meeting with Fuchida-san, the collector with whom I had been corresponding about butterflies for twenty-five years. He was to pick me up at the hotel at 11 a.m. to go to his home to view his butterfly collection but I told myself I ought to try to cancel the meeting. It was too late to call and I decided I’d have to ring first thing in the morning if Anna hadn’t returned and I was forced to go looking for her. Though how I would go about doing so I had no idea.

  The fact that Anna was out there somewhere alone in Tokyo trying to make a connection with a heroin dealer while I cooled my heels in our hotel was getting to me and I wasn’t all that far from panicking. I’d never thought of myself as the nervous type. I’d been through one or two hairy experiences in my life and had managed to stay more or less calm. But the difference then was that I was proactive; this time I was twiddling my thumbs, unable to do anything except wait.

  An hour later, when the crew of Apollo 13 was clearly safe and the world had breathed a collective sigh of relief, the program changed to a review of the upcoming Cherry Blossom Festival. We’d booked a bus trip to an outlying village to witness a ceremony at a Shinto shrine in two days’ time, but in my mind I now saw myself visiting Tokyo’s mortuaries instead, asking if they held the body of an unidentified woman.

  It was ridiculous, I know, but I couldn’t help it. I kept reminding myself that this was the first time her habit had ever interfered in our life, that she must know what she was doing, must even have done this before when she’d been in a foreign country. But all the self-chatter didn’t make the waiting any easier.

  I cursed her addiction a dozen times over, told myself I must try to do something to help her overcome her dependence on heroin. I felt guilty that I had long since come to the convenient as well as erroneous conclusion that it was pointless trying to help her kick the habit, accepting as gospel an adage on heroin from the famous American jazz saxophonist Charlie (Bird) Parker: ‘You can get it out of your body, but you can’t get it out of your brain.’

  I had accepted that heroin was a part of Anna’s life. She obviously had a regular supplier in Melbourne and finding the money to finance her addiction wasn’t ever going to be a problem, but she kept these details intensely private. Anna had always realised that her addiction would have enormous consequences in her business life if it were discovered. She was in this matter, as in all others, completely organised, and it wasn’t for me to interfere.

  Her years as a madam and dominatrix in a house of bondage were equally private; it was a clandestine world I never entered. We discussed it rarely, and then only if a client mentioned a business opportunity that might concern me. I was simply locked out of her world of drugs and bondage, which in many ways made her a stranger to the person who loved her the most.

  Even Anna’s almost annual visits to some famous American or Swiss drug rehabilitation clinic were always referred to by both of us as business trips. It was cautionary shorthand in case the true purpose inadvertently slipped out and was discovered by the media, who, as the feminist movement gathered momentum, were becoming more and more interested in the beautiful, though unapproachable, lone-wolf entrepreneur said to be amassing a private fortune. I also formed the impression over the years that Anna’s client base consisted solely of the rich and powerful, the kind of people who were as fanatical as she was about avoiding publicity and who could quickly put a stop to an overzealous reporter.

  But now, away from home, I told myself all the discretion and careful attention to detail meant nothing. This wasn’t a Western country where the pusher and the user were familiar with street procurement procedures. Anna, like any other addict, was out there in the middle of the night in a city she didn’t know in a country that seemed to do everything differently. Earlier in the evening I had thrown a yakuza lad to the pavement and right now she might be begging another such low-life for a deal in some dark alley smelling of piss and excrement. Or so I imagined.

  I had no idea whether she was telling the truth about the house of bondage in Roppongi or if this had simply been a lie to reassure me that she understood the world she was entering. Anna never lied to me; if she didn’t want to answer a question she simply ignored it. But now, facing the pain of withdrawal, she was probably as capable of barefaced lying as any other heroin addict needing a fix.

  As the night wore on I grew more and more apprehensive. Earlier I’d attempted to calm myself with a logical analysis of the situation. Anna, I told myself, wouldn’t leave such an important aspect of her daily life to chance. She must have faced this predicament before on her various overseas trips. But now, in the early hours of the morning, when my emotions had taken over and I kept telling myself that this was Japan where nothing is ever as it appears to be, these assurances carried little or no weight.

  At 4 a.m. Anna arrived back bright-eyed and bushy-t
ailed. After promising myself not to say a word I immediately began to shout, more from relief than anger. ‘Where the fuck have you been?’ I yelled, throwing up my hands and pacing around her.

  ‘Nicholas, shush!’ she said, calm as you like. ‘I went to Topaz. It is the oldest and most respected BDSM house in Tokyo. You could not come; gaijin are not normally admitted. Now remove your pants at once and allow me to apologise.’ She grinned wickedly. ‘You may spank me if you wish.’

  ‘You’ve got Buckley’s,’ I answered, attempting to calm down. ‘I’m completely buggered and bloody angry.’

  ‘You can sleep in tomorrow, when you can also apologise for shouting at me,’ she replied mischievously. ‘Now, Nicholas, kindly unzip, unbuckle and unwind!’

  Of course I was wrong. Maybe intense anxiety heightens one’s sex drive, because Anna was extremely successful at channelling my anger elsewhere. Afterwards I fell asleep almost immediately and woke a few minutes before 10 a.m. the next day with Anna asleep beside me looking positively angelic. She’d obviously chased the dragon and finally caught it, rewarding herself with a long and blissful slumber (maidens who associate with dragons never sleep, they only slumber).

  My appointment with my butterfly-collecting Japanese swap mate, Iko Fuchida, was at eleven. I decided to have a Japanese bath. This is a process in two stages and in our suite there were two small bathrooms adjoining each other. In the first stage I thoroughly soaped and rinsed myself using a handheld shower, although water can also be scooped from the bath with a dipper. The second stage involved a deep bathtub filled with steaming water, where I immersed myself, relaxing, ridding myself of the effects of my all-night vigil, an altogether reinvigorating experience. My only problem was the size of the towel. I’m not a small bloke and the towel was no bigger than what we would refer to as a hand towel. The idea is to put on a yukata while the skin is still damp to further relax and unwind.

  But there wasn’t time to do this so, still damp in parts, I dressed in grey flannels, sports jacket, shirt and tie, my shoes polished to a military brilliance. It was about as formal as I ever got, with the exception of funerals, where I wore a blue serge suit the government had issued when I’d left the navy to resume life as a civilian, the buttons, alas, no longer partnering the buttonholes. My fellow collector I was almost certain would be wearing the ubiquitous blue serge suit, the national uniform for all Japanese office workers from messenger boy to chief executive.

  I was ready and waiting, seated in the foyer with ten minutes to spare, the rosewood and glass tray of rare Pacific butterflies I had brought as a gift perched on my lap. I’d had it wrapped at Mitsukoshi when I’d previously shopped with Anna, and the shop girls had gathered around ooh-ing and aah-ing and exclaiming at the beauty of the specimens. The elderly lady wrapping it took positively ages, but I must say when she’d completed the task it looked rather swish. She’d wrapped it in handmade paper of milk chocolate brown flecked with genuine gold leaf, every fold precise, the whole a brilliant example of the ancient Japanese art of making and folding paper.

  In fact, I became a little concerned that the wrapping might be a bit ostentatious, and that I might look like a show-off, that it might embarrass my fellow collector if he should prove to be a man of modest means. I’d made the original phone call mid-afternoon, and the person on the other end had said she’d have to contact my friend and could I leave my name and number, that he would return my call in three hours. I’d thought then that he might live in a lodging house or some such place and get the message when he returned from work.

  I’d positioned my chair so that I could look out through the hotel entrance, ready for his arrival on foot from the nearby subway or by taxi. A gaijin my size with a large gift-wrapped box on his lap wasn’t going to be too hard to spot, but we’d agreed on the phone he would carry a butterfly collector’s catalogue.

  I guess it’s natural to feel a little anxious when you meet someone for the first time with whom you’ve been sharing a passion for twenty-five years but, in fact, about whom you know very little. I guess I was preoccupied with just such a notion when there was a squeal of brakes beyond the entrance. Moments later, two bellboys rushed past me towards the glass doors, holding them open and standing as stiffly as a pair of wooden figures. The doorman, I observed, had also sprung to rigid attention, and I could hear people outside crying out.

  Two black Toyota motorcars had drawn up, burning rubber and halting seemingly inches behind each other, horns blaring, almost immediately followed by a black Mercedes Grosser, the first of these huge German cars I had ever seen. Then two more Toyotas slammed to a halt behind it. Men in black wearing sunglasses spilled from the four Toyotas and formed a guard around the Grosser 600.

  By this time everyone in the foyer, hotel guests and staff, appeared frozen to the spot and the place had fallen completely silent. The desk clerks at reception were standing rigidly to attention, ignoring a telephone that suddenly sprang to life within arm’s reach.

  As I watched, the driver opened the rear door of the huge square-rigged monster of a car and a tall, slender Japanese man dressed like the others in a black suit and wearing sunglasses stepped out, took two steps away from the car and paused. The men divided and ran to either side of him. He advanced a couple of steps towards the entrance then stopped again and retreated to the car, opened the rear door, stooped and half disappeared into the interior. By this time I’d partially gathered my wits and realised, some time after seemingly everyone else had made the connection, that the entire entourage as well as the bloke reaching into the rear of the big car were yakuza. And the guy rummaging in the back of the big Benz was obviously a very important gangster.

  My immediate thought was, Shit! It’s about the kid I humiliated on the pavement last night . . . They’ve come to get me! All this happened in a matter of seconds and then the tall slender gangster turned back towards the hotel entrance, whereupon the six yakuza on either side of him formed an escort as he moved through the open plate-glass doors. It look me several seconds more to realise he was carrying a butterfly catalogue.

  Fuchida-san entered the hotel, ignoring the doorman’s salute, and seemed to recognise me immediately, although this may have been because I appeared to be the only person still seated and a gaijin to boot. He advanced, smiling, his entourage drawing back. I rose to my feet, placed the butterfly box on the chair, and went to greet him.

  ‘Welcome, honourable Duncan-san, master of all butterfly collectors!’ he announced loudly so that all could hear his tribute to me, then he bowed deeply.

  ‘I am not worthy, Fuchida-san, it is you who surely deserve such a title,’ I answered, bowing in return. He seemed pleased with my reply and the men around us smiled and nodded. ‘I have brought you a small gift. It is unworthy, its only virtue is that it is almost unique – the twenty rarest Pacific Island butterflies.’ I bent to retrieve the parcel and handed it to him, knowing that in theory the gift should be handed over at the conclusion of our meeting. But I decided to do it the Western way.

  I had expected him to accept it politely in the enigmatic manner of the Japanese and put it aside for a private appraisal. But no such thing happened. His eyes shone with excitement and he immediately called for another chair. When it was brought he sat down and, placing the butterfly box on his lap, untied the parcel. I noticed the top two joints on one of his little fingers were missing. His hands were slim and tattooed, each finger sporting a gold ring, one of which was set with a large ruby, the others crusted with diamonds. He carefully separated the folds in the paper, unconcerned about the time this took. Finally, without the tiniest tear in the wrapping, the tray of butterflies within was revealed. ‘Hiee!’ he exclaimed, clasping his hands tightly. ‘It is a treasure beyond the imagination!’ He scanned the tray. ‘Twenty, and I have only three of them!’ Then showing off outrageously he pointed to each and recited its Latin name. Laughing, he turned to face me. ‘You honour me, Duncan-san. I cannot repay your generosity.�
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  ‘Twenty-five years of friendship between collectors is sufficient repayment, Fuchida-san. I am grateful to you for this alone without your own generosity in sending me specimens in return.’

  ‘And now, at last, we meet.’ He seemed to hesitate momentarily, then, seemingly on an impulse, removed a gold ring set with a large yellow diamond from his forefinger. ‘It is a small token of our butterfly brotherhood,’ he said, thrusting the ring at me.

  It was a gift of ridiculous proportions. I knew better than to refuse, but enough to protest. ‘You pay me too much honour! How can I accept?’

  ‘As a brother,’ he exclaimed. ‘In twenty-five years you have given me great pleasure. It is but a small token.’

  ‘I accept, because to refuse would deny the pleasure of meeting you at last,’ I said, surprising myself with my grasp of the idiom of compounding compliments. While I am not the ring-wearing type and would choose to wear a diamond least of all, I slipped the ring onto my pinkie, it being too small for any of my other fingers. I have always been self-conscious of my hands, which are the size of boarding-school soup plates. ‘I shall wear it always as a sign of our fraternity. It is my turn to be overwhelmed by your generosity, honourable Fuchida-san.’

  I suddenly became aware that nobody in the lobby had moved, that the yakuza surrounding us had now turned to watch every corner of the foyer. I wondered what they possibly thought might happen on an early spring morning in one of Tokyo’s most prestigious hotels and concluded that their vigilance was a show of power and an indication of the importance of their oyabun.

  Fuchida-san, who can’t have been anything less than an oyabun, saw me looking at the reception desk where three telephones were ringing while the clerks ignored them, standing rigidly to attention. I glanced over at the entrance where the doorman and the bellboys stood like statues. ‘Get on with your business!’ he called out. ‘This is not a zoo, even if you all behave like frightened monkeys!’ This caused a burst of fraternal laughter from the yakuza and a few nervous titters from the patrons still in the foyer. ‘Come, Duncan-san, we shall go to my home,’ Fuchida-san said. ‘I would be greatly honoured if you would give me your worthy opinion of my unworthy butterfly collection.’