Then, suddenly, Takeshi was Izumi. He had come home early one afternoon to find a pair of men’s shoes in the foyer. His wife’s moans greeted him as he crept up the stairs. From the half-open bedroom door came a suffocatingly warm, musky smell and the sound of the bed creaking. He peered into the room to see his own naked buttocks between Sachiko’s spread legs. Had this really happened? Had Izumi seen this and somehow repressed it? Or was this Takeshi’s own experience, seen through Izumi’s eyes? Only in Hell could one experience an erotic vision like this.
Daté ran and ran. He was beginning to think that it would be easier if he were caught and killed. The Ikaruga gang members would surely be waiting for him once he dashed out of the alley and around the corner.
All right, then. Let them come. Get it over with. Wait, no! You only die once. Make the most of it! Some people die without even realizing it, like some poor fool getting his skull crushed by an object dropped from the roof of a building. But not him. He was going to cling to life with everything he had. He was going to savour his death.
Daté turned the corner, and the moment he did so, he was a changed man. It was as if a switch had been flipped in the centre of his fear-addled brain. He was no longer being pursued. He had become the pursuer. He wasn’t the prey. He was the hunter. He began to walk slowly, calmly. Where were those Ikaruga sons of bitches? He was going to kill them. And what about Hattori? Still running, no doubt. Then he was going to kill him too. It didn’t matter that Hattori was his subordinate. If he put up a fight, he’d beat him to within an inch of his life and then leave him there to die.
He felt like a tiger on the prowl. When he passed people on the street, he stared them in the face, his eyes wild. As he walked, he thought of his family home in the mountains beyond the last stop on the Yakihata Line. His shoulders were thrown back, and his nostrils were flaring. For the first time in his life, he was a real yakuza.
Hattori, on the other hand, had already been caught. Just after he started running, he collided with a passer-by and fell, hitting his head on the pavement. He was lying on the ground, dazed, when the three Ikaruga gang members got to him. They dragged him into a small bar in the basement of a nearby building.
“We need to use your place for a while,” Asahina, the oldest of the three gangsters, said to the mama-san. It was obvious that they were well acquainted.
“Just finish before the customers show up,” said the mama-san, a burly woman of around forty. She didn’t seem particularly put out. Perhaps she was used to this.
It was eight o’clock, still early for this area. There was plenty of time before the first customers were expected. Asahina had ordered one of his men to attend to Yuzo’s body, and now he had the other two tie Hattori to a chair.
To Hattori, Asahina seemed more fearless than Yuzo ever had. Why couldn’t he have served under Asahina instead? If he had joined the Ikaruga gang instead of the Sakaki gang, he could have been one of Asahina’s men. Unlike Daté, Hattori hadn’t been wild as a boy, and he didn’t even like violence. He was just lazy and not very bright and ended up in the Sakaki gang because it seemed like the easiest thing to do.
“Talk. Which gang are you from? Talk, or I’ll pour this cleanser down your throat.” Asahina knew that threatening to slice up a yakuza’s face would have little effect – if anything, scars are a badge of honour – so he grabbed the closest thing at hand to terrorize Hattori. But he needn’t have bothered. Hattori immediately told them everything.
The dead man was Yuzo Motoyama, a lieutenant in the Sakaki gang and Hattori’s senior, his aniki-bun. The man who ran away was Daté, Hattori’s immediate superior. Hattori himself was nothing but a thug, the lowest rank in the organization with nobody under him. He would tell them anything they wanted to know – just, he pleaded, don’t kill him.
But Asahina hadn’t brought this pathetic man here just to pry information out of him. He had other interests: he was a sadist, and under his tutelage his men had developed a taste for torture as well. The expression on Hattori’s pale, pudgy face made it seem like he was on the verge of tears, and this only inflamed Asahina’s desire to inflict pain. But Hattori had spilt his guts so easily that Asahina had no reason to torture him. In the end, his inability to come up with a reason was reason enough.
“Do you really think we brought you here just for that? We’re here to have some fun,” he taunted.
Asahina twisted his face into a smile, and his two underlings grinned in kind. He ordered them to strip Hattori to the waist, and then, with a carving knife, he made a shallow vertical slash on Hattori’s fat belly. Hattori began to sob.
“Does that hurt?” asked Asahina. Hattori’s tears excited him, but he quickly realized that robbing Hattori of all hope would take the thrill out of the exercise. “If you cry the right way, I might let you live,” he added.
“Cry like a baby,” said Yagyu, one of the underlings. There was no emotion in his voice as he stared vacantly at Hattori. His penis was erect.
“Most Japanese have no religious faith, and they have no one, including their parents, who can serve in God’s stead. So if they get even a little power, they start to think of themselves as gods. You might say that Hell exists solely for the purpose of ridding ourselves of that illusion. After all, there’s no place that can do that in the world of the living.”
This was what Takeshi’s acquaintance in Hell had told him, the man who said that Hell was not so different from the world of the living. But had Takeshi known this person in life? Could it be that he only seemed like an acquaintance and that Takeshi had never really known him at all? In Hell it was sometimes difficult to distinguish between memory and imagination, and yet Takeshi had a feeling that there was always a reason when that happened. Maybe the man was a demon or devil trying to teach him the true nature of Hell. Takeshi might have been given a false memory to fool himself into thinking that he knew the man. For all he knew, the man might have been Enma, the lord of the Japanese underworld.
Takeshi was at the beach. Hadn’t he been at this beach when he first met the man? It was night, and the beach was lit with floodlights. People in swimsuits were reclining on the sand. The sky was devoid of stars and moon, and the sea was the colour of lead. Hardly anyone was swimming. Takeshi in his business suit was the only one fully dressed. He walked along the beach in a pair of light shoes, freed now from his crutches.
As he walked among the men and women on the beach, he found himself looking for Yuzo. He had never met Yuzo as an adult, but he didn’t think it mattered. In Hell it seemed entirely possible to see someone as they had appeared in the distant past. And even if Yuzo were to appear at the age of his death, Takeshi was sure that he would recognize him without difficulty. He had heard from a classmate that Yuzo had been killed after becoming a Yakuza, so he would almost certainly be in Hell, but Takeshi had yet to meet him.
As for Nobuteru, his other childhood friend, Takeshi didn’t know if he was alive or dead. He often wondered what kind of conversation the three of them might have if they were reunited. What would he say to the people responsible for crippling him for life? He wasn’t sure if he could say everything as he envisioned it, but finding that out would be part of the fun.
Even after meeting Sasaki in that dusty bar, Takeshi had no recollection of meeting him in life. In fact, it was a mistake that Sasaki made in a deal with Takeshi’s firm that cost him his job at a construction company and started his long homeless existence. Sasaki’s wife Jitsuko had been with him on the streets, and yet for some reason he hadn’t seen her in Hell. Why wasn’t she here? Surely she had frozen to death with him. Could she not have died after all? Or had she died and gone somewhere else – to heaven or paradise or whatever it was called? She had been a good wife, staying with him no matter what. Maybe she hadn’t deserved to go to Hell.
It was bitterly cold the winter that Sasaki died. He and Jitsuko shivered in a tent they had rigged up out of plastic sheeting in a corner of the park. They each had a thin
blanket around them, like an oak leaf wrapped around a mochi. There was no heat and nothing they could burn; the blankets were all they had. The cold crept up their backs and spread through their bodies to their throbbing heads. The chitter-chitter-chittering of their teeth filled the tent. Every sleepless night they were convinced that they would freeze to death, but every morning the sun shone through the tent’s thin plastic walls, warming them a little and allowing them finally to drift off to sleep. It was the same day after day.
“It can’t be helped. It wasn’t your fault,” said Sasaki’s wife. Her attempts to comfort him were the only bright spot in his life, but they left him feeling worse as he desperately apologized for what happened.
“If only that Izumi hadn’t asked for a kickback. He and that cripple supervisor of his – Uchida, I think his name was. They were in cahoots, I bet. I only met Uchida once. I said hello to him in the hallway, and he said, ‘I have complete confidence in Izumi.’ I know what he meant by that now! He was in on it. I talked it over with Shinoda – he was my supervisor – and we decided not to pay up. But no kickback meant no contract. And I was out of a job, just like that. Shinoda didn’t say a word in my defence, the bastard.”
“I told you to stop thinking about it. Hate doesn’t solve anything.”
“But look what I’ve done to you, leaving you without a home. You didn’t have to come here with me.”
“Who else would have an ugly woman like me? Where can an old woman like me go?”
And yet Jitsuko had been quite pretty in her youth. A difficult life had aged her beyond her years, making her seem shabby and ugly. Their homelessness was his fault, and yet she was always kind to him. She loved him, and maybe that was the hardest part of all. Her ugliness made her even sadder and more pitiful, magnifying his own love for her. Such a good woman should never have been put in this situation. Not after everything he had already put her through.
“It’s cold.”
“Yes.”
“I feel terrible. My body’s like ice. Do you think this is what it’s like in the ‘eight freezing hells’? We’re going to die tonight. I just know it.”
“Don’t be silly. Soon the sun will come out and warm us up, just like it always does. This spot gets the most sun in the entire park.”
Sasaki and his wife never saw another dawn.
Nobuteru’s father was a bureaucrat and a strict disciplinarian, but he had never scolded Nobuteru about Takeshi’s broken leg. He hadn’t even mentioned it. He thought that it was the nature of boys to be rough and rowdy. He was proud of his family line, undistinguished though it may have been, and he couldn’t have cared less what happened to the child of some nobody.
Nobuteru joined the track-and-field team when he entered high school after the war. At a party for the new team members, the seniors pressed him to drink. Nobuteru got terribly drunk and awoke the next day with a bad hangover. Somehow he made it through the day. He was to go to dinner with his parents and sister that evening, but feeling ill, he asked to be excused. His father would hear nothing of it. He shouldn’t let something like a hangover get the best of him, he said. Did he want to be laughed at when he became a salaryman? Nobuteru was coming to dinner, no matter how sick he felt.
His family sat down at the French restaurant and began to order. Nobuteru’s nausea grew worse as his father lectured him. These full-course meals were expensive, he said. Just think of all the children in the world who would never see a meal like this. Nobuteru had better eat, and clean his plate besides.
“But dear, Nobuteru says he’s not feeling well,” said his mother.
This, coupled with the concerned look on his sister’s face, served only to worsen his father’s mood. “He’s going to eat if we have to stay here all night. When he gets a job, he’ll have to deal with situations like this all the time. He needs to learn this lesson now. No son of mine is going to be mollycoddled.”
The table was silent as the food was served. Nobuteru jumped up from the table to go to the toilet.
“Sit down! We’re still eating!” shouted his father, paying no attention to the stares he was attracting. “Where are your manners?”
Lips squeezed tightly together, Nobuteru sat back down. Finally he could hold back no longer, and in one explosive burst he vomited everything in his belly onto the table and floor. His father was livid. He bellowed, stood up from the table, and stomped out of the restaurant. He made no apology to the staff for his son’s mess.
That was fifty-five years ago, but Nobuteru remembered the night as clearly as anything. Had this experience caused his father to rethink his stubbornness? Nobuteru didn’t think so. It might actually have made it worse. But rather than learning from his father’s behaviour, Nobuteru realized that he had grown up to be no different.
He tried to maintain at least the appearance of reasonableness, but his dislike for young people – a common trait among old men – grew more intense with each passing year. Just the way young people talked irritated him. And watching them sing their songs on television was enough to put him in a foul mood – mostly because he could make neither head nor tail of the lyrics.
He would go to bookstores in search of something well-written and elegant, but manga was all he could find. The only things resembling books had garish covers and sat on shelves once reserved for literature. They had titles like Broadband KAP-4 Basics, New Developments in Galaxy Net, Master Secretarial Software and All about ‘Seducing Sophia’: The Ultimate Guide to Your Virtual Girlfriend.
It gave him a headache. Was there nothing for him to read? He would consider asking the store staff for help, but everyone was young and he couldn’t bear the look they always gave him – the look that said, “What are you talking about?” So he would walk out of the store without a word. No doubt that was what they wanted anyway.
“Which will you take, the high road or the low road?”
“Which one is longer?”
“They’re both short.”
Was this a memory from one of Nobuteru’s previous lives? Or a conversation he had with an unseen being before he was born? And how had he chosen? He thought that it was probably the low road. It did seem more interesting. But if that were the case, then how had he managed to live so long? Still, it was true that he hadn’t always taken the low road. He had sometimes walked on the proverbial “sunny side of the street”. He had been president of several companies, if only in name, and despite the low salary, he had even got a legitimate job in an effort to turn over a new leaf when his son was born.
But the temptations of the low road were great. His dealings with the underworld had given him an income far greater than any salaryman’s. His son was now over thirty and rarely came home except to ask for money. It was just as well that he hadn’t knocked himself out working a straight job for a son like that.
He got a licence to teach Japanese, but taught for less than a year before giving up the profession. He floated in and out of various enterprises; real-estate scams, business rackets, pyramid schemes, underground pornography rings – he did it all. He finally managed to build up a small nest egg managing a hostess club with a dozen or so girls, some under-age, some foreign. He closed the club down when he got wind of a raid.
Yuzo had always taken the low road and had died young. Takeshi had always taken the high road, but had he lived any longer? He couldn’t be dead too, could he? The thought that he might be the only one of them left alive was too lonely for Nobuteru to contemplate.
Had the familiar-looking man been right? Was Hell really just a place without God? Why did everything for which Takeshi had worked so hard now seem silly? Why did everything he suffered for and agonized over in his youth now seem laughable? Everyone who came to Hell seemed to feel the same way, and not just about their own lives. Everything that had happened in the real world – everything that must still be happening there – seemed utterly insignificant. Could that be the true nature of Hell? To make people forget their attachments to their pre
vious lives? Was that the real reason for Hell’s existence?
Takeshi was sitting at an expensive restaurant with a high ceiling. It wasn’t particularly large; there were no more than ten tables altogether. He ordered a few of his favourite dishes, but found the food vaguely unsatisfying: he hadn’t been very hungry and everything always tasted the same – exactly as he remembered it in life. He was alone, but everyone else sat in groups of two or three. They must have been friends who had often gone to this kind of restaurant together in life. Takeshi had no such friends. He always went to restaurants alone so that he could devote his full attention to the food.
He hadn’t seen Sasaki since their first meeting, and in any case Sasaki would hardly fit in at a restaurant like this. He was probably wandering around looking for that wife of his who froze to death with him. He hadn’t seen Izumi either. Izumi at least wouldn’t have been out of place there, but Takeshi was trying his best not to think about him. When you thought about people in Hell, they had a nasty habit of appearing, and Takeshi didn’t think he could bear sharing a meal with Izumi. Izumi probably felt the same way.
Two well-dressed men about Takeshi’s age were sitting down at the next table. One had a Ronald Coleman moustache, and seemed to have brought with him a boy in tattered clothes and dirty canvas shoes. The boy sat down awkwardly between the two men, who faced each other across the table. Takeshi stiffened. The boy looked just like Yuzo!
“I brought this war orphan from the past,” the first man said to the second man, who was wearing black-rimmed glasses. “He was in the same situation that I was in as a boy. I’m not sure it was good idea, bringing him here, but I couldn’t help myself.”
It really was Yuzo! Or to be exact, Yuzo from the period about a year after Takeshi had last seen him. His family must have been killed in the air raids. Small wonder he became a yakuza. Takeshi couldn’t take his eyes off him. The boy’s hungry eyes darted around the room, seeing Takeshi but not recognizing him.