‘I’m afraid he doesn’t know anyone of that name,’ she said politely. ‘Perhaps you have him confused with somebody else.’
‘No, it’s certainly him,’ I said. ‘Would it be possible to try again? Cho-u-shi To-mo-e.’
‘I’m afraid that was the name I gave him and he had no idea who she was. I’m sorry I can’t be of any more help.’
She was cutting me off, and with it ending the trail and blocking my path to Tomoe. I’d probably only got this far by being a gaijin, an unusual, intriguing voice on the other end of the phone. She seemed keen to get back to more standard enquiries.
‘But perhaps—’
‘Thank you for calling, I’m so pleased you enjoy his films,’ she said, and hung up.
However much of a proactive catalyst you are, there are limits to what you can do when a film star brushes you off. The only thing I could think of was to go through the Takata-gumi but there were two problems with that: one, I’d been told very clearly to stop catalysing and get some rest; and two, it seemed Fujiwara Daisuke was on the side of whoever had the will, inclination and power to face down Takata. Using the Takata-gumi would likely bring more trouble than help.
It wasn’t just the logistics of getting through to Fujiwara that troubled me – I was disturbed by the fact I was trying to reach him at all. To this point, my dreams had made a strange kind of sense – my brain sifting through the insanity that had overtaken my life. But I wasn’t a movie buff and when I did go to the cinema I usually settled for Hollywood fare. I hadn’t heard of Fujiwara. I didn’t have any experiences involving actors. Recently I hadn’t even seen any films. So dreaming about an actor was already odd. Having one enter my life – or avoid doing so more precisely – was unsettling in the extreme.
The phone rang.
‘Hurry up, we’re outside.’
‘What do you mean? This is my rest week, Kumichō said.’
‘Rest at Horitoku’s – your appointment’s in half an hour.’
I cursed as I hung up. It would surely be easier for everyone if they could just give me advance warning. I grabbed my jacket and made for the door.
I went to the passenger door of Sumida’s car and my heart sank. I got in the rear instead and was met by one of Sumida’s understated greetings and the silent back of Kurotaki’s head. The tension didn’t lessen when we set off – Sumida’s taciturn nature wasn’t the ideal foil for gliding through mildly awkward situations, let alone times like these.
Kurotaki appeared to be simmering quietly, but after a few minutes he decided to break the mood with his unique brand of charm.
‘What’s this shit?’
‘“Grateful Days” by Dragon Ash. It’s a hip-hop tune from way back.’
‘It’s shit.’
Sumida was unmoved. ‘When you do me a favour and give me a lift, you can play whatever you want.’
Kurotaki grunted, his need to let out his bile ominously unfulfilled.
‘Fucking slut.’
I had no intention of responding. I wanted nothing to do with him.
‘Fucking slut!’
Sumida finally reacted to the implicit demand for a response.
‘What?’
‘That slut over there.’
Kurotaki pointed over the crossroads we were held at towards an elegant Japanese girl and her well-dressed gaijin boyfriend.
‘What else can you say about a girl that lets herself get fucked by a gaijin? Dirty whore. No offence.’
The last words were directed at me and just as intended there was offence. I bristled at the slight levelled my way, the gaijin he was really referring to. But my real fury was for Tomoe and the slur aimed at her. Having failed to protect her in person, my urge to defend her honour was more powerful than I would have thought. I battled against it and this time managed to swallow my anger before it raged to my mouth. There was nothing I could do now. I needed to put my feelings aside until a time I could act.
‘You can let me out here,’ grunted Kurotaki, getting out without another word and slamming the door.
I moved to the front seat and seethed in silence.
‘So, have you found out what you need to, for whatever you have to do?’ asked Sumida, interrupting my thoughts of revenge.
‘Apparently,’ I said, my anger latching on to this festering irritation. ‘Although I don’t know what I’m supposed to have found out and I have no idea what I’m going to be made to do.’
Sumida smiled. I assumed it was at Takata’s guile rather than my plight.
‘Don’t worry about it – he’ll have all the angles covered. Just keep watching him. You’ll soon know.’
‘How long have you been a yakuza?’ I asked, suddenly curious about him.
‘Nine years,’ he said. ‘I joined from a biker gang. We were a bunch of arseholes, to be honest. We didn’t give a shit about anything – we did whatever we wanted to do. But you can only get away with that so long without stepping on other people’s toes. I was caught dealing meth in Takata-gumi territory. They slapped me around a bit and told me I could join them, leave town or be killed.’
‘And what do you want? I mean, how long are you going to keep doing this?’
He looked puzzled by the question. ‘Forever – who else is going to employ me now? In any case, I get girls when I want them and make as much money as I can spend. Why would I want to change? There are plenty of opportunities in the yakuza as long as you’ve got balls and a semblance of a brain. I keep my head down and my eyes and ears open. I’ll be ready when my chances come.’
He fell silent again. He was probably as surprised as me by how much he’d said.
‘What about Kumichō? How did he get to where he is?’
‘Kumichō? He’s old-school.’
His attention was caught by a fleck of dust on the dashboard that didn’t exist. He brushed it away.
‘He was born around the end of the war. You wouldn’t believe it to look at him now but he came up in hard times – he had to fight for everything he’s got. Back then there were hardly any guns, it was all hand-to-hand, vicious stuff, and Kumichō was meant to be the most ferocious of them all. There are all sorts of stories. He’s meant to have ripped the voice box out of one guy and gouged the eyeballs out of another, all in the same fight.’
I shivered. I felt I now knew more about Takata than I needed to, but Sumida was like a monk breaking his vows.
‘Then he got put away for a murder. It wasn’t actually him – it was the boss of the time, Dewaya’s, back when we were known as the Dewaya-kai. But taking someone else’s sentence was a good way to earn your spurs, especially if it was the kumichō’s – you’d get a certain promotion for that. I think he did it for other reasons though. Apparently, there was a lot of internal positioning as Dewaya grew old. Kumichō thought he’d let them weaken each other with in-fighting and clean up when he came out.
‘When he was released he took his own sub-crew and moved through Tokyo, kicking out anyone who stood in his way. With his success, the fear-factor and everything else, he wasn’t challenged when Dewaya stepped down. That’s when we became the Takata-gumi.’
So Sumida was keeping his counsel while he learned, but he clearly had his sights set higher for when Takata was no longer around. He might have been below Kurotaki at that moment but if I was going to put money on anyone for the long-term, it would have been him.
‘Come on, get out – we’re here,’ he said, interrupting my thoughts. ‘You’ve got a four-hour session. Look out for me when you’re done.’
I just about held back a string of obscenities. It turned out that while the outline had been inked with a machine, the shading was to be done by tebori, literally to ‘hand-carve’. Horitoku didn’t go as far as chisel into me but considering the tool he was using he might as well have. It looked like a slim, flat-ended paintbrush, but in place of bristles at its tip, needles were bound to a metal stem with red silk thread. He punched it into my skin with alarming speed and as he jabbed and flicked the tool made a disturbing sound, somewhere between the click of knitting needles and a barber’s scissors’ snip. It felt just like being stabbed with a needle-tipped paintbrush.
‘The girl,’ I said, looking for distractions. ‘Make her pretty please. As close to Tomoe as you can.’
He stopped.
‘Of course she’ll be pretty,’ he said sharply. ‘She’ll be the most beautiful girl you’ve ever seen. You think you’ve got an amateur on the job?’
I apologised. It was the horimono equivalent of questioning Hokusai. Even if I wasn’t obliged to show respect where it was due, the conversation with Sumida was fresh in my mind.
‘I just meant that ukiyo-e, it was incredibly beautiful, but, um … they never managed to make the girls look quite as good.’
‘Maybe they had different criteria for what they considered beautiful then.’
‘Maybe. I still can’t help thinking they were better at mythical creatures and landscapes.’
‘Well, keep pondering on that and don’t concern yourself with me,’ he said as he resumed the assault. ‘I’m tattooing the likeness of Ka-chan – I wouldn’t make her anything less than perfect. She’ll be so beautiful you’ll wish you had her on your chest so you could see her every morning when you shave.’
It was good enough for me.
‘By the way,’ I started again with an unasked question from my last visit. ‘Do you know why Kumichō is making me have a tattoo? Not that there’s any reason I shouldn’t,’ I added hastily. ‘It’s just you said fewer yakuza are having them now so they can’t be as easily identified.’
‘Maybe he thought you needed some encouragement to identify yourself,’ he replied. ‘But he loves ukiyo-e and horimono in any case. I did his bodysuit and he often drops by to see the latest work.’
The thought made him wistful.
‘It’s a shame, the decline in yakuza clients. I could relate to them, I understood what they did. Everything’s changing. An “IT consultant” started coming recently – I’ve got no idea what that even is. He seems a nice enough guy but I can hardly understand a word that he says.’
He drifted into his reveries. My focus was on pain. Rather than becoming numbed my skin seemed to hurt more with fatigue, the instrument of torture not only needle-sharp but now red-hot as well. I craved the short pauses between attacks where excess ink was wiped away with a soothing damp tissue and became increasingly despairing at their end. A thought distracted me.
‘Do you know Fujiwara Daisuke?’ I asked, wondering if the floating world winds might allow their whispers to drift my way.
‘No,’ he replied bluntly. ‘Why?’
I deliberated a moment. I was talking to a man who did tattoos for the Takata-gumi and was close to Takata himself. Opening up didn’t seem to be the best way to keep something quiet. Then again, there was something about him that made me think he could keep a confidence, especially if he thought it would help Tomoe. I didn’t have any other ways to get a break.
‘I wanted to speak to him. I think he’s linked to Tomoe’s disappearance.’
He grunted and stabbed my back.
‘I know of him but I don’t know him. The kabuki actors are still part of our world, but the TV and film guys – they’ve got one foot out.’
‘Ow!’
I reacted to a particularly brutal attack on my shoulder blade. He ignored me and jabbed at the same spot again.
‘Now, why would you think he’s part of the business with Ka-chan?’
He might have had my limited trust but I wasn’t going to expose Tatsuzan.
‘His name came up.’
‘Well, if I’m not mistaken he’s under the management of the Tasogare Talent Group,’ he said.
‘That’s right. I tried calling his agent but she wouldn’t put me through.’
‘Mm. Well, be careful how you go there – they’re owned by the Ginzo-kai.’
There they were again. Every place I wanted to go seemed to have them waiting behind the door, something that was particularly inconvenient considering they topped the list of people who wanted me dead.
It suggested it may have been their boss at the sumō meeting. That made sense – I imagined he was one of the very few people with the clout to argue with Takata. It also implied they were no longer on good terms. And if your enemy’s enemy is your friend, this might mean Takata didn’t want me killed. It was a rare ray of light, especially now I knew his methods of dealing with people he did want to harm.
‘So why didn’t you get through? You strike me as a resourceful kind of guy.’
‘I’m a gaijin nobody, he’s a superstar. If he doesn’t want to speak to me, what can I do?’
‘Why didn’t you get Ka-chan to help?’
At times it seemed like I was on a different wavelength to everyone I’d recently met.
‘I’m sorry, I don’t understand what you mean?’
‘Your girlfriend is one of the most admired and respected people in the floating world. You might be inconsequential, but the name Katsuyama opens a lot of doors.’