CHAPTER TWELVE

Tourist trap

Hideyaki Ogawa, an Inagawa-kai Endo-gumi member, was a thin man with a long horse-like face. He had a gravelly voice and a bad temper. On the morning of August 20, 1993, he came by Saigo’s office to borrow his Mercedes. Ogawa had to drive to Yokohama to collect money from a man named Sabura Yamamoto, who was apparently running a small loan-sharking business under the name of Yamamoto Travel.

Saigo offered to go with Ogawa, but Ogawa demurred, saying Hishiyama had said the job was going to be easy. Hishiyama and two other Inagawa-kai yakuza were already accompanying him anyway.

If Hishiyama said the job wouldn’t be a problem, then the job wouldn’t be a problem. The oyabun was always right. But Saigo and Hishiyama weren’t getting along. Hishiyama was dealing and using meth. It made him erratic and unreliable. Saigo, having firsthand experience with meth, knew this all too well. Meth-heads make for bad oyabun.

Saigo was glad he wasn’t going on the mission.

Around 5.50 pm, Saigo got a frantic call from one of his soldiers who had gone with Ogawa. “Hishiyama got shot up. Ogawa-kun, I think he was shot, too.”

The group’s collection visit to the Yamamoto Travel business had all gone wrong. It had turned into a shooting match. Yamamoto had a gun, and so did his partner. The soldier was pretty sure that Hishiyama had escaped after he was shot, but he didn’t see. He had run out of the office fast. It was all he could’ve done.

Saigo ordered his soldiers to get out of the area. He decided to take Hanzawa with him to the tourism office. He needed to be sure who had survived, who had died, and what had really happened.

Meanwhile, Purple had been told that shots had been fired at the Yamamoto Travel company where his fellow Inagawa-kai members were. In less than ten minutes, he was at the scene. Saigo’s car was parked in front of the building. He knew it was Saigo’s car — it was the most expensive Mercedes on the market, and the license plate read “Machida 3000.” All Saigo’s cars had the number 3000 on the license plate. The trunk had been shot up. The back window had a bullet hole in it as well.

He ran into the office, and found a body lying face down in a pool of blood. The body was still convulsing, and the head had been smashed in, but he was still somehow alive. There was what looked like pieces of brownish jelly on a bloody baseball bat on the floor nearby. There were some skull fragments sticking out of the mass where the head had once been, as though they were placed there as garnishes on a fancy cake.

Purple knew he only had a few minutes before the police arrived. The room smelled of sweat, tobacco, creosote, iron, and rust. There was a bullet hole in the wall near the door. Clearly, there had been a shooting, and the man had been shot in the back while trying to run away.

Purple couldn’t tell who it was — he needed to look at the face. It wouldn’t be easy because if he touched the body, he’d be covered in blood. The top of the head was emulsified, so he couldn’t grab the man by the hair. He lifted up the head of the corpse by the ear and turned the face towards his. Suddenly, a voice screamed at him from behind.

“What the fuck are you doing?” Purple was frozen in place. The voice was coming from behind him. It scared the hell out of him. He turned his head and looked towards the door. There was Saigo, dressed to the nines and looking pissed off. Hanzawa was next to him.

He was so shocked, he let go of the guy’s ear, and the head fell back to the floor with a squish. Saigo was pretty sure the man on the floor was Ogawa. Purple lifted the man by the ears again to try to see his face.

Purple’s handling of the body irked Saigo. Purple was treating the body as though it was a dead dog or cat.

Purple was not fazed. He stared at the face. “Yep, it’s Ogawa.” Purple reached into Ogawa’s jacket, took out his wallet, and looked at the driver’s license, just to be sure. Ogawa gurgled something, shuddered once more, and was absolutely still. They all went silent. Purple felt for a pulse. There was none.

Saigo just stood there for a few seconds. He fumbled in his pockets, and got out a pack of cigarettes. He stuck one in his mouth, and glanced at his watch as he lit it. He looked at the body, and decided they’d better get out of the office before the cops showed up.

They got in Saigo’s car and drove as far as they could from the scene. They didn’t have much time. If this was the beginning of a gang war, they needed to avenge their comrade before peace was called. They stopped a few blocks from the office to call the police and let them know that there “had been the sound of gunshots.”

A few hours later, Saigo and Purple pieced it together. Yamamoto was a corporate blood brother of the Yamaguchi-gumi Kodo-kai, the most violent faction of the Yamaguchi-gumi. He wasn’t an ordinary civilian. He’d been operating his loan-sharking business on Inagawa-kai turf. That itself was a problem. The Yamaguchi-gumi and the Inagawa-kai had made a peace treaty years before, but it definitely didn’t allow the Yamaguchi-gumi to open offices in Inagawa-kai territory.

On that day, Hishiyama, Ogawa, and two other soldiers entered the office around 5.30 pm. There were only two people working in the office: Yamamoto, who was behind his desk, and another worker. Hishiyama exploded in rage, flipping over the reception table and kicking a chair across the room. He turned to his crew and said, “Let’s kidnap these assholes and take them up to the mountains. Beat some sense into them. If they won’t pay, we’ll make them pay interest with their bones. Grab them.”

It turns out that Yamamoto knew he was in trouble with the Yokosuka-ikka before the crew arrived. He already feared for his life, so when he heard those words, he panicked, grabbed a .38 caliber Smith and Wesson revolver from his desk, and fired. His assistant was panicking, too. Only Ogawa had a gun, and he returned fire while the rest of the crew fled. On their way out, Hishiyama got shot in the back, and one of the other soldiers got shot in the gut. Ogawa’s gun jammed after two or three shots. He made a break for the door, but Yamamoto shot him. The bullet pierced his heart and stopped him in his tracks. Yamamoto and his crew wanted to make sure that Ogawa was dead, so they grabbed two baseball bats out of the closet and crushed in his head with them. Then they ran.

The whole thing was messy. The Inagawa-kai had a right to take revenge, but it would be only a matter of hours or days before a peace settlement was arranged, and then their hands would be tied.

The first order of business was to see what Hishiyama wanted them to do.

Hishiyama had been taken to the Kitazawa Hospital. They went past the reception and barged into the emergency room, where Hishiyama was lying on the bed, on his side. There was a doctor with him and a policeman nearby. Hishiyama’s eyes were closed. Saigo immediately started to ask questions. Was he okay?

When Hishiyama heard Saigo’s voice, he half-opened his eyes and said, “Hey, Saigo. Just do them in.”

The doctor was checking the machine readings for Hishiyama, and apparently hadn’t heard them speaking. That was a relief. Saigo slapped Hishiyama in the face, to the surprise of the attending physician. The doctor didn’t know what to do, and shuffled back a bit. Saigo leaned down and whispered to Hishiyama, very quietly, “If you say ‘Do it’ here in this very place, they’ll automatically suspect I’m the one who ‘did it’ after I do it. So shut up.”

Hishiyama started to say something else, but Purple slapped his hand over the boss’s mouth and yelled “shut up” in his ear. Purple wasn’t trying to be rude to his boss, but he had to be firm to keep them all from getting arrested. Then Saigo gently asked Hishiyama if he could speak to him for a second. Hishiyama nodded, and Purple lifted his hand off Hishiyama’s mouth, but hovered it over his lips, ready to clamp down if he started saying the wrong things.

Hishiyama apologized to Saigo for being rash, and then Saigo asked about the gunshot wound in Hishiyama’s back.

The doctor was standing there dumbstruck, trying to listen to the conversation. He cleared his throat. They needed to operate on him, and were planning on doing it very soon. The prognosis sounded bad.

The doctors had only treated two gunshot wounds since the hospital had opened years before. They were at a loss as to how to proceed, but at the same time they were really excited to be doing the procedure. “It’s so rare to actually get hands-on experience treating gunshot wounds.”

The doctor told Saigo that at least one bullet had penetrated Hishiyama’s belly and gone straight through his kidney into the area around his spine. They could see about 5 millimeters of the bullet’s head sticking out of the flesh, which was helpful.

Saigo found himself feeling a little nauseous as the doctor went on explaining. With regard to possible infectious diseases due to the bullet’s entry, there wouldn’t be any problem. The bullet had burned all the internal flesh in the course of its trajectory.

The surgeon who was going to be in charge of the operation also came into the waiting room to explain. Hishimaya was lucky: if the bullet had touched any of the nerves around the spinal cord, he could have been paralyzed. If the trajectory had been off by a centimeter, the shot could have been fatal. Still, there was no guarantee that the surgery would be successful, because the surgeon had never done a procedure like this before. “So if he dies, don’t come kill me.”

Saigo went to see Hishiyama before he went in for surgery. Back in the emergency room, an organized crime control division cop and his partner were trying to talk to Hishiyama. Hishiyama saw Saigo’s face, and yelled, “Get those fuckers now before it’s too late. You’re going to lose your chance to counterattack.”

The cops turned and greeted Saigo. The chief detective pulled him aside and said, “You’re not going to do anything stupid, right?”

Saigo assured him that that was the case, with Hishiyama shouting all the way into the operating room.

Hishiyama was clearly not in any shape to be giving orders, so Saigo had to go to Coach, Hishiyama’s superior, to figure out what to do next. The conversation was brief. Coach told Saigo that Yamamoto was a Kodo-kai member and that they did not want to quarrel with the Yamaguchi-gumi. They would establish a peace agreement. However, until there was an agreement in place, Coach would pretend to not know what was going on. Coach would stall the agreement for a couple of days, which would give Saigo enough time to carry out whatever plan of revenge he came up with, and Coach would look the other way.

Coach then handed Saigo a duffel bag containing about 4 million yen in cash. The money was a substitute for Saigo’s monthly organization dues. Coach decided Saigo couldn’t waste his time making money. He had to put everything he had into fighting — and fight like hell.

At this point in his career, Saigo never kept a gun anywhere on the premises of his office or in his home — but he always had one hidden with a friend or associate. He had to call his friend in the Gunma prefecture to get his gun, and while he waited for it to arrive, he and Purple searched for the location of a Kodo-kai office in Tokyo. They were going to find an office and shoot it up, and maybe everyone inside. That’s how it was supposed to be. They asked a friendly soldier in the Kyokuto-kai, and were given the address of a Kodo-kai branch office in Shinjuku.

They only had two guns. Yusuke Yamada wanted to go, too, but Saigo needed him to stay back. He needed someone he trusted to look after his soldiers in case he got jailed. He’d take Hanzawa instead.

And, of course, Hanzawa was up for it.

It was dark by the time the pair arrived in Shinjuku, and it took them a while to find the address. The building was five stories high, maybe forty years old, and sandwiched between a house and a parking garage. They walked up to the steel door of the office, which was accessible from the outside, took out their guns. They knew that when they fired their shots, the Kodo-kai soldiers would come out shooting within seconds, and maybe Saigo and Hanzawa would die, but that was okay.

Saigo had never fired a gun before. He aimed squarely at the door, pulled the trigger, and the bullet ricocheted back, grazing his left foot and making a hole in his shoe. He jumped back in surprise and pain while Hanzawa fired several shots into the door, only one of which bounced off it. And then nothing happened.

Hanzawa and Saigo looked at each other, and then decided to knock on the door. There was no answer. The whole building was empty. There was no one inside; nobody to witness what they had done. Still, they didn’t want to get in trouble for firing shots, so they left immediately.

When they got a few blocks away, Saigo called the Shinjuku Police from a phone booth to report the shooting. They wanted it in the papers.

They soon found out that the Kodo-kai had closed down their office in the building months before, because the entire building had been condemned. The shooting wasn’t reported in the newspapers because nobody had noticed it.

The next day, Saigo got a call from Coach, asking him what the hell was going on. Saigo explained what they’d done. Coach was unimpressed. He had never liked guns. There wasn’t even a tiny article about it in the newspaper. “You call yourself a man? You can’t even shoot up a building?”

Saigo apologized. Coach wondered if he’d even hit the building, but how could he miss an entire building? Coach also wondered how it was possible for him not to have realized there was nobody in the building. “You miss a lot, kid.”

The only thing that appeared in the paper was a short article on the shooting at the tourism agency — and it was incorrect. It said Hishiyama had just been shot in the hand.

The Inagawa-kai Yokosuka-ikka and the Yamaguchi-gumi Kodo-kai achieved a peace treaty several days later. The head of the Kodo-kai, Shinobu Tsukasa himself, came to the Inagawa-kai headquarters to apologize. Monetary damages were assessed, and there was a ritual exchange of sake.

And that was that. There was no revenge. There was no gang war. They had acted foolishly, as yakuza often do. Most of them end their careers without ever firing a shot, yet many of them die over stupid shit. And life went on. Except it wasn’t the same for Saigo. For the first time, he realized that the path he’d chosen might result in his own early and bloody death. And the fact was that he didn’t want to die — not yet.

He didn’t want to die. He had to think that over. He had always envisioned himself as a modern-day kamikaze, ready to put his life on the line for the group, who feared nothing. Yet now he found that he wanted to live. He was doing well in the organization, and was still in a relationship that made him happy every day.

Hiroko acted like the ideal yakuza wife, managing all her relationships with tact. She was motherly, and hung out with Coach’s wife a lot. She would call his wife “older sister,” and they even went on trips together. Still, they weren’t equals. When her “older sister” took out a cigarette, Hiroko would light it for her.

Everyone liked her; even Saigo’s soldiers and his parents.

He not only liked her; maybe he even loved her. He had a family, a good life. He didn’t want to throw that away in a gang war. He wasn’t afraid so much of dying; he was afraid of losing the good life he had finally achieved.

He thought to himself that he was getting soft. He arranged to have another tattoo session. Maybe he’d have a dragon engraved on his leg. Maybe the pain and the tattoos would cover up the fear he felt now.