Confessions of a Yakuza Read Online Free PDF Page A

down with!” I shouted, and chucked it up at Oyone. If I’d thought about it calmly, I should have known that an umbrella wasn’t going to be any use, but that’s the kind of thing you do when you’re in a panic, isn’t it?
    Anyway, I had this idea that it would save her. So I threw it up toward her, but I was in such a state that I threw it handle first, so that the umbrella opened up almost immediately and didn’t get as far as the second floor. I finally got the hang of it, and flung it again with all my might. Oyone grabbed hold of it and jumped with it gripped in her hand, still unopened.
    Till then she’d been paralyzed with fright, but the moment she got hold of the umbrella, her strength somehow returned, and she just shut her eyes and jumped. So she was saved. And we were lovers from then on.
    Oyone’s father was called Ichizo, and as it happened
he
was a great gambler, too. Sometimes he played with the laborers, but when he played with the boatmen it was always inside the boat.
    His barge had a cabin about twenty square feet big, but that was where his wife and children stayed, so they set up a big thing like a tent on the deck where the cargo was piled, and played inside it, out of sight.
    The police must have known about it, though, as there were raids once or twice a year at least. You should have seen the players when they turned up—they all dived into the river, like so many frogs—they’d be in the air almost before the lookout gave the warning. If somebody had called out “Police” as a joke, I expect they’d have jumped in without bothering to find out if it was true or not.
    Anyway, Ichizo was a good-looking guy, in a hard sort of way, and quite a favorite with the women. Thanks to that, his wife got jealous. She gradually got more and more turned in on herself, and in the end she began to mess around with magic, praying to the fox-god and that kind of stuff. You’d often hear her mumbling what sounded like Buddhist prayers. This went on all the time Ichizo was out on the town. She’d be inside their boat, but you could hear it across the river and way into the distance. The river was always jammed with boats, but you could tell at once which one was Ichizo’s.
    One day, I went to the barge with Oyone just as Ichizo was coming home. It was early evening, in summer, and the sky was still red over in the west.
    He grinned at us and said, “That’s right—you have a good time while you’re still young,” so I suppose he was in a good mood. But then I saw that Otoshi, his wife, was standing bolt upright in the body of the boat glaring at him. Her face wasn’t normal. She was all tense around the eyes and her mouth was drawn up at the corners, so that she really looked a bit like a fox herself. And she said in this spooky kind of voice: “Ichizo! You’ve been with that Tamayo from the teahouse again, haven’t you?”
    Ichizo didn’t pay her any attention. He went on board and headed for the cabin, but his wife shoved him back and shouted in this weird, high voice, “A while ago the two of you went into the noodle shop by the Fudo shrine in Tomioka, didn’t you?”
    “Bullshit,” muttered Ichizo, not to be drawn out.
    “You both ordered tempura noodles there, didn’t you?”
    “What the hell are you talking about, woman?”
    “But you found a fly in Tamayo’s noodles when they brought them, didn’t you? So you bawled them out and the owner apologized and brought you a new bowl and gave you ten sen back, didn’t he?”
    Ichizo just stood there looking startled; his face was all pulled out of shape. And then, with us watching him, he grabbed hold of an iron kettle that was on the deck. “Take this, you old fox,” he yelled and flung it at her head. My girl gave a shriek, but almost before she got it out, the kettle had hit Otoshi full in the face. There was a terrific clang, and then—you’d hardly believe it, but the kettle split clean in two and fell on the deck. Otoshi