Confessions of a Yakuza Read Online Free PDF

stood with her eyes wide open and her face all tight and pinched like a fox still. Ichizo didn’t move, he was so shocked; then he suddenly went limp and plumped down on the floor.
    It was completely dark by now, and there were lights on some of the boats. After a while, Ichizo picked himself up and went into the cabin, but he was laid up for the next three days with a fever.
    Of course, that didn’t mean that he gave up playing around. But he must have got scared of going out with Tamayo, because he seems to have dropped her in a hurry. They didn’t throw the broken kettle away, they kept it as it was. It still beats me how something like that could have happened.
    Talking of fox’s curses, there was another thing, too. I’d been going with Oyone for barely three months or so when I began to get fevers from time to time. I was wondering what was the matter, but then I got this pain in the crotch, and the glands there started to swell up. Even so, I thought it would clear up of its own accord and didn’t do anything about it.
    But it got more and more painful, till I couldn’t even walk properly. If my kimono so much as touched my thighs, I’d jump with the pain. The laborers all cackled when they saw me walking about with bandy legs. After a while, though, I wasn’t even walking—I was flat on my back in bed, with a high fever and my whole body shaking like a leaf.
    It must have dawned on my uncle that this wasn’t an ordinary fever, because he went and fetched the doctor. The doctor took one look and said “Syphilis.” My uncle was furious.
    “I didn’t think you were such a slob!” he said. “I’ve a good mind to send you back to your father. What women have you been with, to get like this?”
    “I haven’t been with any women—it just happened,” I said.
    “You get syphilis having sex with women—who ever heard of somebody getting it by himself?”
    He had a point, but I couldn’t believe I’d got it from Oyone. She was such a clean and decent girl, you just couldn’t imagine her with that kind of disease. Most likely it was the woman at the teahouse who gave it to me. But if so, I might have passed it on to Oyone. If I had, it would be awful. The idea really bothered me....
    Anyway, the medicine and injections brought the fever down so that I was able to get up, but the swellings in my crotch went on getting bigger till they were as big as hens’ eggs. They were incredibly painful; if I touched them by mistake, the pain just froze my brain.
    “You’ll have to get a specialist to look at this,” my uncle grumbled. So I was taken to see a VD specialist in Kawagoe. My uncle got Kyuzo to go with me.
    What surprised me was that when we went in at the gate, there were so many patients they were spilling outside from the entrance hall. All of them men. I don’t know what they were doing to him, but you could hear a man screaming inside. It made my skin crawl. This is one hell of a place they’ve brought me to, I thought.
    When my turn came and I went in, an elderly doctor with a beard had a look at me, and I was whisked onto an operating table right away. Three great brutes of assistants wound a leather belt around me, then lay down on top of me to hold me down.
    “Listen—this is going to hurt a bit, but you’re not to move, d’you hear?” the doctor said, in what you’d never have taken for an old man’s voice. “You struggle, and you might find yourself with something important cut off. So make up your mind and grit your teeth. No moving now, whatever you do!”
    I mean, hell—there was no anesthetic or anything in those days! He took a great slash at me with the knife right next to the balls, then twisted it sideways. I was prepared for the worst, but even so I felt faint, everything went black in front of my eyes, and I couldn’t help letting out a shout.
    Not that the doctor could have cared. In no time he’d carved out the buboes on both sides of my groin, then he stuck a thing