My Yakuza

Excerpt From: My Yakuza

He didn’t have much time. Shiro wanted to pound Matsumi-san’s head into the shiny, red-lacquered bar top. Instead, he remained passive, watching Matsumi-san drain his second bottle of beer.

Lava-lamp style lights swirled across the bar as two girls in a suspended cage lip-synched to the pop singer Shakira high in one of the corners. Matsumi-san swayed to the music. Shiro signalled the bartender who brought them another round. The price of two more drinks included more snacks. This time, they received a small platter of sliced fruit.

Matsumi-san’s face went slack. “This strawberry. It reminds me.”

Shiro strained to hear over the loud music. Friday night. Tokyo was hopping. Everyone was in the mood for love, booze and karaoke.

“What does it remind you of?” Shiro asked in his half-baked Japanese.

“She is sweet, like fruit.” Matsumi-san poked at the delicate sliver of strawberry that was cut into a perfect heart shape. “Siono can make a man forget everything. Her lips are like wine, her tongue so sweet…like this strawberry.”

Dude, this is my mom you’re talking about. Shiro took a deep breath, hiding his disgust for the inebriated, middle-aged office worker, and waited. The music thumped a little louder through the bar’s four rooms.

They’d just opened the fourth room right above them. A hypnotic disco beat made Shiro’s foot inadvertently tap against the leg of his barstool. At the age of twenty-three, the disco era had bypassed him. His generation was hotwired to different times, so his body’s response to the music surprised him.

Young couples clustered in corners, up against bars and by the door. Half of the glazed-eyed men were being catered to by whores. Beautiful, alluring women, but whores all the same.

“She’s so beautiful,” Matsumi-san crooned. “Her laughter is like the river.” He moved his hand in a wavy gesture.

Oh, brother.

“Can you remember the name of the hotel?” Shiro asked again.

Matsumi-san was a sweaty guy. He palmed liquid from his forehead.

“Blue lights out front. Many blue lights.” He stared into space. “Many. That’s what I remember.” His eyes grew huge as he turned back to Shiro. “Is it true she is dead, Shiro-chan?”

That’s what Shiro had been told. He had no idea if it were true, except it seemed unlikely that Siono would just disappear. Shiro noted the colloquial form of his name and felt a sudden burst of excitement. The guy was going to remember.

Matsumi-san clapped his hand on Shiro’s arm.

“Hotel If. That was the name!”

Matsumi-san was so excited, he jumped from his stool, his hand raised high, sloshing half his beer in the air.

Hotel If. Man, how hard could it have been to remember that?

Shiro thanked him in gentle tones, catching the Masta’s eye. The man who owned the bar nodded. He had assured Shiro that they’d find a suitable female companion for the lonely guy, once he received Shiro’s signal.

With genuine feeling, Shiro thanked Matsumi-san again and took off.

“Blue lights, remember that. Right in the middle of town!” Matsumi-san called out after him.

It had stopped raining, but the seat on his bosozoku was wet. No matter. He had, at most, ten minutes before Shun’ichi’s goons missed him. He jumped on his motorbike, hitting the street. He swung his helmet onto his head as he took the first corner sharply. One street, then another flashed by him. The half beer he’d had made him dizzy as he skidded and swerved through rain-slick streets from one brightly lit hotel to the next.

And there it was.

He stopped, one foot dropping to the road as he stared at the entrance of the Hotel If, watching a giggly young couple enter. Just one of the dozens of love hotels in Tokyo’s Shibuya district, he’d finally found it.

For days he’d snatched moments between his message drops, trying to find Matsumi-san, the man who’d last hired Shiro’s mom for a couple of hours of love. For the first day, Matsumi-san had played coy. Tonight he’d confessed he had seen her and had also heard that Siono had disappeared right after their tryst.

Hotel If. Shiro felt the emotion catching in his throat. It was just where Matsumi-san said it would be, right in the centre of the love hotel district off Dogenzaka Street.

Shiro lost count of the number of drinks he’d poured into the guy these past couple of nights, trying to get answers.

He gripped the handlebars of his bosozoku, drinking in the blue lights surrounding Hotel If. The sky felt heavy, perfumed with fresh rain that threatened to unleash its force again.

This was the last place his mother had been seen alive. He switched off the engine and removed his helmet. The cool night air fanned his warm, damp skin.

Why had Siono come here? Why this place? Matsumi-san said she was the one who had selected it.

“I saw her ad in the newspaper. She met me at the bar. We had some drinks. We had some love…” No…how had he put it? We had some rest.

Now that was a quaint way to describe fucking. What had he expected by coming here? His mother lying in a battered heap in the lush landscaping out front, calling his name? A trail of blood? Her ghost pointing a long finger in the direction he should look? Physical evidence? A note? God…it was all so hopeless. If she had been there…he caught himself looking at the name of the hotel again.

If. How apt. If she had come here. If she had died here…if she had been here at all there would be no way of proving it. He’d waited a long time to overhear snatches of a conversation and Japanese was his third language. He wasn’t learning his mother tongue quickly. He glanced around. Encouraged by the distant chatter of strangers, he swung his leg over the seat. He walked towards the entrance. There were signs out front. Two different prices—one for resting for two to three hours and double for staying the night.

Photos of the available rooms, decorated in surprisingly attractive ways, were lit up by a light box just inside the lobby. He was both impressed and dismayed. Guests had complete privacy because they clicked on the box for the room they wanted and money went into an automatic cash machine. He stepped into the well-lit hallway. Small pockets of tropical flowers and plants surrounded each doorway. Some had lights on, some didn’t.

He went back to the light box again. Half of the room photos were dark. He checked room number two against the darkened entrance ahead of him. Both were dark. It was ingenious. He was certain it meant the room was occupied.

Which room had she been in, if she had been here?

Shiro walked outside again, taking time to sort through his emotions. He should never have let Siono come here. Fool! How could I have stopped her? He raged against the forces that had separated them—her fantasies and the mysterious Yakuza who had spirited her away to Tokyo. Siono had lived and breathed the city, even when Shiro was a toddler growing up in Honolulu. She always said she would take him back there. In Tokyo, the sun was bigger, better, brighter. He knew she was dreaming from the movies he saw.

Then came the Japanese businessman who’d booked her for the night. Shiro had known his mother was a prostitute. She worked intermittently, but with Shiro in his final year of college and preoccupied with his own life, she’d drifted back into bad habits.

He begged her not to go with the guy to Tokyo. He tried to tell her he had a bad feeling. He’d read the papers. She was a prostitute. Businessmen like the one who wanted to lure her away, often turned out to be Yakuza who trafficked a stream of hopeful women to Japan each year as virtual sex slaves.

“You have no romance in your soul,” Siono had said. “Didn’t you ever see Pretty Woman?”

No, he hadn’t. Unless it involved manga, anime, or smooth John Woo-style action sequences, he wasn’t interested.

Siono tried to tell him all men wanted a whore they could redeem. She was convinced Shun’ichi Harada loved her and wanted a better life for her. So, his mom had fled Honolulu.

What she found was exactly what he’d feared. She had been put to work as a prostitute. She seemed upset at first but, she’d told Shiro, she felt she had an edge to the other hookers. She was one of the few Japanese women working the streets. Most were blonde, Korean or Filipina. She felt she had a special place in Shun’ichi’s life.

She had called Shiro twice more, the last time to say she’d escaped her Yakuza’s clutches. She was coming home.

“How did you get your passport back?” he had asked her. She’d cried when she told him Shun’ichi had taken it from her.

“Never you mind,” she said. “Mahape a ale wala‘au.”

That was Hawaiian for let’s not speak of it. Sort of the tropical equivalent of a great big elephant sitting in the living room. His mother had said it often, starting with why, when Shiro was five, his Hawaiian-born father had abandoned them. He grew up being Jawaiian as they called the half-Hawaiian, half-Japanese kids. Now, he was proud of his heritage. Unlike his mom, Shiro loved Hawaii. He missed the scent of his beloved islands, the smell of flowers on his skin. Tokyo sure was nothing like she had told him.

Siono never arrived home. She never called again. His maternal grandmother received a call from a man saying that Siono had died. He said she’d fallen out of a hotel room window. Death, he’d said, was immediate. Grandma had started to ask questions, but the man hung up.