The Yakuza Path: Better Than Suicide

by Amy Tasukada

  THE PLASTIC BAG containing the imagawayaki crinkled within Nao’s grasp. A dozen house recruits formed a line in the headquarters’ living room, with the four full-fledged Matsukawa in charge of them capping off the end. Out of everyone there, the only person Nao knew by name was Aki.

  Nao needed to build a relationship with everyone in the family, and the festival was the easiest way to start with the next generation. The newest recruits had no memory of Nao’s past. If he managed to gain their full respect, he would have a loyal foundation in six months. Then the graduated recruits would be split into the eleven wards and lay the stones of respect for Nao as the Matsukawa godfather at each one.

  They all stared, their eyes begging him for some kind of rousing speech, but Nao’s body ached, and he doubted he could squeak out more than a few words. He twisted his neck away from the nylon sling digging into his skin. Sweat dampened the collar of his shirt, and Nao loosened his tie in hopes of some relief from the humidity.

  Kurosawa shot him a reassuring smile, which made Nao hate himself a little more. Kurosawa’s faith in him was misguided.

  “Happy Obon,” Nao said to the group. “May all your ancestors arrive swiftly tonight and have pride in the decisions you have made. Thank you for your work here.”

  It wasn’t the best speech, but it was something. He reached into the bag and handed out the first of the prepackaged confections. The recruit gave him a ninety-degree bow and a formal thank-you. Nao made his way down the line, each recruit doing the same. Aki’s thick-accented thank-you sent a shiver down Nao’s spine, but with three hours of sleep, Nao was sure it was from sleep deprivation and nothing more. Once the last underling had received his snack, Nao mumbled another thank-you for their work.

  Nao walked over to Kurosawa. “We ran out. So I guess you don’t get one.”

  “I ate mine last night before we went to the brothel.”

  “We still need to get my shoes.”

  Kurosawa chuckled. “Hopefully the whore hasn’t sold them.”

  “I think he’s into brands too much to…” Nao stopped and glared at one of the recruits.

  Nao had heard the bold recruit’s mumble as if he’d shouted in his ear. He could feel the ghost of his father looming over, watching him as he failed to control his recruits.

  “Did you have something you wanted to tell me?” Nao lurched in front of the recruit.

  “N-No, Father Murata.”

  Nao stepped closer until he was nose to nose with the underling while he remained in line. Each of Nao’s nerves ignited. Especially if the lowest level of the Matsukawa disrespected him, he’d lose the respect of everyone above. The dumb fuck would regret ever opening his mouth.

  “You mumbled something,” Nao hissed. “Open your mouth and say it again.”

  “These are very good, Father Murata.”

  “Don’t lie to me!”

  “I’m not—”

  Nao grabbed the recruit’s wrist and squeezed. His lip quivered, and his eyes shook with fear. The dumbass would make for a good example to everyone there. Nao’s head began to pound and shook his skull so much he couldn’t think.

  Then his father’s voice came.

  If he didn’t act, Father would make the days left of Obon a torturous waking nightmare.

  “I-I said they were cold,” the recruit squeaked out under Nao’s restraint.

  “That’s what I thought.” Nao took a step back and turned away from the recruit.

  A cold chill snapped down Nao’s spine, and a pressure pushed at the back of his eyes. Then his ears rang out, and his father’s voice reverberated in his ears like he stood right behind him.

  “You were more loyal to that Korean scum than to the family,” Father said.

  Nao shook, and the pressure in his head only intensified his father’s words. Nao had done the right thing in the end. He rubbed his eyes hiding the tears swelling up from pain.

  “Show me you know how to run the family or else,” Father warned.

  He gulped. If he didn’t act, Father would make each minute of Obon an agonizing terror . Nao had tried to be nice to the recruits, but they were ungrateful. They thought he was weak for giving them a treat, but he would teach them a lesson. They would fear him, and through the fear they would respect him and listen to every word he would say. It was the only way he could gain their respect.

  “I’m sorry for my—”

  Nao’s fingers curled into a fist and he turned around, connecting with the insolent recruit’s jaw. Nao’s knuckles pulsed with the connection, but the adrenaline pumped through him the moment he took action.

  The recruit stumbled back, and Nao kicked his knee so the bastard would fall to the ground. The second his body slammed to the floor, Nao pressed his foot against the recruit’s throat.

  A wicked grin crossed Nao’s face, and he leaned on his foot a little more. A sweet wave of satisfaction swept through him as the recruit’s muscles contorted underneath Nao’s foot. The small pleading gasp only drove Nao to push his entire weight on the recruit’s throat.

  Nao glared at the other recruits, their mouths agape. Igniting the fear in each of their hearts would make them obey. Kurosawa stepped closer, but the glare Nao shot him stopped him in his tracks.

  “Does anyone else have anything they’d like to say?” Nao yelled.

  They all shook their heads, and Nao lifted his foot. The recruit gasped for breath but scrambled into a bow, his head against the floor.

  “Forgive me, Father Murata,” he breathed out.

  Nao walked away, giving no reply.

  With each step toward the dining room, the burst of adrenaline snuffed itself to exhaustion. He had done what any godfather would’ve done in his place. The recruits learned from being punished, and a firm hand was the means of delivering it.

  A twelve-seater table dominated the dining room. Nao kicked out the head chair and sat down, the silver bracelet Saehyun had given him clanking against the long wooden table. He sighed and buried his head in his arms.

  The weight of the day squeezed on his chest like tea pressed into a pu-erh tea cake. All he wanted was take off his stifling suit and sleep, but he couldn’t rest until he figured out who was betraying him.

  “Ouch.” Nao winced.

  Claws pricked Nao’s leg as his kitten climbed up his pant leg. Nao smiled, grabbing Nobu and putting her on his lap. The black hairless cat meowed and gnawed at his bracelet as he scratched under her chin.

  After a minute, she hopped onto the table to chase her tail. Nao took off the bracelet and spun it on the table beside the cat. The cat squatted flat and stared at the swirling jewelry until she stuck out her paw and sent it flying into Nao’s lap.

  He smiled and spun it again to get his mind off the part of himself that had snapped when the wave of adrenaline hit. He had to learn to control the monster he was and not choke the recruit for calling a cold snack cold. Cooled down from the high, Nao wasn’t sure if he had done the right thing. He couldn’t tell if it was more important for people to think he was a kind leader that earned respect or for them to fear him.

  “Would you like some tea, Father Murata?” Aki asked.

  Nao tried to read Aki’s smile as he stood at the other end of the long table, but it was genuine as ever. A part of Nao questioned how Aki could smile at him after throttling a recruit.

  “Just a cup. I should be leaving soon for the beer garden festival. There won’t be enough time to enjoy a pot.”

  Aki disappeared into the kitchen. Nao continued to spin the bracelet for Nobu’s entertainment. On the third spin, she sent the bracelet flying to the far end of the table. It bounced off a cucumber and scattered a small stack of red origami paper, before an eggplant stopped the bracelet from a falling.

  The cucumber and eggplant were a main focus of the first day of Obon. Ancestral spirits traveled by horse, symbolized by the cucumber, to join their family for the three-day celebration and traveled back to the underworld by an ox, represented
by the eggplant.

  “Here are the leaves as you requested,” Aki said, putting a small dish of tea leaves in front of Nao.

  Nao glanced at the rolled leaves. “This is the cream oolong tea?”

  “It’s amazing you can tell what tea it is by the leaves.” Aki motioned to the vegetables. “Would you do the honors?”

  It made sense for Nao to turn the vegetables into the rides for everyone’s ancestors since he was the head of the Matsukawa. Aki handed Nao the vegetables along with some skewers. Nao snapped the skewers in half while Aki made his way back into the kitchen.

  Nobu meowed and swatted at the eggplant occupying Nao’s attention. He ignored her for a change and pushed the broken skewers into the vegetables to give them legs. Standing them next to each other, they looked nothing like a horse or an ox. No horses were green, though maybe a dark-colored ox could look purple at night.

  Aki padded over, placing a teacup in front of Nao. The milk oolong coated Nao’s throat like butter, soothing the raw desire for vengeance brought on by his father’s ghost. Nao could become consumed in the life he’d once had in those brief sips, and his life as godfather disappeared.

  “It’s very different from the other teas I’ve tried,” Aki said, setting his teacup next to the stack of red paper at the end of the table.

  “It was the oolong I was searching for to complete my stocks for months.” Nao took another sip. “I get to share it with you since I can’t share it with my customers.”

  Nao bit his tongue. He meant to say the family, or at least knew he should’ve said the family. He picked up the bracelet and gave it another spin for Nobu, hoping Aki hadn’t caught the slip. Nao needed to spark fear and respect in the recruits, not flirtation over tea.

  It was Aki’s Kyoto dialect. Nao could taste Aki’s lips with each delicate syllable he rolled off his tongue. Perhaps under different circumstances he could have allowed himself to give in to attraction, but he couldn’t as the leader.

  Nobu hid behind the eggplant and pounced on the bracelet. With two swats the bracelet skated across the table and toward Aki, where she lost interest in the silver ring and attacked a red paper crane instead. She batted the crane across the table until it reached Nao, and then she plopped onto the table with a thud.

  “You’re making cranes?” Nao asked, examining the collection of about ten in front of Aki.

  “They’re for Ikida’s mother.” Aki looked up, his bangs covering one of his eyes. “I’m making a thousand of them.”

  “You made ten in the three minutes you’ve sat here?”

  “I like to do things with my hands.”

  Aki had a way of purposely phrasing everything to sound like an erotic act.

  “You could’ve gone into construction instead of the yakuza,” Nao said.

  “I did work for a company assembling office furniture before joining the Matsukawa.”

  Nao examined the soft angles of Aki’s face. He didn’t seem like the type who got into fights, which made his choice to join the underworld off.

  “What happened?”

  “On the first day, I was put in charge of assembling all the chairs for this new company. It took me all day to assemble twenty.” Aki shook his head. “I was so slow I couldn’t help anyone else.”

  “They should have given you a chance to get faster.”

  Aki creased the wing of the crane. “The company called the next day and said ten people had fallen out of the chairs. I’d ended up assembling them wrong so they leaned forward instead of back.”

  Nao laughed. “How can you do that? Didn’t they give you the instructions?”

  “There were only pictures. So it was easy to get confused. I learned construction wasn’t for me, but I was in the origami club in high school.” Aki held up another red crane. “So these are easy.”

  “Cute.”

  Damn. Nao had slipped again.

  He cleared his throat, took a sip of tea, and hid his face with the cup while Aki’s cheeks grew red. It only made him cuter.

  “You want to make one?” Aki asked. “I have three hundred more to go so I could use the help.”

  “Of course not.”

  Nao didn’t trust himself to get closer to him. Aki pressed his lips together and looked away from Nao.

  “Please forgive me, Father Murata, I didn’t mean…”

  Nobu abandoned the paper crane and batted the bracelet to Aki.

  “Saehyun?” Aki mumbled.

  Nao narrowed his eyes. “What did you say?”

  “Forgive me.” Aki put the bracelet down. “I didn’t realize I said it out loud.”

  “You can read Korean?”

  “My grandfather was brought over as a laborer during the war.”

  Aki slid the bracelet back to Nao and turned it so the light bounced off Saehyun’s name. Nao could crush the smile off Aki’s face and keep the lascivious words of Aki to short replies at the same time.

  “So you don’t get the wrong idea,” Nao started, “Saehyun was the leader of the Koreans. I seduced him so I could spy on them. He gave me the bracelet thinking I loved him. Then I killed him along with every last one of the Korean bastards destroying Kyoto.”

  Nao swallowed his lie with a sip of tea. If he kept on telling himself the lie, perhaps in time he would believe he harbored no feelings for Saehyun, but Aki didn’t need to know that. The whole Matsukawa didn’t need to know how he really felt. Nao stood and grabbed the picture of Shinya off the altar.

  He placed the picture in front of Aki. Nao was going to kill Aki’s smile. He wouldn’t dare flash it in front of him again.

  “This was the man I was going to spend the rest of my life with.” Nao tapped the frame. “When we visited Tokyo, he was drugged and then raped in front of me. It went on for hours while I was forced to watch him get violated over and over again. He was so doped up that he begged for more. When they’d had their fill, they shot him and then realized I was the son of Kyoto’s godfather. So they left me there. I hunted them down and painted the Tokyo sidewalk with their intestines.”

  Aki’s eyes watered, and Nao grinned. He’d shut down all of Aki’s charming smiles and silenced his Kyoto dialect that went straight to Nao’s deepest fantasies. Aki would think twice before he decided to strike up a conversation with Nao.

  Aki opened his mouth as if wanting to speak. Nao would give Aki something to shut that mouth forever.

  “Everyone who gets close to me dies.” Nao pushed the frame down, startling Nobu and making her run off the table. “Everyone. Lovers, my father, my last bodyguard. No one who has ever come close to me lives.”

  Aki nodded. “The Matsukawa will always be there for you, Father Murata. We are your family.”

  In a way Nao wanted to smack Aki for knowing exactly what to say. Nao wanted to crack Aki’s heart open and make him hate Nao for his own protection.

  Kurosawa walked into the room, and for once the man was welcomed. Nao couldn’t trust himself with Aki another moment.

  “I got the tickets to the beer garden,” Kurosawa said.

  “Good. Let’s go.”

  “Sakai had the connection, so he’s coming, too.”

  Nao narrowed his eyes. Of course Sakai would want to come so Kurosawa could give him a full account of Nao’s actions the past few hours. Nao left nothing finishing the final sip.

  NAO RUBBED HIS TEMPLES, a headache forming with the scent of spilt beer and stall vendor food. It was nothing like the geisha teahouse he’d wanted to visit, but if the relaxed environment and free-flowing alcohol made their tongues looser, then Kurosawa’s suggestion would be welcomed.

  The overcast sky promised rain, and the humid air clung to Nao’s skin. It might’ve been more comfortable if his arm hadn’t been in the sling, but he didn’t have time to go back to the doctor to mend broken stitches. Kurosawa would’ve nagged him about not wearing it, too.

  Kurosawa and Nao walked through the arched entry gates. Crowded picnic tables filled the space, and
a stage stood at the far end with geiko-in-training dancing, while food vendors and beer stalls lined the perimeter.

  “I didn’t think so many people would want to go to something like this,” Nao said.

  Kurosawa shrugged. “It gives people who can’t usually afford to see geiko in the teahouse a chance to experience them.”

  The festival filled his ears with noise, and the people appreciated the beer more than the geiko. He couldn’t question the traitor if he couldn’t concentrate on a single thought.

  “Are they already here?” Nao asked.

  “Somewhere.” Kurosawa shrugged. “Let’s get some food. I’m starving.”

  Ten minutes at a vendor stall and Kurosawa had a tray filled with chili dogs. Two heaping spoonfuls of chili sat on top of a hotdog while grease dripped down and pooled in the corner of the paper container. It was an Obon tradition in a way, but the imagawayaki was by far the more traditional option.

  “There they are!” Kurosawa pointed to a picnic table near the stage. Nao swore he had already looked there, searching for them. They walked along the rows of tables until they spotted Fujimoto and Ikida.

  “Father Murata,” Fujimoto said. “Thanks for inviting me. I’ve never been able to get the tickets.”

  The metallic stripes running through Fujimoto’s suit sparkled. Even Nao looked too old to wear the trendy design. Ikida wore a normal suit, but after greeting Nao, his attention went back to the geiko.

  Nao leaned close to Fujimoto so he could be heard. “Are you feeling all right with all the noise?”

  “The doc’s being overly cautious. I’m fine. We should have a rematch sometime. I decided to go easy on you since you’re young.”

  Nao smiled. “Sure.”

  “You never heard the way people talked about him?” Kurosawa laughed and placed the tray full of chili dogs in the center for everyone.

  “Here you go.” Kurosawa placed a chili dog in front of Nao. “You didn’t eat any of the imagawayaki, so you must be starving.”