Then what could he want, one might wonder, with this skinny servant girl? After all, he wasn’t hanging about here for his own amusement, he was on an important job. A matter of life and death, you might say, but still he hadn’t been able to refrain. The moment he saw the girl, he realised straight away that she was his kind, and without even pausing to think, he had applied all his skill in the way he acted with her: he put on a haughty face with a sultry expression in his eyes. When she came closer, he turned away; when she was at a distance, he kept his eyes fixed on her. Women notice that straight away. She had already tried to talk to him several times, but Tanuki maintained his mysterious silence. On no account must he open his own mouth too early.
It wasn’t so much that he was amused by the game with the servant girl – it was more that it helped to relieve the boredom of waiting. And then again, free sake was no bad thing either.
He had been hanging about in Semushi’s dive since yesterday morning. He had already blown almost all the money he had been given by Gonza, even though he only placed a bet every one and a half hours at the most. The accursed blue die had gobbled up all his coins, and now he only had two left: a small gold one and a large silver one, with a dragon.
Since yesterday morning he had neither eaten nor slept, only drunk sake. His belly ached. But his hara could endure it. Far worse was the fact that his head had started to spin – either from the cold or the sweetish smoke that came drifting from the corner where the opium smokers were lying and sitting: three Chinese, a red-haired sailor with his eyes closed and his mouth blissfully open, two rikshas.
Foreigners – akuma take them, let them all croak, but he felt sorry for the rikshas. They were both former samurai, that was obvious straight away. Their kind found it hardest of all to adapt to a new life. These were changed times, the samurai weren’t paid pensions any more – let them work, like everyone else. Only what if you didn’t know how to do anything except wave a sword about? But they’d even taken away the poor devils’ swords…
Tanuki guessed again – this time it would be ‘odds’, and it was! Two and 5!
But the moment he put up the silver yen, the dice betrayed him again. As usual, the red one settled first, on a 5. How he implored the blue one: give me odds, give me odds! And of course, it rolled over into a 3. His last coin but one had gone for nothing.
Snuffling in his fury, Tanuki put down his beaker, so that the servant could splash some sake into it, but this time the mischievous girl poured some for everyone except him – she was probably offended because he wasn’t looking at her.
It was stuffy in the room, the players were sitting there naked to the waist, wafting themselves with fans. If only he had a snake tattoo on his shoulder. Maybe not with three rings, like Obake’s, and not five, like Gonza’s – just one would do. Then the rotten girl would look at him differently. But never mind, if he carried out his assignment diligently, Gonza had promised him not only a fiery-red snake on his right shoulder, but even a chrysanthemum on each knee!
The very reason that Tanuki had been entrusted with this important mission was that he did not have a single decoration on his skin. He had not had any chance to earn them. But the hunchback would not have let in anyone with tattoos. That was why Fudo and Gundari had been put on the door, to prevent any Yakuza from other clans getting in. Fudo and Gundari told customers to roll up their sleeves and inspected their backs and chests. If they saw decorated skin, they threw the man out straight away.
Semushi was cautious, it was not easy to reach him. His ‘Rakuen’ gambling den had a double door: they let you in one at a time, then the first door was locked with some cunning kind of mechanism; on guard behind the inner door were Fudo and Gundari, two guards named in honour of the redoubtable buddhas who guarded the Gates of Heaven. The heavenly buddhas were truly terrible – with goggling eyes and tongues of flame instead of hair, but this pair were even worse. They were Okinawans, skilled in the art of killing with their bare hands.
There were another four guards in the hall as well, but there was no point in even thinking about them. Tanuki’s assignment was clear, he just had to let his own people in, and after that they would manage without him.
Bold Gonza had been given his nickname in honour of Gonza the Spear-Bearer from the famous puppet play – he was a really great fighter with a bamboo stick. Dankichi certainly deserved his nickname of Kusari, or ‘Chain’, too. He could knock the neck off a glass bottle with his chain, and the bottle wouldn’t even wobble. Then there was Obake the Phantom, a master of the nunchaku, and Ryu the Dragon, a former sumotori who weighed fifty kamme [iii] – he didn’t need any weapon at all.
Tanuki didn’t have anything with him either. First, they wouldn’t have let him in with a weapon. And secondly, he could do a lot with his hands and feet. He only looked inoffensive – short and round like a little badger (hence his nickname). [iv] And anyway, since the age of eight, he had practised the glorious art of jujitsu, to which, in time, he had added the Okinawan skill of fighting with the feet and legs. He could beat anyone – except, of course, for Ryu; not even a gaijin’s steam kuruma could shift him from the spot.
The plan thought up by the cunning Gonza had seemed quite simple at first.
Walk into the gambling den as if he wanted to play a bit. Wait until Fudo or Gundari, it didn’t matter which, left his post to answer a call of nature or for some other reason. Then go flying at the one who was still at the door, catch him with a good blow, open the bolt, give the prearranged shout and avoid getting killed in the few seconds before Gonza and the others came bursting in.
It was a rare thing for a novice to be given a first assignment that was so complicated and so responsible. In the normal way of things, Badger should have remained a novice for at least another three or four years, he was much too young for a fully fledged warrior. But the way things were nowadays, sticking to the old customs had become impossible. Fortune had turned her face away from the Chobei-gumi, the oldest and most glorious of all the Japanese gangs.
Who had not heard of the founder of the gang, the great Chobei, leader of the bandits of Edo, who defended the citizens against the depredations of the samurai? The life and death of the noble Yakuza were described in kabuki plays and depicted in Ukio-e engravings. The perfidious samurai Mizuno lured the hero, unarmed and alone, into his house by deception. But the Yakuza made short work of the entire band of his enemies with his bare hands, leaving only the base Mizuno alive. And he told him: ‘If I escaped alive from your trap, people would think that Chobei was too afraid for his own life. Kill me, here is my chest’. And with a hand trembling in fear Mizuno impaled Chobei on his spear. How could you possibly imagine a more exalted death?
Tanuki’s grandfather and his father had belonged to the Chobei-gumi. Since his early childhood, he had dreamed of growing up, joining the gang and making a great and respected career in it. First he would be a novice, then a warrior, then he would be promoted to the wakashu, the junior commanders, then to the wakagashira, the senior commanders, and at the age of about forty, if he survived, he would become the oyabun himself, a lord with the power of life and death over fifty valiant men, and they would start writing plays about his great feats for the kabuki theatre and the Bunraku puppet theatre.