“Well then,” she whispered. Steam swirled around her face. “Mukashi, mukashi, when I was a little girl, my father was a yakuza underboss, second only to the oyabun. My father was a powerful man, respected by his peers and the many men who worked for him. His name was Yamada Senzo and he was an expert at kendo and tameshigiri.” She looked at Quinn to see if he understood. “Do you know tameshigiri?”
Quinn nodded. He’d practiced the art of cutting with a functional Japanese sword — some of his targets considerably more realistic than others.
Miyagi continued her story. “You may know that the yakuza were originally gamblers. Even the name ya-ku-za comes from the term for eight-nine-three, a losing hand in a Japanese card game. Some call them rogues and thieves, but to my father’s mind, the yakuza had an ancient samurai ethic. He trained me in all things according to the martial way from the time I was old enough to walk. We were very close, he and I.
“Unfortunately, when I was thirteen years of age, he became very ill. Wicked men, men who had sworn oaths to support him, schemed instead behind his back and took everything he had. In his weakness, he could not fight them. He died a broken man, leaving my mother overwhelmed with crushing debt. There was nothing she could do but take up house with another yakuza lieutenant.”
Miyagi looked up suddenly, pained eyes locked on Quinn. Tendons knotted along her delicate neck. The tip of her tongue quivered against her lips. “It is here, when I began life on the street, that my story, the story that is relevant to you, begins…”
CHAPTER 19
Yamada Emiko had the stomped look of a girl with a broken heart — but she knew how to fight.
“Choke! Choke! Choke!” The chant rose from the darkness in the deserted train tracks behind the vacant box factory. The empty shell of broken windows was a precursor of the economic slump that would soon strike Japan’s industry and powerful markets, but the fighting youth knew nothing of that. To them, the vacant building offered a place to hide from the crushing conformity society tried to push on them.
Locked on the gravel in a deadly embrace with her opponent, Emiko puffed her hollow cheeks and reared back, catching the other girl’s throat in the V of her bent arm. Chiyo was new to the group. Still well fed from her parent’s table, she had Emiko by thirty pounds — but that didn’t matter.
Emiko grasped her own forearm with the opposite hand, pulling tighter, her body settling in next to her opponent. Each time Chiyo moved, Emiko adjusted her grip, squeezing the life out of her like a constricting snake. One leg entwined the other girl’s ankles, keeping her from kicking free or turning around.
Chiyo gurgled, struggling to draw a breath. Her hands clawed at the arm that wrapped around her neck, trying in vain to pry it away. Emiko let her wrist nestle in next to the hollow of the other girl’s neck, as her father had taught her. She bent it just enough to drive the base of her thumb against her opponent’s carotid artery, stopping the flow of blood to her brain and putting her to sleep almost instantly.
Emiko dropped the unconscious Chiyo like a piece of garbage, then raised her hands above her head and gave a bloodcurdling scream. Victory meant money, which meant food — and maybe even a little sake.
Her peroxide-red hair was chopped as if with a pair of garden shears and stood out at different lengths in all directions. In a country that valued conformity, such a haircut on a young woman was the equivalent of spitting in the face of her elders. It did not matter to her. Emiko had no elders to spit on.
She’d cut away the neckline of her pink Hello Kitty sweatshirt in order to expose a budding cleavage. Kenichi hated for other boys to look at her that way but didn’t mind taking a peek himself. Besides, it gave him a reason to be jealous. Emiko enjoyed the feeling of being fought over, especially if muscular Kenichi with his James Dean pompadour, tight white T-shirt, and black leather jacket was the one doing the fighting.
Life had been hard enough after her father died in debt, but then her mother had taken up house with the filthy yakuza underboss, Sato, who seemed to be a lot more interested in Emiko than he was her mother.
Looking back, Emiko should have killed him, but she knew little of such things at the time.
At first she’d stayed with girlfriends from school, but when their parents discovered that she was the daughter of a dead yakuza lieutenant, they politely but firmly told her it would be best if she found somewhere else to lay her head. She’d slept in a park the first night — almost five months before — next to a crazy homeless woman who thought Emiko was a pet goat. The fact that she’d abandoned life, coupled with her ability to fight, made the bosozoku street tribes a natural place for the young girl to eventually land.
Now gaunt from malnutrition, too little sleep, and too much alcohol, her collarbones stretched against pale skin as if they wanted to escape. Her fingernails were dirty and broken. Grime ringed the cuffs of her pink sweatshirt.
Kenichi urged her to eat more, begged her to quit fighting, even promising to clean up his act and get a job as a mechanic so they could get married.
Marriage. Emiko scoffed, looking at the muscular boy across the unconscious body of her latest opponent. Marriage was too big a word to comprehend for a girl who didn’t expect to live to see her fourteenth birthday. Apart from her feelings for Kenichi, she didn’t even care.
The greasy bookie who’d set up the fight with the new girl handed Emiko her money, a measly five thousand yen — roughly twenty-five American dollars — to risk a broken neck.
“Sagara wants to see you,” the bookie grunted. He stuffed a wad of bills into the pocket of his canvas trousers that looked to have been doused in motor oil.
Kenichi’s strong arm snaked around Emiko’s shoulders, drawing her close. “Tell him she is busy tonight,” he said. “Come on, Emi-chan. I got the motorcycle fixed. Let’s go for a ride across the riv—”
The bookie gave Kenichi a hard cuff to the ear. “Idiot!” he spat. “No one tells Sagara they are busy. He will tell you if you are busy or not.”
Kenichi shucked off his leather jacket, always spoiling for a fight. Emiko had been his girlfriend long enough to know that no one could hit him in the head and get away without a beating, least of all a greasy old man.
Sagara’s acid voice barked from across the tracks, stopping the boy in midswing. He was a thick man, nearly as wide as he was tall, with a big belly and fat cheeks that pushed his eyes closed from the bottom when he smiled, which was usually at the expense of someone else’s misfortune.
“Oi!” He grunted, nodding to the slouching man at his left who held a black pistol, half hidden in the darkness. “Can I buy you two a hot meal or should I have Tomiyuki-kun put a bullet in your worthless brains?”
Kenichi spun at the new threat. Fists doubled, he stood on the balls of his feet. Emiko’s father had taught her about men like Sagara. She knew it would be bad strategy to fight such a person in face-to-face combat. He was yakuza, like her father had been — too powerful, too connected for mere teenagers to beat in an open fight.
She patted Kenichi’s arm to calm him and then put on her helpless-child voice. It was another strategy taught to her by her late father.