by Cody Poulton
“About suffering they were never wrong,
Auden, Musée de Beaux Artes
The old Masters …”
On the wall of the little sitting room in our Kyoto house is a reproduction of Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s Netherlandish Proverbs, one of those delightfully busy portraits of a host of peasants up to no good. An odd thing for the wall of a Japanese room.
It was an enormous, meticulously assembled jigsaw puzzle. Where did this come from? I asked my wife. “Oh, Uncle Goldfish across the way made that,” she said. “He’s got a lot of time on his hands.” Uncle Goldfish (kingyo no otchan) was so named because he kept a large tank of goldfish out on the landing in front of his apartment. A regular in the coffee shop my wife ran, he was very tall, well over six feet, and in his early seventies> He was a former yakuza oyabun, or boss. He was a particularly gentle, Japanese version of Junior Soprano, a retired gangster, leading a quiet life, tending to his goldfish and other harmless hobbies. There was a certain courtliness about the man. You could trust him, my wife said. An honourable thief. The yakuza have a reputation for being trustworthy. Richigi was the term she employed.
Occasionally after closing time at the coffee shop, Uncle Goldfish would invite us over to his apartment in what he called in English “the longhouse,” a literal translation of nagaya, a tenement. Inside were two straw-matted rooms and a kitchen, with a small bath and toilet off the veranda behind. The back room had a bed, a dresser, a flat screen TV, and a low table around which we’d sit to eat and drink. He had more channels than we did, so it was always more interesting to watch TV at Uncle Goldfish’s. Short of money like a lot of pensioners in our neighbourhood, he’d wait till six when they sold off the sushi and bento boxes at the local supermarket. In his fridge he kept a jug of shōchū, white liquor, cut with water. Whenever we visited him it was clear that he’d already had a few. A large man, his voice grew larger whenever he drank, and he was persona non grata in most of the local pubs. He was never violent, but he could be rowdy.
One night, Uncle Goldfish opened his wardrobe and showed me the old suits he’d kept from better days, when (as one of Bruegel’s proverbs goes) he’d “tiled his roof with tarts.” He pulled out one bespoke but particularly garish jacket, made of multicoloured strands of raw silk. “I’ll never wear this again. Why don’t you try it on?” It was much too large on me. Besides, where could I have worn such a thing?
Uncle Goldfish had been head of a local chapter of his yakuza family. He had his own clubhouse and when he rose in the morning, two henchmen would dress him like a French king; he’d stand there, arms and legs akimbo, as they put his shirt and trousers on. I didn’t pry into how he made his living then, though occasionally he made mention of the trips he’d make to Southeast Asia or of the time he grew marijuana at home. Drugs, prostitution, gambling, and protection were how yakuza made their living. Just why he’d left the life I wasn’t sure, but he found himself singularly unsuccessful at making honest money. For a while he ran a video store, but that folded. What little he hadn’t spent already went on alimony and child support when his second wife left him, having caught him with his mistress at the clubhouse. There was a son in town (he ran a bar) who occasionally visited.
And there were the goldfish, out there on the front landing. There were also the stray cats, noisily fucking on summer nights in the narrow crannies—you could hardly call them alleys—between his tenament and the house next door. All the cats were interested in his fish. One evening he made me a proposal. “You’ve got a car. Why don’t I get some cardboard boxes and round them up? We’ll stuff them in the back and drive them across the bridge and set them free on the other side of the river. Cats won’t cross a body of water.”
Great, I thought: if the cops ever pulled me over on the other side of the Katsura in my Daihatsu Move, loaded with a passel of protesting cats and a lanky old yakuza riding shotgun, how would I explain? Luckily I never had to. The cats were a nuisance but couldn’t get into the aquarium. Whenever my grandson came for a visit, he always headed straight over to see the old man’s goldfish.
In the summer when it was hot, sometimes I’d see him stripped naked to the waist. Strange for a yakuza he had all his fingers but no tattoos. He said he’d never been into body art—it was unnecessary for his line of work—and he’d committed no indiscretions that would have made him give up a digit. Losing the little finger wasn’t pretty, he told me. What they’d do was apply a tight tourniquet with a rubber band to the finger that was to be severed. This would not only stanch the blood but also numb the pain, which was still considerable. But I noticed a nasty scar across his belly. How’d you get that? I asked. He tld me that he and a buddy were horsing around one day and got into a fight over a girl. The other guy pulled out a short sword and stabbed him. The cut wasn’t so bad, but he stumbled down a flight of stairs and burst his spleen.
We’d been visiting him regularly for dinner for a couple of years when I heard that he’d been diagnosed with terminal lung cancer. I saw him only when I was in town, so months would pass before we’d meet again. Pinned to the wall over his bedstead was a large package of the pills he was taking.
On Christmas Day in Kyoto I try to visit the flea market at Kitano Tenjin Shrine, which is held on the twenty-fifth of every month. That year, when I mentioned that I was going, Uncle Goldfish asked to come along. We went in my Daihatsu. Accordioning his long legs into the passenger seat of the little car, he reflected on his driving days and his fine automobiles, many of them foreign. He’d driven for close to fifty years without a license, he said nonchalantly. “You mean to tell me the cops never stopped you?” I asked. “Oh, they stopped me all right, but I dealt with it,” he said vaguely. “The last time, though, I had a problem. I got pulled over with a girlfriend on the way to a love hotel. I gave up driving after that.”
We parked the car in the lot of a family restaurant behind the shrine. Uncle Goldfish pointed out to me a restaurant in Kami Shichiken, the geisha district behind the shrine, where he and his friends would play hanafuda and gamble. In my mind’s eye I conjured scenes from a slew of yakuza movies where half-naked men and women with tattoos sat in rows and played cards like ritual war.
The last time I saw Uncle Goldfish we were over to have dinner. By then he was eating little and drinking nothing. “I’ve got something to show you,” he said, and popped a disk into his DVD player. A fanfare of trumpets played over an aerial shot of Kyoto. The camera panned from one famous tourist site to another, then zoomed in on the main clubhouse for the gang he’d belonged to. Inside was a hoard of gangsters, in a great room festooned with curtains in celebratory red and white stripes. Besides the top bosses from all the country’s gangs—there must have been a good dozen of those—were the members of the local chapter, numbering well over a hundred. Everybody was there: the guy with the little Hitler moustache, the walleye, the glasses, the scarface, the buzz-cut, the punch perm, the double-breasted suits, the tuxedos—not a single woman among them—there for the investiture of the gang’s new oyabun. A half dozen responsible for carrying out the ceremony were dressed in pure white linen kimonos and when they raised their arms to carry various ritual items—sake, tall cones of salt, a sea bream—one could catch a glimpse of flowery tattoos running down their arms from their backs and shoulders. The emcee, responsible for the blessing of the sake and the fish with salt, was missing the little fingers on both of his hands. Though his voice trembled, he poured out the sake with a flourish and took the first drink—to prove it wasn’t poisoned—before pouring out individual cups for the outgoing and incoming Dons. The ceremony was fascinating, an amalgam of Shinto wedding and imperial coronation. The new boss surveyed his gathering with a stony gaze. I imagined him calculating which of those present he was going to get rid of once the ceremony was over. I know I wouldn’t have been welcome. Cameramen dressed in suits, like you might find at a wedding, danced around recording the event. The finished product had all the trappings—the jump cuts, the close-ups, the portentous music—of a B-grade gangster movie.
When it was over and the DVD popped out of his player, he said, “Keep it. I’m sure you’d find some use for this.” That was his parting gift to me. I returned to Canada soon after. His final days were not spent entirely alone—a tag team of local ladies tended to him before he died.
I wonder which of those Dutch sayings best summed up Uncle Goldfish’s life? Surely leaving the life of crime has been for him Van de os op de ezel springen—he’d fallen from the ox onto an ass, which is to say, on hard times. Some might say he’d spent his life “crapping on the gallows.” Assembling Bruegel’s painting from a thousand pieces of a jigsaw puzzle must have been a kind of penance for him, an exercise in reassembling his chequered life in a trail of scatological proverbs. To me, he’d accepted his lot with stoic dignity, but maybe he’d only been pissing at the moon.
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To explore more of Cody Poulton’s work, click here. To learn more about his work as professor of Japanese studies at University of Victoria, click here.
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