Yakuza Confessions

I began making progress in figuring out how Goto had gotten into the United States. I had a clue and I’d developed a good source, someone who knew a lot and wanted to talk.

It was a clear, cold day in December 2006 when I went to see Masaki Shibata, an ex-yakuza, at a very nice hospital in the middle of Tokyo. Shibata was a very intelligent man. He had also been friends with the Emperor of Loan Sharks. It was a small world, after all.

I was completing the human-trafficking project, and I was doing other investigative work to keep money coming in. I worried about Helena. She’d completely disappeared.

I was commuting back and forth between the United States and Japan. The kids seemed happy in their new home and were learning English really quickly.^1* There were adjustment problems, the biggest being that the United States doesn’t have universal health insurance as Japan does. It was very hard when Beni came down with a high fever and I realized we couldn’t afford to take her to the emergency room unless it was absolutely necessary. In Japan, we would have gone in the middle of the night without thinking about it. I’d never had to contemplate the costs of medical care before in my life.

Public health care in Japan can be bad, but most of the time it’s good and it’s better than nothing.

However, here’s a strange thing about Japan: Almost any restaurant is spotless. The floors glow, the countertops are clean, the linen is a bright white. This doesn’t hold true for medical facilities. Most hospitals have a thin veneer of dust on the floor; the sheets have been washed, but stains remain. The windows look as if no one has cleaned them in decades. You have to take off your shoes and put on moldy slippers to tread through poorly lit halls with medical equipment and supplies filling the corridors.

Shibata’s hospital was different. You could wear shoes. It was a clean, well-lit space. You might actually be able to eat off the dishes without fearing secondary infection.

I didn’t sign the guest book. I didn’t want any evidence that I’d visited the guy or that I knew him.

Shibata was a big man in his organized crime group, but he was no longer an organization man. When he’d been diagnosed with liver cancer, it flashed upon him that he’d led an evil life. You might wonder why the yakuza seem to get stricken with liver cancer. A lot of it has to do with the tattoos. Most of them got them when they were young and the needles used weren’t clean. Many of them have hepatitis C, and they drink a lot. That’s a pretty lethal combination. In addition to that, the traditional tattoos almost kill the sweat glands. The body can’t get rid of its poisons easily, and that’s also hard on the organs.

Shibata knew he wasn’t going to get a liver transplant, and he decided to make his peace with the world, make amends where he could. He married a Malaysian woman who worked at one of his clubs and had a kid with her.

Fortunately, Shibata wanted to talk to someone, wanted to balance out his sins. So a Buddhist priest introduced us. Tsumihoroboshi is the word for it. There were, of course, conditions on what he would tell me and what I could do with the information. He knew that upon his death, terrible things would be written about him in the press. I had to promise I’d tell his son that his father had had another side, that he had tried to be a better man. I was to give his son an unopened letter.

Shibata looked pretty bad. People in the advanced stages of liver cancer have a terrible pallor. Yellowish. He wasn’t quite there yet.

As the liver becomes less and less able to function, all the poisons in the body that it should be filtering out don’t leave. You essentially become toxic to yourself. Some people become violent, delirious.

Before asking what you want to know as a reporter, it’s always good to chew the fat a bit. I mentioned that I’d walked by the Yaesu Fujiya Hotel on my way to come see him and been reminded of the Eiju Kim murder in 2002.

He asked me if I wanted to know what had really happened. But first, I had to open the window. He wanted to smoke. I’d brought him an aluminum case of Lucky Strikes, his favorite brand, from duty free. A carton of ten. I had to stand on his bed to disconnect the smoke alarm.

I remembered the Fujiya Hotel shooting vividly. All I had to do was look down at my feet. By again playing the idiot gaijin, a role that required no method acting, I had managed to get behind the yellow police tape and right up to the corpse. The blood on the ground practically carpeted the street, it was that rich and copious. I imagined I could see steam rising faintly from the puddle. The air smelled like aluminum foil.

Even with all the blood on his clothes, it was plain that the victim, Kim, dressed well. Armani, maybe, a black pin-striped number. I’m not fashion-conscious, but I know a good suit when I see one. With a nice herringbone-patterned shirt, dark gray. Tailored to fit, clearly.

Kim was old school. I counted ten whole fingers, although the left pinkie looked suspicious. It might not have been original—it could have have been a toe taken to replace it in restorative surgery. If I took off his shoes, I would know the truth, but that would surely be pushing my luck.

I snapped a couple of pictures before a cop in panic mode grabbed my arm, lifting me off my feet, and pulled me back behind the crime scene tape. As he was dragging me, I noticed my feet leaving a trail of blood, sort of slimy, like snail goo. I suppose one could have accused me of disrupting the integrity of the crime scene, but when someone is gunned down in front of a hotel near one of the largest train stations in the world, well, most of the damage has already been done. The shooter was in custody. I hadn’t felt terribly guilty.

Shibata was still waiting while I replayed the scene in my head.

“Well, were you there?”

“Yes, I was at the scene. I saw the body.”

Eiju Kim, real age unknown but probably late forties, a Japanese citizen of Korean ancestry who was head of the Osaka yakuza group Kyoyou-kai, which was part of the Yamaguchi-gumi family, got into a heated conversation with Naoto Kametani, the head of the Rokkorengo gang, also part of the Yamaguchi-gumi, in front of the Fujiya Hotel. The two of them were close friends.

Kim, who was accompanied by Kenichi Takanuki, thirty, his underling and driver, broke off the conversation and briskly got into the backseat of a large black car parked next to them. Takanuki slid behind the wheel. Kametani was left standing next to the car.

As the car was pulling into traffic, Kametani whipped out a handgun and sprayed the backseat with bullets, killing Kim instantly. The driver jumped out of the car and was shot, too. Kametani fled on foot but only got about two hundred feet before the cops, who were coincidentally hanging around, tackled him and arrested him for attempted murder. On the surface, a pretty straightforward homicide. Yet it was highly unusual: interfactional violence like that is rare.

“You want to know the real story?”

“Yeah, I’d love to.”

“Okay.” And then he didn’t say anything. Shibata seemed lost in thought, and I reminded him that I would like to know the real story. He nodded.

Shibata inhaled deeply and happily. He held the cigarette with his left hand between his thumb and index finger, making a kind of circle, with his pinkie standing up rather delicately. And then he talked.

It was an incredible story. It involved slush funds in the Osaka prosecutor’s office, media suppression, and a colossal cover-up. Still, it didn’t make complete sense, kind of like conspiracy theories, which abound in Japan. I’d go into detail, but I want to live out the rest of my natural life. Still, I wanted to know more.

“Where’s the proof?” I asked the wise man.

“I am the fucking proof. It’s true because I say it’s true,” Shibata replied firmly, then stubbed his cigarette out on the windowsill. For a second, even with his pale and sunken face, I got a sense of the sheer force that had made him a wet-your-pants kind of enforcer in his day. His look was that intense.

The room got very quiet. You could hear the cigarette sizzling out.

“It still doesn’t make total sense to me.”

“You’re the reporter, you figure it out.”

“Ex-reporter.”

“Yeah, yeah. It doesn’t matter anyway. It’s all history. Nobody gives a shit. But you didn’t ever think it was funny? You never wondered why Kametani never said a word about why he did it? You never wondered why he got twenty instead of life?”

“Well, I assumed that if he’d killed a civilian, he would have gotten life.”

“You sons of bitches. When yakuza kill yakuza, nobody gives a crap.”

That gave me pause. “You know,” I said, “I said the same thing once to a cop in Saitama, and we made a bet. I ended up taking his entire family out for Korean barbecue, and they ordered wagyu!^2* You want the story?”

He nodded.

It was a couple years back, when Sekiguchi was still in good health.

On November 16, 1994, hostilities had boiled over between the Kokusui-kai and the Yamaguchi-gumi. The Kokusui-kai struck first, shooting and severely wounding two Yamaguchi-gumi soldiers who had made a visit to their office in Tokyo. The next day, the Yamaguchi-gumi retaliated, the gang war spreading across two prefectures—Saga and Yamanashi—then to Shinjuku in Tokyo, and then finally to Saitama Prefecture.

I was expecting something to happen that day, and I wasn’t disappointed. I was passing time at the police press club, learning the fine points of mahjong from a senior reporter of the Tokyo Shinbun, when a public affairs officer ran in shouting about a shooting. A shooting of people, two people, not just office doors. I hitched a ride to the crime scene.

It was a seven-floor condominium building in the heart of Konosu. The Kokusui-kai office had a sign on its door that read TOOUTANTEISHA (Eastern and European Private Investigations). It was one of three private detective agencies in the area that were fronts for Kokusui-kai offices; they even advertised in the yellow pages.

Yakuza-looking thugs entered and left the office, shouting into their cell phones and generally ignoring the police, who were swarming into the area and roping off the entire first floor with yellow tape. You could see blood on the sidewalk but no bodies.

I snapped as many pictures as I could. One yakuza, wearing oversized sunglasses and a white velour sweatsuit, glared at me while talking into his cell. He waved his hand violently as if to say, “Don’t fuckin’ take my picture.” I took it anyway.

That did not please him. He stomped toward me, shouting obscenities, which I couldn’t understand because he was rolling his r’s and making that typical yakuza growl, which he must’ve learned from bad yakuza movies. Just as the Italian mafiosi look to Hollywood movies to model themselves, the Japanese yakuza do the same. In fact, the yakuza usually own the studios making yakuza movies, which means that sometimes in a yakuza flick, the extras playing yakuza are actually yakuza. Conversely, the scary-looking guys in front of me were definitely not actors.

I pointed to my Yomiuri armband. “I’m a reporter. I have a right to take pictures.”

The subtlety of my argument did not deter him, and he grabbed for my camera.

I pulled it back beyond his reach, shaking my finger at him and going tsk-tsk. I dared to be so cocky because my favorite cop, Sekiguchi, had shown up on the scene. He was in black jeans, a navy blue sweater, and a long leather jacket. His hair was slicked back, and he had on leather gloves. He looked more like a yakuza than the yakuza.

As Mr. White Sweatsuit got close to punching out my lights, Sekiguchi yelled the guy’s name and told him, “Haul your fat ass outta here, and stop using the goddamn phone.” The man retreated, still glaring at me.

Sekiguchi walked over to survey the scene for bullets and whispered, “Jake, don’t push your luck. Don’t antagonize those guys. They have a poor sense of humor.” Then: “Drop by tonight.”

I nodded. we had a rule: we never spoke to each other at a crime scene. I hung around trying for a few standard quotes. A bar hostess on the second floor told me, “I knew that those people down there weren’t really detectives, but I didn’t know they were yakuza. They were very quiet until today.”

“Now that you know, are you frightened?” I asked, gently leading the witness.

“Well,” she said, dragging on a Mild Seven cigarette, “not really. It’s like lightning. It never strikes twice, right?”

A totally unusable comment.

I was able to get a retired schoolteacher from the third floor to say something more appropriate: “I was always worried that something like this would happen, and now it has. I’m so frightened I want to move out. Why can’t the police do something about these kinds of dangerous people?”

That would have been usable, but it had problematic content and had to be edited. Because if the police know where the yakuza offices are and the local citizens know where the yakuza offices are, why doesn’t the government shut them down? Well, yeah, why doesn’t it? But that’s a whole different can of worms. I think the final version of this comment was “I sure hope the police catch those people.”

A housewife who lived next door added, “If one of those bullets had missed … I hate to think about it. It’s a good thing no one was hurt.” Now, that was more to the point, but it was factually incorrect, as two yakuza were now in critical condition. In the eyes of the public, two yakuza and only yakuza getting shot meant that “no one was hurt.”

I filed my article, took a nap, and then headed out to see Sekiguchi.

Sekiguchi arrived back about ten. I was already in the house, feet under the kotatsu next to Yuki-chan, the elder daughter, who’d sweetly roped me into helping her with her English homework. Chi-chan, the younger daughter, was watching a horrible musical on television and eating candied squid on a stick. Mrs. Sekiguchi was reading the newspaper. The house was so small that I could stretch out my arms and almost touch the walls. But it was cozy.

Sekiguchi walked in, threw his jacket on the tatami, and immediately sat down with us on the floor, sticking his feet under the kotatsu.

“Otsukare-sama [a standard line, on the order of “Tough job, you must be worn out”]. What’s going on with the investigation?” I said, wasting no time.

“Well, the Kokusui guys aren’t cooperating. They’re not talking. But whoever the gunman is had a lot of balls.”

“What do you mean?”

“Look at all the other shootings. A couple of gunshots into the door. What does that do? But this guy, the guy doing this job, he’s a goddamn kamikaze. He rings the doorbell, walks into the office, and says, ‘Who’s in charge?’ He doesn’t wait for an answer. He goes up to one of the Kokusui-kai mugs sitting there, raises his gun, and—bang bang—right into the chest and belly. Then he turns around and does the same thing to another mug. Then he walks out the door. He walks out the door. Then this eighteen-year-old punk, a yakuza wannabe, grabs the guy on the street, tries to go for the gun, which is in the gunman’s right hand. They struggle. No contest—the gunman knifes the kid in the stomach with his other hand. And then he’s outta there. The building manager hears all the noise, comes down the steps, puts the three wounded guys in his car, and drives them to the hospital. Cops are called. The CSI people are still there.”

“Any idea what the gun was?”

“Tokarev, probably. Russian gun. Every yakuza has to have one these days.”

“What are these guys fighting about?”

Sekiguchi lit a cigarette. “You wouldn’t believe the shit these guys fight over. Here’s what I heard. Two guys from the Yamaguchi-gumi go pay a visit to the Kokusui-kai office in Taito Ward, Tokyo. One of the Yamaguchi-gumi guys is named Nakai. His friend got in a car accident involving a Kokusui-kai guy, so Nakai and his buddy have shown up to smooth things over, settle the bills, whatever. Apparently, Nakai is a loudmouth and he says something to piss off the Kokusui-kai guys. One of them is Korean, right, so he’s got a hot temper, and he pulls out a gun. Next thing, the Yamaguchi-gumi guys are on the floor.”

“A gang war over a traffic accident?”

“Yeah, but no, it’s not just that. The Yamaguchi-gumi rules Kansai [western Japan] and owns about forty percent of the market. They’ve been trying to expand into Tokyo [in Kanto, eastern Japan] for years. The Kokusui-kai guys are offended that the Kansai thugs are even walking on their turf. Nobody wants them in here. In Saitama they don’t have an office, not yet, so I think the trouble was just part of the bigger picture. Like, stay out. But it doesn’t matter much. Once the bullets fly, there is no going back.”

At the time of this gang war, the Kokusui-kai was the third largest crime group in Saitama, after the Sumiyoshi-kai and the Inagawa-kai. It had eighteen offices and around 230 known members. Cops were now stationed in front of each of the offices.

According to Sekiguchi, it wasn’t unusual for yakuza to use a private detective agency as a cover, but the preferred fronts were real estate agencies and construction companies. The Kokusui-kai had done well pretending to be private dicks; they’d take an infidelity case, milk the client for all they could, and if they found out the spouse was cheating (almost always the case), they’d blackmail the cheater by threatening to tell their client the truth. It was a nice little racket.

On the morning of the eighteenth, the Tokyo Metropolitan Police Department received a call from someone claiming to be the gunman.

“The Konosu shooting? I’m the fucking guy.”

He said he’d be turning himself in with the gun that afternoon, and as promised, he did. He was Takehiko Sugaya, twenty-seven at the time, a member of the Yamaguchi-gumi.

In Saitama, Sekiguchi was assigned to interrogate Sugaya. Sekiguchi’s skills as an interrogator preceded him. Yakuza were known to confess on the spot, lest Sekiguchi in the course of interrogation get them to spill incriminating evidence about other crimes. (Sekiguchi wasn’t bad with white-collar criminals either, although he stood out from other investigators with Ivy League educations and highfalutin backgrounds. The way I heard it, he’d treat yakuza with deference and respect, as if they were important people, and he’d treat bureaucrats and corporate criminals as if they were the scum of the earth—as if they were yakuza.)

I waited a day before going to see him. By now a case involving yakuza forging pachinko receipts and ripping off millions of dollars from the big pachinko giants was about to break. The gang war had ended, and now that the gunman was in custody, it was already old news. But Sekiguchi’s job was not finished.

While Mrs. Sekiguchi prepared some late-evening fried rice for us, Sekiguchi and I huddled under the kotatsu and talked shop. Sugaya was proving to be a tough bird, he said. The kid was claiming that he’d done the job on his own; no one had put him up to it. Sekiguchi had reason to believe otherwise. In the Yamaguchi-gumi, if you knock out a rival gang member and then turn yourself in, you’ll be promoted to executive class once you’ve served your time. It was a rite of passage. But in many cases, the real gunman went scot-free and the organization would send a proxy in has place. Sekiguchi wanted to determine if Sugaya really had been the gunman; fortunately, since the victims were alive, he had front-row eyewitnesses.

I took a long drag of the cigarette and tried to blow smoke rings, which I wasn’t good at. Then I made my stupid remark of the day: “Okay, but who cares? Sugaya will be convicted, and he’ll be out in three or four years. When yakuza kill yakuza, nobody gives a crap. Especially if they don’t actually kill other yakuza but just wound them.”

“Yeah, I think that’s a problem.”

“A problem?”

“Why should those guys get off any easier than anyone else? The crime is the same. Because they know that the courts will treat them differently, it encourages them to have gang wars. The guys are more willing to shoot each other because they know they won’t be doing serious time.”

“Well, that may be true, but Sugaya is still only going to get four years—max. Look at the statistics.”

“I’m the interrogator. I could get this guy put away for ten.”

“Ten years? In your dreams, Sekiguchi-san.”

“Ten years, minimum.”

“I’ll make you a bet. If you get this guy put away for ten years, I’ll take you and your family out for yakiniku, and you can order whatever kind of beef you like. If he gets less than ten, you have to give me the list of all the yakuza offices and their executives in Saitama.”

Sekiguchi stubbed out his cigarette. “That’s a bet you’re going to regret. I may have two little girls, but they eat like five little boys. Prepare to ante up, Adelstein.”

Mrs. Sekiguchi chuckled at the two men in a pissing match. “I’ll be the witness to the bet. Jake-san, I don’t think you will win this one.”

I assured her that I’d never lost a bet in my life, then intoned, “Assault never carries ten years, even with gun violations.”

“Who’s talking about assault? This is attempted murder.”

I hadn’t thought about that. Anyway, you’d have to prove the intent. “Did Sugaya say anything like ‘Die, you bastard’ or ‘I’m going to kill you’?”

Sekiguchi winced. “No, he did not.”

“Well, how are you going to establish intent?”

“The legal principle is mihitsu no koi. Any reasonable person would know that if you shoot someone in the chest and gut at point-blank range, there is a strong likelihood that person will die.”

“Sugaya isn’t stupid. He’ll just say he meant to frighten them. It wasn’t like he put a gun to their head and finished the job. A couple of shots, and he ran. Panicked. No intent to kill.”

“You’re way off, Jake-kun. This guy is a soldier. He didn’t care whether they lived or died. He would have been happy to have killed them.”

“Maybe so, but is anyone stupid enough to admit that?”

“Oh, he’ll admit it to me.”

“Good luck. Let me know when I should pick up the list.”

With the bet between us, our banter continued. But Sekiguchi was serious about one thing: he detested the Yamaguchi-gumi and was happy they weren’t in Saitama. “Once they take root in any prefecture, they spread like cancer. I’d take the Sumiyoshi-kai over those guys any day of the week.”

To make a long story short, Sekiguchi got Sugaya prosecuted for attempted murder in addition to violations of gun and firearms laws. He appealed to Sugaya’s “manly pride” to get him to tell the truth. Sugaya was put away for ten years. I had to take the Sekiguchi family out for yakiniku, dropping 30,000 yen ($300) for a meal of prime Japanese beef.

Shibata smiled.

“Jake-san, sometimes you are a real bakayaro [stupid guy]. You should never have bet the cop. Even I’ve heard of Sekiguchi. He was no friend of ours, but everyone respected him. And that guy Sugaya—I admire him. Yakuza used to be like that—you did the crime, and you did the time. It was gokudo. You didn’t whine or plead, like the chin-pira do now. You live like a man, you take your punishment like a man.

“The punks today are afraid to go to jail. Too damn weak. That’s why we farm out the dirty work to the Chinese and the Iranians. If they get caught, they don’t talk and they just get deported. Sugaya is going to get out of prison and find there is no organization to go home to and no place where his honor is appreciated.”

“You really think so?”

“It’s all about money now. Loyalty to the oyabun, honor, endurance, obligation—they don’t count as much. The Kokusui-kai Sugaya shot at are now part of our group. We merged with them last year, so now we’re in Tokyo. Won’t be long before we control the entire country. And I don’t think that will be a good thing.”

I was a little puzzled. “You’re a yakuza yourself. Where’s your team pride?”

He laughed. “Maybe I had pride in being a member of the organization once upon a time. But you get closer to the end, you question things. You begin to wonder if everything you took for granted is so good. The organization I entered isn’t the same as it was. When things become too big, they get out of hand, things go bad. A lot of the yakuza have no rules anymore, they don’t respect ordinary citizens, they don’t respect anything. They’re involved in all kinds of really bad shit. Especially the Goto-gumi.”

“More than before?” I asked, hating to ruin his nostalgia buzz.

He was quiet then. He put his hands on his knees and took a deep breath. “Maybe,” he said. “Maybe it always was shit. I don’t know. I’ve done a lot of bad things in my life, but I did a few things right. I never betrayed the oyabun, I never double-crossed a friend, and I never ran away from a fight. Maybe it ain’t much, but it’s the measure of what I am.”

“It counts for something.”

“You bet it does. Now, what did you want to ask me?”

“I’ve got two things.”

“I’m not asking you to number them. Just ask me.”

“I’m missing a friend. I haven’t seen her in a couple of months.”

“Give me a name.”

“Helena.”

“Do you have a picture?”

I gave him one. He looked at it, looked back at me.

“Give me the details.”

I filled him in. I told him who she was and what I had asked her to do. He flinched a little when I mentioned the Goto-gumi and the NGO name. He muttered something and motioned me to come to where he was sitting by the window. I could barely hear him, so I leaned over.

He slapped me across the face with such force that I fell backward and landed on my ass. My ears were ringing so hard I thought I’d gone deaf in one of them. He stood up and glowered at me, motioned for me to get up. He was breathing a little heavily but seemed fine. I didn’t feel fine.

“What the fuck were you thinking?” he screamed at me.

“I didn’t know.”

“You should have known. You’re not a child, you’re a man. You should never have asked her to look into that organization. What is wrong with you?”

“Goddammit, Shibata. I told her to stop.”

“And you should have known she wouldn’t. You liked this woman, maybe more, and she must have liked you. So why did you take the risk? Sometimes you’re so fucking smart, Jake-san, and sometimes you’re just a fucking idiot.”

He gave me his hand and helped me up. His grip was strong. He sat back down.

“I’ll look into it. I don’t think you’ll get the answers you want, but I’ll ask. Now, what’s the other thing you want to know?”

I sat on the bed, trying to sit up and stay up. My balance seemed kind of shot.

“I know that Goto wasn’t the only guy to get a liver transplant at UCLA. I hear there are others. I want one more name.”

Shibata offered me one of his cigarettes, I took it. He was already almost through the pack of Luckys.

He shook his head and stared at the floor for a few minutes. He looked up at me and stared into my eyes. I don’t know what he saw, but he nodded again.

“I know what you’re trying to do. I don’t think it’s wise. But I understand. Are you sure you want to go down that road? It’s kemono no michi.”

“Kemono no michi?”

“Sometimes in the mountains the animals make paths by using the same route again and again. If you don’t know what you’re doing, you might think it’s a path made by humans—it looks that way. If you follow that path, the path of beasts, you won’t get anywhere at all. People lost in the wilderness, they follow these paths and only get more and more lost. Sometimes they lose their way and they die. It’s not a path for humans, it’s a dangerous diversion. Are you sure that’s the road you want to take? It won’t get you where you want to go.”

“Look, I’m just pursuing the story. I’m not planning to do anything crazy.”

“No, you’re not planning at all. Think a little. Keep your eyes on the right road, not the wrong one.”

Then the old bastard whacked me across the face again, even harder. And when I fell down this time, he kicked me in the stomach. I managed not to puke but curled up in a fetal position, feeling very stupid and a little scared. Actually, really scared.

“I’m not making jokes now. You cannot be careless. Don’t trust anyone. If you think this is painful, what Goto will do to you or your friends if he knows what you’re doing will hurt a thousand times more. Don’t fuck around.”

“I understand.”

“Good. Now get your lazy ass up and get me some more Luckys. I’m out. The box is over there on the television.”

I retrieved the cigarettes, but I wouldn’t take them to him. I refused to go within striking range and tossed them at his head. He caught them and chuckled. We had a long conversation after that. Before I left, I reattached the smoke detector with great difficulty. It was really hard to stay balanced on the chair. Have someone slap you as hard as he can, and then you’ll understand why.

In 2007, Shibata died. But before this, he got back to me with a name: Hisatoshi Mio, the founder of the Mio-gumi. He was also a backer of the Emperor of Loan Sharks, Kajiyama. It made a lot of sense. Goto had taught Kajiyama how to move money through Las Vegas. It wasn’t surprising that Goto also knew Mio. I was pretty sure now that the Goto case wasn’t an isolated incident. There was something very strange happening at UCLA. I kept my promise to Shibata. I gave the letter to his wife, and she promised to give it to her son when he was old enough to read. I’ll probably go back someday and make sure he got it. He never gave me anything about Helena.

Sekiguchi followed Shibata that autumn. I had suddenly lost both my main yakuza source and my main police source. My prospects for breaking the Goto story now looked bleak.

Sekiguchi was forty-eight years old. Thinking back on it, I’d known him and his family for almost fourteen years. He took his last breath at 3:45 P.M. on a rainy day toward the end of August. The whole family and I had returned to Japan and were staying with my mother-in-law. It had been good for the kids—they were becoming very skilled at English, and now they needed to brush up on their Japanese.

The day before we were supposed to return to the United States, around August 29, while we were all eating Chinese food, Sekiguchi’s wife called and told me he’d passed away. I wanted to cancel the flight and to be there for the funeral.

I made everyone, except the kids, very angry. I had a heated argument with Sunao and my mother-in-law. They were both of the opinion that I should go to the wake, assuming there was one, and just visit the family the next time I was in Japan. I didn’t agree. You wouldn’t think that a weird Jewish kid and an organized crime cop ten years older than him would have become such good friends, but over the course of so many years, that’s what had happened. I wanted to stay, but Sunao was not having that. I asked Sunao if she could take the kids home by herself. I’d escort her to Narita and have someone meet her at the airport in America and drive everyone home, but I was accused of putting my selfish need over the needs of my family.

We left the Chinese restaurant after eating and went back to Sunao’s home. I had to at least see the Sekiguchi family and pay my respects to the dead. At 10 P.M., I found myself in a taxi heading in the rain toward the Sekiguchi house in desolate Konan. Sunao came with me. We weren’t talking to each other. The rain was coming down so hard the taxi had to stop once or twice along the way. The taxi fare came to almost $250.

A midnight run to the Sekiguchi home. It felt like old times, but it wasn’t. I was wearing a black suit I had with me and had borrowed a black tie from Sunao’s mother.

I know that funerals and wakes are meaningless rituals, but not for the ones left behind. I’d promised Sekiguchi that when he died I would go to his funeral and pay my respects; that I would wear a real suit; and that I would try to wear matching socks. I owed him a stick of incense at least. You would think that people would understand that sometimes promises are binding even after death. It’s one of the few regrets I have in my life: I had promised to go to his funeral, and I didn’t.

His body was already home by the time I got there. It wasn’t laid out in Buddhist fashion, which is typical in Japan. He was going to have a Shinto funeral. When I arrived, his body was on a futon in the living room, Shinto style. I didn’t know anything about Shinto rituals. It was a new experience.

Sekiguchi had taught me more about reporting, interrogation, honor, and trust than anyone else I had ever known. I kind of considered him a second father. I had taken my Beni to see him before I took her to my own parents. Even in death, Sekiguchi still had something to teach me about Japan.

It was weird to see him laid out on the tatami floor like that. They took the white cloth off his face and let me see his expression. He looked as if he were smiling. He had that same shit-eating grin that he used to have when he would dangle tidbits of information in front of me or crack a bad joke or when I’d lost yet another bet to him.

He’d been in a lot of pain over the previous months. Even intravenous dosages of morphine weren’t doing the trick. The cancer was all over his body. For a while he’d been going to the Ariake Cancer Institute in Odaiba, about three hours from his home in Saitama. He was an outpatient, so after being blasted with chemicals and radiation, he’d made the trek back to Saitama by train, sometimes during the rush hour, when there were no seats.

I insisted on paying for him to stay at a hotel, Grand Pacific Le Daiba, which was close to the hospital, after his treatments. He needed to rest before going home. Of course, he protested and refused. He couldn’t accept a gift like that. As a cop—and he was still working, unbelievably—he didn’t want to take anything from me, nothing of monetary value. I told him I was working for a company that owned the hotel and I got the room comped.

It was a lie, of course. I think he knew that it was a lie and that I knew that he knew. But it was necessary. It allowed him to take the gift, and I wanted him to have it. We do that in Japan. There is the public image, tatemae, the facade that must be maintained, and then there is what’s really going on. The tatemae was that he was just borrowing a room. It worked for him and for me. “Uso mo hoben”—lies are also skillful means—is a proverb that comes from a Buddhist sutra.

In that Buddhist sutra, there’s a story about a bunch of children playing in a house. The house is on fire; it’s very dangerous, and if the kids don’t get out, they’ll burn to death. However, the kids won’t leave the house because they’re having too much fun. People are yelling for them to leave, but they won’t, and the door is locked from the inside. Someone tells the children that if they come outside there’s delicious candy waiting for them. It’s a lie, but it gets the kids out of the house and thus they are saved.

Uso mo hoben. Sometimes, yeah.

Unfortunately, I didn’t have the power to get him out of the house. All I could do for him was keep him a little more comfortable as it burned down.

I knew how to pay my respects at a Buddhist funeral, but I was at a loss this time. I followed the protocol as Mrs. Sekiguchi laid it out for me, giving him water and bowing. I laid a cigarette on the table near his head with the food.

It wasn’t the cigarettes that had given him cancer; it was betrayal. Another cop on the police force had leaked damaging information about him to a newspaper a few years back. He was a colleague of Sekiguchi’s but resented Sekiguchi’s success.

Sekiguchi’s “crimes” were uncuffing a yakuza and feeding him a bowl of ramen before taking the guy into the police station to be arrested. Sekiguchi had also broken up a near prison riot by pulling a yakuza out of the holding cells and letting him have a smoke. All these things were violations of police protocol. The cop who had it in for Sekiguchi fed this to a reporter at the Mainichi Shinbun. It was published, and then all the newspapers followed the story up. He was “a bad cop,” after all.

He was stripped of his detective position, demoted, reprimanded, and put on traffic duty. He spent a couple years there in limbo. It ate at him. That’s probably when he got cancer. I think that was the real cause. It was a combination of betrayal, humiliation, and then frustration.

He had asked me to do some things a few months before he died. I kept most of those promises. I promised him I’d check on his family and his daughters periodically. I still do. It’s hard to believe they’re both women now. I look at them, and I still see the six-year-old girl and the nine-year-old girl who tried to convince me that I couldn’t be Jewish because every single Jew had been killed in World War II, just as they’d learned in school. The younger one had wanted to take me to school as an exhibit for show-and-tell.

Sekiguchi lived well. He died well, too. He had looked good the last time I’d seen him; that’s when I’d been sure he was going to die. Most people seem to get better right before the end: the half crazy become lucid, the cancer patient looks healthy. He spoke with his family the day before he died, and he had positive things to say to them; they had a good conversation. He left the world at peace with himself and his family. That’s what Mrs. Sekiguchi told me, and I was glad to hear it.

In Buddhism, after forty-nine days, you are reborn, but in Shinto-ism, after fifty days, you become a deity, according to the Sekiguchi family. I looked at him and thought, I really hope that works out.

It’s always good to have a god on your side.

I knew I was in trouble. I knew I had put my family in jeopardy. Helena was still missing.

I can still remember seeing that smile on Sekiguchi’s face. It looked as if he was pretending to sleep. In my imagination, I could hear him talking to me. I wanted him to tell me what to do. I wanted to hear his words: “Jake, sometimes you have to pull back to fight back. Ask yourself, what time is it now?”

Well, God knows I was sick of getting my ass kicked. Pulling back didn’t seem like an option anymore. Maybe it was time to fight back. It seemed better than the alternative.