“You don’t like playing them, or watching them, or both?”

  “I don’t mind playing them. I like volleyball. I’m not much of a team player. I hate watching baseball, football — bores the hell out of me.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “Because life shouldn’t be a spectator sport. Because I’m unable to see the victory of a bunch of overpaid athletes as my victory. It has nothing to do with me.”

  “What if you were betting a million dollars on the outcome of the game?”

  “Then I’d be wearing a cheerleader outfit and screaming, ‘Go team go!’ over a megaphone.”

  He laughed.

  “You might not have made a bad yakuza. In another day and time.”

  “What about yourself?”

  “I’m the same way. There are better ways to waste our hours on this earth than watching grown men play children’s games. Even when you have a stake in the game.”

  “You don’t get any vicarious joys from the victories, the spoils of war, grabbing new territories?”

  “I can see the end in sight. For decades, we’ve been playing a game of monopoly.”

  I was kind of surprised he knew Monopoly. I was expecting a Japanese Go simile. He picked up on that.

  “Monopoly was huge in Japan. I loved playing that game as a kid. I figured out early that you wanted to invest in the mid-to-high-level real estate early on. Collect rent. People who banked on raking it in via Park Place and the high-end properties always lost. And there were worse things than going to jail.”

  “So how the did the game of Monopoly turn out?”

  “We won everything, and that’s why we lost. The whole board is ours, and now the game is over. The man is coming to collect the board, the properties, the investments, and everything we took, earned, or stole. Because we got too big. Japan isn’t Mexico. We’re not going to take over the country. A few more upgrades to the law, and we’re gone. Maybe we’ll exist as a cultural treasure.”

  “So there’ll be a bunch of tattooed old men walking around in expensive suits, with some young thugs menacing people — sort of an interactive thing?”

  “I don’t have any tattoos. I’ve always been a businessman, not the illustrated man.”

  He was damn smart. I had to give him that. I thought I knew him completely, and here he was throwing me off by referencing Ray Bradbury. I knew he read a lot, but mostly historical fiction. Or so I thought.

  “Well, you can always say the game was fun while it lasted.”

  “It started out as fun, but we all forgot the rules. The money was exciting for a long time, but you get to be my age, and there’s not much that money can buy you anymore. It can buy you time. Maybe a new liver — if you’re a coward. Maybe a new heart, possibly new lungs. Maybe it can buy you a beautiful woman who will pretend to love you and hope you die quickly, so she can inherit whatever she thinks you have. It can’t buy you peace of mind, or a good night’s sleep.”

  “JP Morgan once said, ‘There’s a certain amount of nirvana that comes from having money in the bank.’”

  “A wise man.”

  “When are you going to retire?”

  “They want me to take over in a few years. I don’t want to.”

  “But isn’t that the goal? You’d be one of the most powerful men in Japan, in the underworld at least.”

  “The real power is always the number two. The number one is a figurehead. The number three controls the money. Number four deals with all the other shit until he gets to be number three. Number five is the best place to be. You collect money from the bottom, pay a fraction to the top and you sit out the power struggles.”

  “It’s not easy being on top, I hear. You can’t smoke, and you can’t drink. You’re supposed to be a role model.” I tapped my fingers on my chest.

  He motioned for the bodyguard to leave the room. I got up and opened the window, and took a pack of Dunhills out of my pocket. I had clove cigarettes with me. I didn’t want to smoke, but it would override the smell of his cigarettes.

  We moved over to the balcony and stepped outside onto the patio. I opened the pack of cigarettes and gave him one, then offered him the pack, but he motioned for me to hold it. I was about to light his cigarette, like a good host, but he took the lighter from my hands and lit it himself, and then lit mine. I wasn’t going to stand on ceremony.

  We both looked out at the sea and inhaled deeply, and then sighed. And laughed. There was something so juvenile and intimate about the whole exchange.

  “Damn. These are good. I miss smoking.”

  “Everything good is bad for you, you know.”

  He nodded.

  “Maybe,” I added.

  “Did you ever see that movie Ichigoichie?”

  “You mean Forest Gump?”

  “Is that the English title?”

  “Yes, Forest Gump. The Japanese title in English would be something like One Meeting in One Lifetime: Forest Gump.”

  “Interesting film. I saw that on a plane, and I thought to myself, Life as a yakuza isn’t a box of chocolates.”

  “What’s it like then? A six-pack of beer?”

  “Life is like a pack of cigarettes. It’s like a fresh pack of menthol cigarettes in the Japanese summer. Someone told me that in the U.S. only fags smoke menthol cigarettes.”

  “Some people say that.”

  “Well, fuck them. Men smoke menthol cigarettes in Japan.”

  If there’s one thing I learned as a reporter, it’s that, sometimes, the best thing you can do to really understand your subject at a profound level is to just shut up and let the expert speak. Without interruption. Without asking a single question. I never forgot what he said.

  “If you want them to last, you get the hard case. The box. The box is compact, solid, feels good in your hands; you light up, and the menthol makes you feel cool inside, even though it’s humid and hot outside. You get a buzz, it tastes good. But that’s only for the first few cigarettes. The humidity creeps in, and they go stale fast. But you keep on smoking them anyway. You begin to believe that if you smoked enough cigarettes, something magical would happen, and somewhere down the road, the last cigarette would taste as good as the first. Even if you don’t get a buzz, at least it clears your head. You can think better. It’s almost as good as that nicotine high.

  “You wait. You smoke. You think. You work. You get tired of waiting for a buzz that doesn’t come. And, finally, you throw the pack in the road carelessly and buy another.

  “You know you’re not supposed to smoke. Everyone knows it’s bad for you. But you keep doing it.

  “You gather with the other smokers. Fuck the rest of the world. If they don’t like the stench, they can get the hell out of the room. If you flick your hot ash in the wind, and someone gets burned, they’re unlucky. That’s how it goes. You and your pals keep smoking them while you’ve got them. You and your friends eventually decide to smoke the same brand — even though there’s no real difference, except in the taste, the packaging, and the lethality.

  “You are united in your misery and your tiny rebellion. Share a smoke, make a friend, become a blood brother, shun people not smoking your brand. That’s the yakuza world. You smoke where you want to, when you want to. The whole world is your ashtray.

  “When you’re young, you don’t know that your secondhand smoke is poisoning everyone around you. When you’re older and you figure it out, you’re sorry and you’re a little more considerate, or you just don’t care. You keep on doing this for years. Even after the first cigarettes no longer taste good, even when the cigarettes are stale right out of the pack. Quitting doesn’t even occur to you as an option.

  “You can change brands, buy a better quality of cigarette, but it always ends up the same. The older you get, the faster the cigarettes burn. In the end, you wind up with nothing but cancer and a trail of ashes behind you — that’s your legacy.

  “If you’ve been really successful, maybe you leave behind a gold-plated Dunhill lighter and a carton of unfinished coffin nails. And somebody else starts smoking your cigarettes.”

  And then, when he was done speaking, as if he’d timed it to the second, his cigarette burnt out. He took out another, and I lit it for him.

  I lit one for myself.

  “You know,” I said a little hesitantly, “you could try quitting. It’s never too late.”

  “You’re right, but it’s one of the few little pleasures I have left in life. Might as well savor it. So.”

  “So.”

  “So, did you come here because you need something?”

  “I wanted to thank you for your advice all those years ago. It worked out. Not quite the way I thought it would, but it did.”

  “Advice is cheap. Is there anything else I can do for you?”

  I explained that I had a friend in trouble. I was worried that he might do something that would put him in jail. And maybe put someone else in a hospital, or in the grave.

  “So what do you want me to do?”

  “I want you to handle it so no one else gets hurt.”

  He took a long deep breath and then said, “What exactly are you asking for?”

  “I’m not asking you to do anything at all. I’m just telling you that I’m worried.”

  He went on.

  In his own organization, there were yakuza who had bought the telephone numbers of cops, eavesdropped on their conversations, and tried to threaten the detectives by implying that they’d hurt their children or their wives. That was unheard of — that was something the mafia did. Even as a bluff, what kind of asshole threatens to hurt children? And what if they actually did? When the yakuza start menacing the police, women, and children, the police don’t take that lightly.

  The anti-organized crime ordinances kept gnawing away at the core business. The United States had banned transactions with the yakuza. Uchibori and the second-in-command of the Yamaguchi-gumi had their U.S. credit cards frozen. American Express? No yakuza carried it in their wallets anymore. Citibank, which had been disciplined twice by Japan’s Financial Services Agency for laundering money for the yakuza — they were no longer a safe place to bank either. How was an honest thug supposed to survive without a bank account, a place to live, or a credit card? The phone companies were not renewing cell phone contracts either. A modern-day yakuza without a cell phone? Inconceivable. The police and the government were killing them off with contracts, ordinances, and inconvenience.

  The organization’s upper management was telling low-level yakuza to stop carrying business cards. But what fun was it being a yakuza without your daimon? Nobody could wear the badges anymore. The franchise was starting to fall apart.

  He explained it to me in terms of a McDonald’s, assuming that this was something an American would understand. Who would want to run a McDonald’s if you couldn’t use the golden arches or call yourself a McDonald’s? The name was half the business.

  There had been a code once. Not everyone kept it, but people knew what it was. The young guys coming up in the organization — they didn’t know the code, and if they did know it, they didn’t care. They were running elaborate frauds preying on the elderly or grandmothers estranged from their kids. They were stealing cars and exporting them overseas. Some of the brighter ones were now in the entertainment business, managing teenage girl bands, scamming idiot fans who believed they might one day be loved by the girls they obsessed over. They were making money selling child pornography and borderline child pornography. The surviving yakuza weren’t engaged in any of the traditional crimes — collecting protection money, running gambling dens, simple extortion. The ones that survived were running labor-dispatch companies, dubious IT venture outfits, consumer-loan companies, and retirement funds that went bankrupt (after all the funds had been siphoned off), leaving thousands of people without a pension.

  The hot-headed kamikaze type of yakuza who were good in a gang war were now useless. There were no gang wars, except in southern Japan. There was one gang that ruled them all. No need for fights. In fact, hot-headed violent members were a liability. The Japanese courts had ruled that the head of the organization bore employer liability for anything that those below him did.

  Even Tsukasa Shinobu, the head of the Yamaguchi-gumi, had been sued. He’d been sued along with Goto for $2 million by the family of the real estate agent Kazuoki Nozaki.

  Nozaki, as rumoured, was eventually killed, over a real estate deal in 2006. After a five-year investigation, the police and prosecution managed to put away four Goto-gumi members for the murder, and had an arrest warrant issued for one more, who was shot to death in Thailand — but they couldn’t pin the crime on Goto.

  Tsukasa Shinobu had been in solitary confinement at the time of the murder, and generally didn’t approve of killing civilians. Goto paid the family over $1.2 million and apologised. He then fled the country — seeming to prove that you can get away with murder in Japan if you’re a yakuza boss and the only underling who can testify you gave the orders is conveniently killed before he (or you) can be arrested.

  Tsukasa, rightly, was able to walk away without paying damages, since he wasn’t responsible.

  But that was rare. As any boss could be sued for the crimes of his underlings, whether he was responsible or not, most bosses settled out of court.

  If some hot-headed punk in the organization beat up a civilian or, God forbid, killed them, the family had the right to demand compensation from the bosses at the top, and increasingly they did. And so the loose cannons were let loose. The organization didn’t need men with brute strength; it needed good businessmen.

  There was no loyalty, no honour, no meritocracy. If you wanted to be in the upper echelon of the group, you brought a few million dollars in cash to the second-in-command, and within a few weeks you were sitting at the top. You didn’t earn a position anymore; you bought it.

  Even the pretense of not bothering civilians was barely heeded. Guys like Saigo, Coach, The Buddha — they were as out of date as Windows 95. Maybe some organizations tried to keep the code, but there were signs as far back as 2003 that the yakuza world was going to shit. That year, the Kudo-kai in southern Japan threw a grenade into a hostess club that wouldn’t pay them protection money. They killed people with almost no compunction, and beat them up with less.

  I was curious. Had things really changed that much, I asked my contact. When he looked back on it all now, had it been worth it? Did he feel like he’d lived a good life?

  He took some time to mull that over. He said that there was a time when the yakuza were the only place that the burakumin, the Koreans, the Chinese, the dyslexic, and the outcasts of Japanese society could find a home. The yakuza would take anyone. They were the employment agency of last resort. And maybe that had been good. They gave the outcasts discipline, brotherhood, and rules to follow. Street crime was low in Japan when the yakuza were strong. That was good.

  During natural disasters, the yakuza banded together and brought food, water, clothes, and supplies to stricken areas faster than the government ever did. They had no red tape; they just did it. There were ulterior motives for some of them, but not all of them. That was a public service.

  He confessed something as he was speaking.

  “I’m half-Chinese. My mother was from Taiwan. I’m not full-blooded Japanese. It doesn’t bother me, but when I was growing up, it bothered other people. I’d have never risen this high in a Japanese company. I’d have smashed my head on the invisible ceiling.”

  But, for the most part, the yakuza and his group had been like every other company in Japan, all about making money, and making even more money, and controlling more of the market. It was all about business. All the gang wars in the old days, the assassinations, the fights — they were all really about mergers and acquisitions. Most of it was just about expanding the nawabari as far as it could go. Giri was something he and other yakuza had once esteemed, but for many it had lost the moral meaning of the word, the sense of reciprocity. Now it was just code for yakuza gatherings: memorials, release from prison celebrations, funerals, succession ceremonies — everything except weddings. The daimon — no more than a corporate symbol. The credo of the group, the lofty ideals — more or less PR. He joked about corporate governance and corporate responsibility. In that sense, in the sense that they weren’t dumping toxic waste into the water supply, they had that. There were rules of conduct that had once been kept but that now no one even paid lip service to.

  I didn’t know if that was really the case. I asked, hadn’t the gap between the yakuza as they saw themselves and how they were always been huge?

  “You know, I’ve been in this business a very long time. And I’ll tell you something. Even when I was starting, they’d be talking about ‘the last true yakuza’. They’d tell us the previous generation was more honest, tougher, more patient, worked harder, kept the code. I don’t know if that was ever true. It’s like anything in this world. Ninety-nine percent of it is crap. There have always been, and may always be, 1 percent in the yakuza who have some sense of decency, some honor, who keep to the code. Inoue — he was one of those. Maybe he was the last yakuza.”

  “Well, you’re still in the business.”

  He laughed again, very hard.

  “I’ve done some awful things to get where I am, even worse things to stay where I am. I can say I never betrayed my own people, and that’s something. I look after my people, and I pay my debts to those I owe. But I’m not a yakuza. I’m a businessman who can’t retire.”

  He smiled, and motioned for me to give him another cigarette. As soon as I did, he put it to his lips. Without even thinking about it, I took out my lighter and lit it for him. That’s the order of things.

  “So, about your friend,” he said, “What exactly is it you want me to do?”

  “I’m not asking you to do anything,” I said again. “I’m just saying I’m worried. Even if I did, I wouldn’t ask.”