CHAPTER V

…

As far as I've learned, people do not care whether you're telling them the truth or you're telling them a lie, as long as they are entertained by it. If enough people believe a lie, it will eventually become the truth. Things get out of hand so quickly. In fact, I know about another woman who also lied about her pregnancy to her husband, and now… there's an entire religion about it.

Anyways. Just the other day Miura Yumiko stormed into my school and stirred up trouble, which obviously drew unwanted attention towards me; another fiasco I didn't need. Who does she think she is? Does Miura really believe she's the Queen of England or something? One of these days, I'll get even with her. On the contrary, I'm actually a very nice person, even if the whole world seems to antagonize me; I normally don't go after people in order to exact my revenge - if I wasn't this nice, then the world would've ended already. But of course, as they say, "forgive, but don't forget the bastard's name."

It seems that the news of my unexpected confrontation with the girl from Yotsukaido spread like wildfire, regardless if it were lies or baseless rumors. The guys in the Journalism club wouldn't stop bugging me about my "girlfriend". They also found out how Miura and I "dated" every Wednesday, and plenty more little details that were badly twisted from the plain truth. I was exasperated. Anyone with common sense would see that Miura was anything but someone I loved. In any case, it was a trifle not worth losing sleep over. One reason why I chose Journalism is because it has one of the least amount of members on the list. And, having a major in linguistics, I thought it'd be within my area of proficiency. Tobe Kakeru is also in the Journalism club. I couldn't believe it. He's our paper editor. How is it possible for such a dimwit to become the leader of a club that deals with literature and society? I'm just a writer; I correct grammatical mistakes, compose articles from whatever information my clubmates bring in from the field interviews, and sometimes also act as the co-editor (because Tobe sucks at his job.) Yui Yuigahama is a member of the Pop club, but she sits in our room just to hang out and pass the time. She usually helps us by giving material to put into the paper - celebrity news, fashion trends, the like.

Then there's Orimoto Kaori, a girl I used to know back in Junior high. She goes to Chiba University as well. It's peculiar how people act as if they don't know each other when they actually do - you'll notice that your colleagues either recognize you and cheerfully say hello, or they just walk past you like a ghost. That's what she did before we got stuck in the same room for the rest of the third year of college. Orimoto is our field interviewer. It fits, because with her cute face, her phony voice and enthusiasm (which is killing me) she makes a good reporter. The fact that she seemed to only have gotten prettier over the years didn't help me. She goes with the other members to gather material for the paper. Of course, half the time she doesn't do her job at all, and instead goes out with her girl friends, which is no surprise for a typical college girl. So I'm mostly the one bringing in word from the streets. I could actually do a better job than her if I wanted to. I have connections, and almost I know the streets like I know the back of my hand.

Mutsuhiro Fukushi is a lead player in the Basketball varsity. He's the kind of guy who always wears a jersey and is a sneakerhead. The popular girls would always flock all over him and his team. He's the polar opposite of me; in a different circumstance, it would've been impossible for us to associate with each other at all. Fukushi said that my story was unbelievable. The jocks in his team were all pissed, and I might get the typical harassment anytime soon. Everyone knew that the professor was a ruthless and strict man, and it was funny that he was letting me off. A lot of students from different classes complained about it, so the professor told them what Miura had told him. Yes, that abortion nonsense! I was prepared to just take the F if it were to come to that but alas, my campus life is essentially terminated. I probably couldn't go to my class anymore. That also explained why the girls in my major weren't talking to me at all - not like they did in the first place - and they were looking at me as if I'm a pervert. If people didn't avoid me before, they did now.

Afterwards, any classes that I took, people were talking and talking about me. I've been making such progress with my social image, only for it to come crashing down now. What a waste of time. But it gave me a nostalgic feeling. It feels right at home to be the social outcast again. Perhaps I was feeling lucky and the universe noticed I had become a "normie" for two years straight. Now, they're out to put me back where I belong: outside of society. Maybe I was never inside the box in the first place. Why am I not surprised? But that's not all. This is nothing compared to what I've been through thus far. I've lived half my life on the wrong end of society, so people gossiping behind my back is textbook defamation for me. It hardly affects me at all. When you get sick enough times, you'll start to build immunity to this kind of thing. Somehow, I'll just manage to turn this disadvantage into my strength.

I got a B grade in the class C-306, which I couldn't go to anymore. I didn't go to class at all during Wednesdays, and I only took the semester exams. If I scored that high while caught in this fiasco, imagine if I didn't have to skip a day of class every week. I was never the scholarly type, but I might even get an A-plus grade. The professor must've taken my "situation" into consideration, so people started hating me even more. C-306 was one of the top-level classes in Chiba University, and you have to work your arse off just to get a B; to put into perspective, no more than three students at a time can obtain an A grade in that class. Fukushi told me that such things had never happened before, and never will. He said it was going to be a campus legend.

Young people these days wallow in their youth for much longer than they ought to. My dad always told me that it was work that taught young people the value of the money which they often spent like it grew on trees. He turned out to be right, and these days with Japan becoming more open for the rest of the world, and with the ongoing immigration-emigration in the population, it's getting harder to find a job in the city, and even more a fair salary. It seemed like it was more practical to travel abroad, which most people did, where the prospects of a good future was more likely. For those who didn't leave the country, they now found themselves competing with the growing immigrant population.

I didn't stick around in school longer than I have to after dismissal. There's nothing much for me to do there. But there's loads of things in Sakaecho for me that needed straightening out. I immediately headed down to the district after school. Needless to say, the guys weren't too overjoyed on finding out what had been the cause of my absences. Hanzo was shaking his head. Fukushi and Matsudo were also not amused the moment I walked into the house. They said it was not fair and I was "acting up" on them. They got it all wrong. If only they knew my struggle. But being in the company of a beautiful, albeit despicable blonde was a sort of happy struggle, isn't it? You think having a girlfriend is all fun and games? Well, you haven't seen anything yet. I knew where this was going. The classic peer pressure trick. It was obvious these guys were just jealous because I get to skip classes and hang out with a hot girl. Remember when you were a kid, and you had the coolest toy in the neighborhood, and every other kid treated you like a king just so they could get their hands on it? The fact is that these guys just want to get even.

It's been a while since our last score, and they were itching to run a new scheme, and that being the package delivery. I didn't want to take any unnecessary risks, as I intended to finish college without a criminal record. Yesterday, I crossed paths again with Tobe and Yui while I was downtown, and the three of us went out to have coffee. Yui left both of us for a few moments, which was exactly what I needed to reach an epiphany. I asked Tobe what he would do if he was offered three hundred thousand yen for doing a "not-so-legal" job. That got him stumped for a moment, and sent him immediately prying into what I was up to. He thought we were going to rob a bank. "Well, I don't know dude, three hundred grand doesn't seem worth dying for," he eventually answered. Then it hit me. Tobe had unknowingly given me the answer.

I left in a hurry to go to the nightclub that evening. It's true, even a billion yen isn't worth your life. It nearly isn't worth anyone's life at all. Hanzo, Fukushi and Matsudo were impatient to hear my answer. I told them to count me in, but on one condition. They were all gleeful and saying that it was the "right" move. I joined on the condition that absolutely no one will get hurt. There'll be no setting cars on fire, sticking a gun into someone's face, or any deadly notions. That was the condition. This isn't the first time I got involved in criminal activity. I'm not a bad person, but I'm not nice either. It would be more accurate to say that I'm a bad citizen. Like I said, being a bartender at The Grandeur wasn't my only job. The more people you see who were into these kinds of things, the more you think that maybe it wasn't so bad. You'll think that it all lies in doing the job right and not getting caught. I'm a bookmaker, a loan shark, a fence, but a robber? Not until now. Not everyone can grow up to be a doctor, an engineer, a movie star or a professional athlete with good salary and stability. There'll always be people who'll have to get their hands dirty. You could say I was baptised by the bitter reality of life, and now see certain things from a different perspective.

The most serious act that I have ever committed up until now is trashing the Yellow Cab Company last year. No, not the pizza joint. It was a new taxi service company which had just settled in Sakaecho district, and the cabstand opened down on Humming road. An aspiring entrepreneur came from Fukui to the city with the intentions of starting his own business. His first mistake was getting comfortable right in our own backyard. The guy was from a well off family, and thought all he needed to do was get married to a local girl and he was automatically one of us - that he could just compete with Manuel Ieyori. He lowered his prices. He worked around the clock. He set up special discounts to take people from the last railway and bus stops on Myoken Dori avenue to Chuo ward or Mihama ward, and even as far as Narita airport.

I was actually impressed by the tenacity of the man. But the guy either didn't know how things worked around here, or he was dumb. Soon, yellow-painted cabs began lining our streets. It looked alien compared to our plain white labeled cars. The folks at our cabstand didn't like it. Manny had sent people to talk to the guy. They said the guy was stubborn. Manuel Ieyori went to talk to the guy himself, and told him that there wasn't enough business for two companies. There probably was, but by now he just didn't want the guy around here in Sakaecho. Finally, one day after Manny had been cursing around the cabstand all day long, he called me and his nephew Hanzo to meet him at the cabstand after midnight. I couldn't believe it - I was excited and at the same time scared. I knew Manny had something planned for the Yellow Cab Company, but I didn't know what it was.

When I got to the cabstand, Manny and his nephew were waiting for me. They had a 5-gallon container of gasoline in the back of the car. We drove around the neighbourhood until all the lights were out in the office of the Yellow Cab Company, on Humming road. Then Manny gave me a hammer with a rag wrapped around its head, while Hanzo carried the gallon of gasoline. After a long moment of hesitation and encouragement from Manuel Ieyori, I began smashing in the door windows of every yellow cab along the road. It took me three strikes to break in the first window, but after that, I got the hang of it and finished the job. Right behind me was Hanzo, throwing gasoline-soaked newspapers through the windows I had just smashed and dousing the seats of the cars, while his uncle watched us.

As soon as Hanzo finished, we both ran back to our car. He said it was dumb to be standing in the middle of the street with an empty gasoline can when the fires began. I shivered. Every CCTV camera along this street was controlled by our folks, and they knew not to meddle with business. Manny gave me the honors of setting the Yellow Cab Company alight. I ignited the entire pack of matches inside the box just like I'd been instructed, and threw them like flares inside every broken cab window. I feared that the car would blow up immediately, which was silly. But as soon as I set the last cab alight, one car exploded into a beautiful orange ball of fire. I was scared and amazed out of my wits, as I ran as fast as I could to escape the subsequent explosions. Across the street, Hanzo was waving the empty can in the air, cheering, while Manuel Ieyori smiled at me, with a look of a proud father who had just watched his son score a home run. At that moment, I knew my life wouldn't be the same.

I chuckled at the memory. I keep saying that I just want to live a very quiet life, but it seems that the universe has other plans for me. But if I'm going to be honest, I don't hate this kind of life. It wouldn't matter anyways, as bitching about circumstances never got anyone anywhere. So I accepted, and joined Hanzo and the gang. I will be the one to devise and dictate the entire operation, which must succeed flawlessly, if we were to get away with a million yen. Additionally, I managed to secure thirty percent as my share, while the rest of them got twenty-three percent of the money, because I was pretty much responsible for this scheme after all. If everything goes well, and it will, I'll soon be able to join my family overseas. I'm not a genius, and I'm most certainly not a criminal mastermind. But if I had to do one job, I damn well would not fail at that.

On the first Saturday of October, we were prepared to pull off this scheme. We drove down the 357 highway and took a right at Wangan-doro avenue, and into Kawasakicho. This was one of the terminals where freighters unloaded cargo. There were rows of warehouses, stacks of containers, and floodlights and lampposts illuminating the roads. The office building oversaw the tons of goods that went through every week; textiles, wire rolls, petrol, electronics and foodstuffs. Japan was an industrial powerhouse that consumed raw materials and churned out exports. There were more exports than imports in the country. Sometimes, the ships also brought in unexpected stowaways who discovered that it was easier to slip through the unloading bays than the airports. The bay was black and slightly turbulent, and I could spot red-belted ships several miles off the coast at anchor. Specks of light from the bridge blinked time and again. There were no stars in the sky. You couldn't see them because of the light pollution in the city. It was bitterly cold. The guards at the checkpoint were very passive and allowed our box truck to enter without much hassle. We provided an ID (a duplicate of course.) It looked like we were wholesalers for a supermarket. Who would've expected we were here to steal a presumably high-value package?

We waited for over an hour. It was almost one o' clock past midnight. We're inside the truck, watching for a freighter docking at the pier. The port of Chiba handles more than 160 million tonnes of cargo annually, rivaling the port of Nagoya as the busiest ports in the country. You'd think that the package we were about to seize would be a grain in the bucket a sand with that much shipping going on down there, but something told me that there was a reason why the Ichihara-kai were interested in this particular package. We spotted our ship unloading cargo onto the bay. Workers dressed in neon-yellow vests carted away metal containers, and some of them drove forklifts. Most of them were foreigners, and we overheard them chatting in their foreign tongues. Only now did we find out what the target package was: it appeared to be a stack of crates covered in green canvas. It looked like a birthday present to us. It slid down the ramp bridging the unloading bay to the starboard side of a massive red freighter. I couldn't wait to get this whole thing over with.

According to Hanzo, the package contained high-tech CPUs which would be worth a lot in the black market. He was tipped where we would take the package already, and all that was left now was to steal it. Fukushi had managed to borrow this truck from a bistro to use for transport. Matsudo, arguably the smartest among the four of us, obtained the schedules and timetables in the port through some clever way. Everything was set. We felt uneasy, as normal with these kinds of plans. I've devised our plan to take advantage of a fifteen minute gap, but I was sure that it'll take over an hour for the officials to actually get here and claim the package. Still, it was better to be safe than sorry, and by the time they notice we'll be long gone. They'll try to trace the plate number of this truck, but Matsuda tampered with the plate making us essentially invisible to the police, but only for so long. I know that we didn't leave loose ends. I ran the operation in my mind countless times, and it will not fail.

We pulled over the truck beside the entrance of the warehouse, and as soon as our shoes hit the cold ground, we started getting to work. Hanzo began flaunting an orange piece of paper to the workmen. It was a sham. Matsudo printed out a fake manifest for the package, and they believed we were legit. They wanted IDs, so we provided the fake licenses. I even told them to phone up the office. There we are on the pier, hauling the crates into the box truck at a steady pace. It was just like the liquor and cigarette bootlegging operations we occasionally took part in; we'd help unload Manny's trucks at the cabstand. Before you know it, we're driving out of the unloading bay and down the E4 highway, making away with a successful job. It wasn't even a robbery. We didn't have to make a single threat. It was a brilliant theft. Nobody suspected a thing, and the workers at the bay thought it was an order pickup.

My three accomplices were whooping with joy, while I allowed a small smile to form on my lips. But it was no time to celebrate yet. We kept driving for around fifteen kilometers towards Ichihara city. That is where we were to conduct the transaction of the packages. Then a sudden thought unsettled me. What if, by some breach of impossibility, we picked up the wrong packages? I told Hanzo to stop the truck just as we were about to cross the Yoro river, and we pulled over near a park. I just needed to see what was inside those crates. They were all confused, saying that it was unnecessary and might jinx everything, but I insisted. We all opened the back of the truck and set one rectangular crate down, and pried it open. I remembered catching a glimpse of the suspicious label on the side of the boxes, and sure enough, it was worse than I anticipated. Everyone was silent, as we stood around the opened package, staring grimly.

"Hanzo… what did you say was in those packages?" I slowly looked at him.

"But… there's no way!"

"Well, look at what we've got."

"They told me it was just computer parts… could it be that we've taken the wrong package?"

"No, this might be exactly what they wanted," Matsudo said, stooping down to take a closer look.

I already knew from the start that it was not just some package of computer parts. If we are to use movies for reference, this is the point that everything changes and the tables turn. Regardless whether we picked up the wrong package or not back at the pier, this was a huge change in our plan. One million was too big of a reward for just some computer parts, yet too little for anything much more serious. If you thought they were drugs, well… you're wrong.

"This is an M4 Carbine assault rifle," Matsudo cradled the weapon in his hands carefully. The gun was a beautiful black color, with a matte finish. It was plain and without attachments, yet it was handsome, and its magazine remained in the box, alongside three more carbines, slotted in the cutouts of the styrofoam. "A1 variant, semi-auto and capable of full auto fire. Chambered for 5.56 cartridge. This is military grade, guys," he explained.

"What are we going to do?" Hanzo asks.

"We finish the job, obviously." Fukushi says.

"No."

They all stare at me.

"This is not the deal."

"What the fuck are you saying?" Fukushi frowns, crossing his arms. "Let's just deliver and get it all over with, for god's sake! We'll have the money and- "

"You think we can just waltz out of this deal with what we agreed with? Does Hanzo even know who we're conducting the transaction with?"

Hanzo didn't answer. Matsudo meanwhile inspected the rest of the crates inside the truck. Pushing the pair of glasses on his nose methodically, he stated that there were seven more of the same rectangular crates, ten more different crates and several boxes of ammunition. There's a very high chance that even if we get to where we're supposed to deliver these packages, we'll get cheated and sent away without the money. And what can we do about it? Call the police? Say that we got cheated in a deal to deliver stolen guns to the Yakuza? In the worst case scenario, we might get whacked by the very people we're dealing with.

"What are we going to do then?"

"These guns are worth more than what we bargained for," I said.

"If I had to guess, fifty thousand dollars, more or less," Matsudo told us.

Fukushi asked how much were the guns worth in yen. Like a calculator, Matsudo ran the numbers. "Roughly around six million yen, I think. And gun prices have a high inflation rate here, so probably five, six times that number."

That was a whole goddamn lot of money. If we were to re-sell these guns (which would be pure stupidity) it'd be worth a lot more than that. Just as I expected, we were getting much less for our troubles. Unlike in the United States where there are more guns than there are Americans, Japan has a very strict law on guns. How effective, you ask? Let it be said that Japan has the lowest gun-related crime rate in the world. Handguns are banned outright, and let's not get started on high powered, automatic weaponry. I've read in a magazine that a Glock-19 goes for around two, three hundred dollars on the streets in the U.S., but here in Japan it could cost up to half a million yen apiece.

The only thing that you could legally own were air rifles and shotguns and even then, you'd have to get a permit, training, even a drug and psychology test - every reason that would make a kitchen knife a more practical weapon to acquire. Not even the Yakuza possess such heavy armament. Forget the gunslinging action you see in the movies. The truth is the average "Yakuza" gangster would never want to use a gun. It's a life sentence. And having a gun doesn't automatically turn someone into a killer hitman. There's hardly any civilian shooting ranges in Tokyo, every ammunition store requires you to return even your used cartridges, and if you haven't noticed, murders around here are usually done with cold weapons, like knives or bludgeons.

Finally, I speak up. I told them that whoever gets a hold of these weapons will become dangerous, and should a gang manage to arm themselves with guns, they could easily subdue their rivals by intimidation backed with real force. They were all staring at me wide-eyed, as if not knowing what I was saying. Slowly, they realized the circumstances and what I was proposing to them. Like I said, gun laws ensured that the Japanese public did not have ready access to firearms. If even an ordinary citizen were to gain access to these weapons, it would mean one potentially dangerous gunman lurking in public, with the capability to harm dozens of other people; and given these rifles? It'll be a massacre. A boryokudan gang with calculated intentions has numerous methods to put these guns to their advantage. It would mean over seventy weapons, possessed by seventy potentially dangerous individuals, who will put a whole lot of people in danger. But on the other hand, this was indeed an opportune moment. He who smiles in the face of crisis has found an opportunity. And I found myself smiling.

"We are in a position to take advantage of this situation. We'll be making more than just a million yen," I say.

And on that early Sunday morning, I had once again become the de-facto leader of a gang of bartenders.