The other members of the gang called Kousuke Mizukawa “Dog.” Kousuke didn’t know why. He supposed it might have something to do with the fact that he ended up joining the yakuza without ever dabbling in minor street gangs, with no history of delinquency and no notable admiration for the yakuza way of life.
One day, a yakuza member took a liking to him and brought Mizukawa into the gang. All because of his slightly unusual way of fighting… He was taken in like a stray dog. Mizukawa had to agree; it was a fitting analogy.
In any case, they didn’t call him “Dog” because of his appearance. Mizukawa didn’t look like the stereotypical yakuza. He was twenty-two with a slim build and poor posture. He was androgynous and wore cheap glasses, the kind any student would buy. He seemed an intellectual type, with nothing threatening about his aura. There was certainly nothing bulldog-like about him.
In some countries, calling someone “Dog” would be quite offensive, but not so much in Japan. It just made you wonder why someone would say that. Perhaps they called him that because he wouldn’t understand what was so bad about it.
Well, if that was the case, then they were right. He didn’t understand it, so he simply let it go. That was his way of dealing with life. Rather than investing a lot of energy into thinking about something headache-inducing, he saved his brainpower for more immediate issues. He was a doer.
He always did what came naturally to him.
Fifteen members of the gang told him no, they insisted, they yelled… Eventually, they tried to stop him with force, but he defeated them all with an extendable baton. He didn’t feel great about that. They were protecting both their own interests and the organization’s. Sure, they might’ve simply been scared minnows who’d rather turn a blind eye to trouble than deal with it, but still.
Mizukawa, though, wouldn’t be stopped.
“Excuse me,” he said, opening the sliding door without waiting to be summoned in.
Inside the room, a bald, seventy-something-year-old man was sitting on a futon spread on the floor. This was the boss. He was holding a sword still in its scabbard.
For a few seconds, they just stared at each other, the ticking of the clock on the wall seeming louder than it should be. Mizukawa glanced at it. It was past eleven PM… Not great.
Mizukawa knelt on the floor beside the boss.
“I think you know why I’m here. I’m going, and I need your secret treasure.”
The old man sighed, laid the sword on the floor, pushed off the blanket, and sat cross-legged, facing Mizukawa. He had once been a strong fighter, supposedly, but to Mizukawa, he was no different from the decrepit elderly wheeled into hospitals every day. It was creepy how much the boss looked like a withering tree. Mizukawa knew the boss had started suffering from hearing problems a few years earlier, perhaps the origin of his sharp decline.
“Do you have to do this?” the boss asked.
“I see no reason not to.”
“Do you really need to take that with you?”
“It’s how I do things.”
“That’s the thing with you, isn’t it…?” The boss crossed his arms and rolled his eyes. “You are who you are, Mizukawa… Okada told me, ‘I’ve found this weird stray, and he’s fun. I wanna make a guard dog out of him.’ Then he brought you to me.”
That was when Mizukawa first joined the gang, six years earlier. He got into a fight that day, and when Mizukawa was fighting someone, his immediate intent was to kill. He didn’t do any glaring, yelling, or posturing. Right off the bat, he was ready to kill, or to at least irreversibly maim his opponent. He’d go for the eyes, cut or rip off the nose or ears, crush the balls… That was how he handled things.
Coming from a rough background, he had learned to fight that way to survive before his sudden growth spurt in his late teens. If someone gave him any trouble at all, he immediately struck them with everything he had, and that instinct stuck with him.
That eventually brought him there—to the boss’s residence. It led him to fighting his way through a bunch of other gang members who might’ve been his seniors. He went on the attack and put everything on the line.
“This is it, then? You’re not changing your mind? I suppose I know the answer already.”
“No.”
“I’m afraid I’m against it.”
“Of course, you have to protect our people… I won’t take up your time. I’ve come to ask you to expel me.”
“That wouldn’t change a thing. If you take that outside, it’s over for us.”
“I’m sorry, but I have to do this for the man I owe everything.”
“Such devotion to that fool Okada. I don’t mind that…but can’t you be a bit smarter about this?”
“Okada just got killed. I don’t think it’s smart for us to pretend like nothing happened and keep working security for the parlor.”
He was referring to the underground casino owned by the gang. Okada had been in charge of it.
Mizukawa, with his underwhelming appearance, would be useless as a bouncer, so instead, he was taking care of various odd jobs at the casino. But one day, he caught a customer shamelessly cheating and, without even saying a word, cut off four of the man’s fingers right then and there. People remembered him after that and gossiped about how the cuts were so clean. The offending customer got his severed digits neatly reattached at the hospital, which happened to be right next to the casino.
From that day on, none of the customers felt brave enough to try to cheat the casino, and likewise, there weren’t any the dealers brave enough to try to cheat the customers. Mizukawa didn’t know if that would actually be bad for business. As far as he was concerned, he did his job. He was known as a man who did his job.
The gang’s illegal gambling den became renowned for its trustworthiness, and its popularity skyrocketed.
“You graduated from stray dog to guard dog. But it’s never been our family you’ve been guarding. It was Okada. Not that I didn’t know that from the start.”
“I’m just a mangy mutt. I’m not some clever guard dog worth a damn.”
“Okada gave a damn.”
“He did, yeah.”
Mizukawa and Okada met six years earlier. Four foreign mafia types thought a miserable-looking, scrawny Japanese man would make an easy target, and they ganged up on Mizukawa, who was just a teenager at the time. Okada saw how Mizukawa beat them all, and that was how Mizukawa’s involvement with the yakuza began. He joined the family as Okada’s younger brother in return for their disposing of the corpses and hiding him for two weeks to be safe.
Mizukawa had never been fascinated with the yakuza. He wouldn’t have joined the group voluntarily. He did it only because of what he owed Okada. Mizukawa would do anything to please him, and when Okada didn’t like something, Mizukawa would eliminate it. Okada liked him, and keeping him happy became Mizukawa’s motivation to continue working. It all seemed so natural.
“Okada’s death was a bit of an accident. I’m in the middle of talks with the responsible family. But that won’t be enough to make you give up on this, will it?”
“No. I know you’ve sent the captain to talk to them, but I don’t see the point.”
Okada died in a territorial dispute. He tried to punch a member of the rival group just as the other pulled a knife to intimidate him.
A veteran brawler, Okada didn’t punch with just his arm—he’d thrust his whole body at the opponent. He wasn’t expecting a blade to come in between him and his target. So he ended up throwing himself at the dagger.