David Turri's Blog

1

Tommy Dugdale is a stand-up comic. A failed one. A has-been from the start of his career. A never-even-was. Audiences from Blackpool to Benidorm hate him. Existentialism is funnier. Bus timetables get more laughs. The Rosetta stone makes more sense.

In his time, this Flying Dutchman of the comedy circuit has played every venue there is. From working men’s clubs through holiday parks to stag nights. From strip clubs to seedy cabarets. Everything except wakes and funerals, where the grief his jokes create might be appreciated.

Tommy used to be on the books of a London talent agency run by a Mr. Gee. In his frenetic entertainment world, talent was a euphemism for anything he could put on a stage, make a few quid off and not be arrested for. It was Mr. Gee who gave Tommy his start. Sent him sailing off into the world of laughter. On to rocks. He should have drowned, but he didn’t drown. He kept washing up on shore, coming back for more work.

Until in the end, Mr. Gee pulled a gun on him, a Dirty Harry Magnum. “No more gigs with me, Tommy. You’re fired. Go away. Go to Patagonia. Entertain the penguins.” He squeezed the trigger. A little flag on a stick popped out of the barrel saying “Laugh!”

But when Mr. Gee saw Tommy walk into his local pub on a cold and miserable Thursday evening he could have just descended from heaven on a cloud. His appearance was the answer to a desperate prayer.

“Tommy Dugdale! Thank God.”

“How’s tricks, Mr. Gee?”

He grabbed Tommy by both elbows.

“Are these great beads of sweat running down my face or did I just come out of the shower?”

“What’s up?”

“Problems, Tommy. Trouble, son. I’ve got an Irish band due, but they’re caught in traffic or they got lost. I don’t know because their un-fecking-smart phones keep cutting out. They’re late, and there’s a crowd out there waiting for them.”

He put a finger to his lips, pointed into the air with another.

“Listen. Hear that?”

“I don’t hear anything.”

“Exactly. Nothing. Bleeding nada. That’s my problem. Those yobs out there want to get themselves wound up with some loud music before they head off to the clubs to cause mayhem. How are they going to get wound up inside a bloody Black Hole? They won’t hang round much longer because there are other pubs that have got bands already going full throttle, bands much better than this crowd of Dublin gits I got the misfortune to be representing.”

He was wearing a tie-pin that sported a solid-gold naked dancing girl with diamonds for nipples and a ruby between her legs.

“It is not a propitious start to their London tour, is it?”

“It isn’t.”

“That’s why I need your help.”

“I can’t sing to save my life.”

“Not singing, you moron. I want you to go out there and do your patter, tell a few jokes. Fill that Black Hole for me. I don’t expect miracles. I’m old enough not to. Just engage them, Tommy. Amuse them. Bemuse them. A smile, some chuckles, a few giggles. Just keep them in their chairs till the band gets here. Do that for me, then you’ll suddenly have a hundred quid in your pocket.”

“All right.”

“Bless you, Tommy.”

“How do I look?”

Mr. Gee wondered if it was a trick question. He folded his arms, stepped back and studied him.

Tommy Dugdale had stopped growing vertically when he was thirteen. Horizontally, he was a slowly expanding universe. His gut sagged down under a paint-flecked, black T-shirt. The anorak he had on stank of sweat and plaster and concrete. His shapeless trousers looked like he’d been wearing them every day since puberty. His work boots were caked with clay. The hair around his bald patch stood up like it was magnetized.

“You look great. Where are you working these days?”

“At a building site in Walthamstow.”

Mr. Gee turned him around and gave him a shove.

“Do me proud, Tommy.”

His sudden appearance on the stage didn’t faze the resident MC, who was slumped behind his drums. He cracked a cymbal and drummed a roll and purred into the microphone.

“We are proud to present this evening direct from an engagement in Walthamstow, the one and only Tommy Dugdale.”

Nobody clapped, except two louts who must have lived in Walthamstow. Tommy thumped across the stage to the mike in his dirty boots. This is what he said:

“I was walking along the street the other day, minding my own business, when I saw this bloke coming towards me carrying a pig in his arms. The funny thing about this pig was that it only had three legs. So I stopped him and I asked him, what’s with the pig? He gives it a little cuddle, a peck on its snout.

“This is no ordinary pig, he says. This pig is a hero. A few days ago, we were taking a walk along the canal and our little lad fell in. He can’t swim. The pig jumped in after him, grabbed his shirt collar in its mouth and waded back to the bank with him. Saved his life. The wife was in tears.

“I said, well, it certainly is an amazing pig. But why does it only have three legs? The bloke says…”

Wait for it.

“…A pig like this, he says, you don’t eat all at once…”

Confused silence.

The MC cracked the cymbal again.

“We are proud to present, direct from The Stardust in Birmingham, Siam O’Connor and The Heartbeat of Dublin Band.”

They crashed onto the stage in a tangle of instruments and beer cans.  The vocalist, a pretty lass in a short, tight skirt, tripped on a cable and fell down, exposing her panties to the audience, the sight of which got everyone wound up right away.

2

Alec Swipple sat down heavily on a stool with a pint.

He was a lumbering, over-weight and round-shouldered man with a shock of steely-gray hair that made him look like Beethoven when he scowled, which he did most of the time. Despite a paucity of personal human resources himself, he was assistant manager in the Human Resources Department of a London confectionery company.

Alec was an ordinary working-class bloke, and did the things an ordinary bloke does. He got up and went to work. Got a bit drunk after work. Went home to his wife, Mabel. Got up the next morning, went to work again; got a bit drunk again. He worried all the time. About money, his weight, about his messy garden. But worrying was like getting up and going to work, like the weather. A normal part of his life. As far as lives went, his was far from spectacular, but he was happy with it because he didn’t know anything better.

He was unaccustomed to reflection or self-awareness, had always been a stranger to mental or emotional extremes. But now something preyed on his well-being and he had become a victim of turmoil.

To add to that burden he carried on his rounded shoulders, Alec had the misfortune to be Tommy Dugdale’s best mate. They had first set eyes on each other in Standard One of St. Mary’s Primary School, two little fat boys, and had never been far out of each others orbit since.

Alec spotted Tommy coming through from the other bar clutching money in his hand.

“Been selling your blood again? Evening, Mr. Gee.”

“Hello, Alec.”

Tommy wasn’t happy.

“You said a hundred quid, not fifty.”

“What are you complaining about? You told one joke, and it went down like The Titanic. Fifty quid for one bad joke. I bet it’s a long time since you earned that much easy money in the trade. Where was the last place you worked?”

“Two nights in September at a club in Chislehurst. But the bastard never paid me.”

“What happened?”

“There were complications.”

“Tommy, complications have been happening to you since you started out. You chose the wrong profession. You should have joined the Provisional IRA.”

“Can I get you a pint, Mr. Gee?”

“No, I’m all right, Alec. Let me give you some advice, Tommy.  Your patter doesn’t go anywhere. Your jokes belong in the BBC’s archives.  The smoking’s got to your voice. That gut and the bags under your eyes and those chins – the spotlight picks it all out. See you around, Alec.”

“Cheers, Mr. Gee.”

Tommy stared off after him, muttering.

“What’s he talking about? I’ve had a gut like this, bags under my eyes and these chins all my adult life. Did Gillian come in yet?”

“You expecting her?”

“Yeah. What’s the time?”

“The big hand is on twelve and the little hand is on seven.”

“You ready for another pint?”

“Yeah, Tommy. Thanks.”

Gillian Cox was a tiny, bad-tempered bowling ball of flesh and muscle, all breasts and thighs and beefy arms. She worked in a local supermarket, and Tommy had met her just after his divorce when, one night, she knocked on the door of his flat, with a suitcase and a black eye, a present from her boyfriend.

She was not an easy woman for men to handle. They found it easier to slap her about than try to reason with her, because reasoning with Gillian was harder than climbing the Eiger in slippers.

Tommy brought her in, took care of her swollen eye, opened a bottle of wine and sat with her the rest of the night as she poured out her grievances. With the sun coming up, they had staggered to the tangle of sheets that was Tommy’s bed.

And Gillian stayed. At the time, Alec had commented, in his acid-tongued way:

“Little Tommy Dugdale, shining stumpy knight on a white horse.  You knights are supposed to slay the dragons, not let them move in with you.”

For Gillian, the attraction to Tommy was that he made her laugh, sometimes until tears ran down her cheeks. Just being himself, he was a very funny little man. It was only when he got up on a stage that he made people want to throw their drinks at him.

For Tommy, the attraction to Gillian was the fact that she was shorter than him. Most women could rest their elbows on his head.

When he back from the bar with two pints, he asked, “Did you hear what they found when they were knocking down that old house on Commercial Street the other day?”

“What old house?”

“They came across a wardrobe in the rubble. Opened it and found a skeleton. I’m not kidding. It had a gold medal round the neck saying, Hide-and-Seek Champion of Ireland, 1956.”

Alec sniffed.

“Why don’t you ever laugh at my jokes, a little spontaneous chuckle once in a while, just to be polite?”

“Because I’ve been knocking about with you since we were kids.  I’ve heard it all before. I know what you’re going to say before you open your mouth. I can read you like a book. If you weren’t there, Tommy, I could write you. What’s there to laugh at?”

“You’re in a bad mood tonight. Not that you’re never not. What’s up?”

“Nothing. What joke did you tell in there?”

“The pig with three legs.”

“Wot you don’t eat all at once?”

“Yeah.”

Gillian never showed up after all, but things got lively around them as the evening wore on. A badly-thrown dart nearly took a girl’s eye out.  Someone almost choked to death on a pickled onion and had to be squeezed and pummeled by a dock worker until it came up again. A man kept going on about his mother’s miraculous cure at Lourdes until someone punched him. The barmaid found a pair of dentures at the bottom of an empty glass.

“What’s wrong, Alec? You’ve been down in the dumps all night.”

“Nothing, Tommy. I’m just tired.”

“We better be making tracks. Give you a lift back?”

“I’m a bit down, but I’m not suicidal. I’ll catch a cab.”

“All right, then.”

Tommy got behind the wheel of his old Rover and drove home. He lived in a ground-floor flat in a Victorian tenement down a cobbled mews. Dozing while he drove, his foot hit the brake a blink before he crashed into the wall behind his parking space. That near-miss woke him up, and gave the Rover itself quite a turn.

The lights were on in the flat. He went in. There wasn’t any sign of Gillian, but he found a dead man lying on the carpet, making an awful mess.

He was wearing a turtleneck sweater, corduroy slacks and brown loafers. The slacks were down round his knees. His underpants were red, with a pattern of grinning blue sharks swimming over them. A blade was buried in his chest, with the handle broken off and gone.

Blood had blackened the sweater. A pool of it stretched from his shoulder to his thigh, turning the rug into a quagmire. Thin red streams had run in all directions over the linoleum. The bone in his nose was shattered. His forehead was bruised. The thick, curly hair was sticky with blood and matted around the crown.

The furniture had been knocked around. There were blood streaks down the walls. Plates and cups lay smashed on the floor of the kitchenette. A bottle of gin stood open on the sink bench. And on the kitchen table, there were two uneaten cartons of chicken curry.

https://www.amazon.com/Pig-Three-legs-David-Turri-ebook/dp/B01M1YITQA/ref=asap_bc?ie=UTF8

The book you’re about to read is one like you’ve never read before…

It’s taken me some time to digest the book. For over a week I didn’t read, didn’t want to read. And then I read a naughty romance just to clear out the images this book left in my mind that kept replaying like a bad nightmare. My hair stood on end several times reading about the evil that dwells on the top of the hill at 29 Argyle Drive.

I would like to share a couple of triggers this book might evoke, but fear I would give too much away, so I’ll leave it as a blanket trigger of: if you’ve ever been physically or mentally abused this book might draw you into that darkness again.

With that said, read at your own risk.

The storyline bounces from present, to history, to further history, as the house at 29 Argyle is revealed. Good intentions, and more good intentions, go wrong, very, very wrong. The evil that emits, as the history of the house is revealed, vibrates off the pages of this book (or your e-reader). Do not be afraid, it’s only a book, and your imagination will play the scene as only you can see it.

I give this story 5 heads of hair standing on end out of 5. The answer to your question: Why did you only give it 4 stars? , is simple. I gave it 4 stars because I live in The USA. The story is written across the world and the language/slang usage at times I needed to look up. The other reason was sometimes I had to stop and retrace my steps to recall the part of the house timeline I was on. The only thing I would recommend to the author would be to enter the date or year at the beginning of the time warp. I don’t think this story could be told in any other order. Those were my only two hang-ups. Stephen King scary!! THANK YOU for the read Mr. Turri!!!! I’m still curious if the end of the book, was only the beginning of another chapter…

An excerpt from “Damaged Cargoes”, available from Amazon, both Kindle and paperback.

https://www.amazon.com/Damaged-Cargoes-David-Turri-ebook/dp/B016Q3IHMW?ie=UTF8&ref_=asap_bc

“What do you think of our little venture, young Bonham? Feeling some scruples, I’ll wager.”

He corralled Hamlin up against a wagon wheel.

“Back home, a war was fought over slavery. Your brother says you fought in it and were wounded. I respect that. But there’s a big difference between that and the trade in this part of the world in fit and strong young men and women.

“The Negro when he was brought from Africa didn’t want to come. The young men and women who board our vessels do so willingly.”

“They are children.”

“True, we deal, of late, with the younger end of the scale. But our business encompasses the whole range of strong and healthy woman-and-manhood.”

He searched his pockets and found a cigar.

“There are international marketplaces in Shanghai and Hong Kong from which young men and women from Japan and China are shipped under indenture and contract to the Dutch East Indies, Latin America, the sugarcane fields in Havana and Hawaii, the gold mines in Australia and California.”

The match blazed in front of Hamlin’s face.

“The younger ones – like those in there – work in the Shanghai foreign settlement as servants, housemaids, kitchen hands; in the gardens and the stables.”

He blew a stream of smoke at the sky

“The world is growing all the time. These people are needed and they go eagerly, bound over to work a certain number of years for a fixed sum and free passage. They work hard wherever they end up, scraping rubber in Malaya or building a rail line in the mountains of Peru.

“But a man has got a right to work and to receive a wage for his honest labor, which none of the people we ship out have a chance in hell of getting here. We offer them that right.”

He jabbed the air with his cigar.

“People in this country are shackles of their Daimyo Lords. That’s all they are – commodities. The Meiji appropriated the holdings of all the big Daimyo landowners so they will never again be a threat to the government. That means the Daimyos can’t support their people any longer.

“Up north, there is no rice. Whole villages are starving. Parents are killing their female born. They take the baby girls into the mountains and leave them there.

“Or their parents sell them to men like Nakamichi for much needed cash. Because of us, Ham, those children now have the chance to work for a future of their own.”

“Suddenly you’re missionaries.”

“We’re businessmen. I’m in this venture for profit and not ashamed to admit it. But, as a by-product, a lot of men and women, boys and girls, get a fresh start.”

“Casket”, my second challenge for a Kindle Scout publishing contract, didn’t garnish enough nominations to be selected. But a sincere thanks to everyone who took the time to read the excerpt and click ‘nominate.’

The statistics were heartening, however. In the one-month period of the campaign, I got a total of 793 views. This compares with 378 for “Incident at Citrus Heights”. I was ‘hot’ – not me, unfortunately; the book – for a total of 44 hours (compared with only 18 hours last time.)

I have no idea what all that means. But I’LL BE BACK in a couple of months with my third challenge.

Meanwhile, I will begin uploading both Casket and Incident at Citrus Heights on kindle. When they are finally available, I sincerely hope you click BUY.

Thanks again for your support!!

Dave Turri

Two of my novels were partly inspired by tales such as those I am going to relate.

“29 Argyle Drive” [http://www.amazon.com/29-Argyle-Drive-David-Turri-ebook/dp/B00Q2ETTRS/ref=tmm_kin_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr=] is a horror story – possession, spiritual and demonic; poltergeists; the whole nine yards. It owes a lot to these stories told to me by several Japanese friends who have a Sixth Sense.

“Escarpment”.http://www.amazon.com/Escarpment-David-Turri-ebook/dp/B016LX8U60/ref=asap_bc?ie=UTF8  is about the tragedy of the Battle of Okinawa and the innocent people who died in it. There are ghosts and spirits here, too. Again, the story was fueled by anecdotes told me by the same people.

The precincts of Osaka castle, its parkland, the Osaka Business Park and the district of Kyobashi stand on land drenched with blood. Haunted land. In 1614, during the winter siege of Osaka castle, the attacking troops couldn’t breach the walls. Couldn’t get at the enemy samurai. Couldn’t get their “kubi” (the decapitated heads of the samurai they killed). They took out their frustration on the villagers who lived around the castle. Killing thousands and thousands of them. Taking their “kubi’. So that Ogawa River, which still flows through Kyobashi, was more blood than water and clogged with headless corpses.

During World War 2, the castle was a command center and the area was crowded with armament factories. From March 1945, streams of B-29s swept over the Kyobashi district in nine separate raids. Ten thousand people were killed. On August 14, the day the war ended, 150 bombers pulverized the area a final time.

Bombs were dropped directly on Kyobashi JR station just as two crowded trains pulled it. More than 700 people died, of which 500 were never identified.

***

There seems to be a fundamental difference between a ghost and a spirit. Ghosts are there, but have no innate existence. They are psychic imprints on the landscape. Like a DVD stuck on a track and repeating it over and over. Spirits, on the other hand, exist in the places they haunt. They can communicate with the living. And they can harm the living.

***

Ms. A_____ lives in a condominium overlooking Osaka Castle. One night she was awakened in the early morning by the figure of a samurai in the bedroom sitting on a big war horse.

“Ken” used to work nights at a business hotel in Kyobashi when he was a university student. His duties included periodically patrolling each floor of the hotel. One particular floor, he always braced himself as the elevator doors opened. All along the corridor, furious and desperate samurai were engaged in bloody sword fights. He had to dodge his way down the corridor. Curiously, when he got married, he lost his power of second-sight almost completely.

Until a couple of years ago, a major company in the Kyobashi area used the top floor of its building as a new employee dormitory. Until the freshmen boycotted it and demanded to be moved to new premises. The reason was that their sleep was being disturbed by samurai racing through the night on their horses. The top floor is currently used for meetings and conferences.

I heard this anecdote from “Hiroko”. She met a friend of hers for lunch at a Kyobashi restaurant. The restaurant is located at the basement level. They went down the stairs, but as soon as they sat down at a table, the friend grew pale and became perturbed. Hiroko asked her what was wrong. She shook her head and whispered, “I feel awful things here. I see terrible things. We have to go.”

Ms M______ works in a high-rise office building in the business district. Because she has second-sight, she often sees dead men in factory clothes hanging round the elevators of the floor she works on. She doesn’t make eye contact. The women’s changing room often becomes unaccountably cold.

Ms M______ went to school in Kyobashi. She tells of an unwritten rule that when the day’s activities are done, students are told not to linger on the premises. They are encouraged to go home as quickly as possible. Teachers, too, don’t hang around the school after dark. (I heard confirmation of this from another Japanese friend of mine whose daughter went to elementary school in Kyobashi.)

All her life, Ms M______ has seen things that most people don’t see, things that should not be seen. At high school sports practice in the gym one day, she saw a spirit that had attached itself to the ankle of a boy. She said the spirit was blurry, elongated and the color of a shark.

Another time, a friend of hers had forgotten something in the gym. Ms M_______ told her to leave it until tomorrow. It was getting late. The friend said, don’t worry. I’ve got this.

She took a Buddhist omamori [see picture] lucky charm from her pocket.

She ran back to the gym and picked up whatever it was she had forgotten. As she was coming out, she heard a woman’s voice whisper in her ear.

“Sonna wa imi ga nai yo.”

Which means…

“That kind of thing is meaningless.”

Referring to the omamori.

In my novel “Escarpment” http://www.amazon.com/Escarpment-David-Turri/dp/1512293490 I write that, from my own experience of many years’ residence in Japan, the Japanese seem to live on much more intimate terms than we do with the world beyond death.

There is one motif that repeats itself often in spooky stories – the taxi driver who picks up a ghostly passenger. The motif appears most often in tales connected with the Sennichimae department store fire in 1972.

In 1615, the land on which the store would eventually stand was used as a mass grave for people killed in the siege of Osaka castle. Later, the site became an execution ground.

On the evening of May 13, 1972, the Sennichimae Department Store was undergoing renovations in the third floor women’s clothing section. It is believed that the fire started from a carelessly discarded cigarette. Poisonous gasses from construction materials quickly filled the stairwells.

On the top floor of the store there was a nightclub, packed at that time with two hundred people. The exits from it were locked. All elevators had stopped. The stairs were full of smoke and gas. 118 people died.

Ninety-six perished in the cabaret itself – 93 from carbon dioxide poisoning and three from injuries they received when they were trampled on during the panic to escape. Twenty-four, mostly female employees of the nightclub, jumped off the roof. 22 of them died.

Ever since, many people traveling on the Sennichimae subway line, which runs under the place where the store used to be, have heard faint, far-away cries for help. Another department store opened on the site a few years later. Many employees claim to have seen ghostly apparitions in the restrooms.

But the most commonly told stories concern taxi drivers who, late at night, report picking up hostesses in front of the Sennichimae entertainment arcade. Usually, the women are wearing expensive kimonos. There is nothing spectral or spooky about their appearance or their manner. They tell the drivers their destinations and sometimes chat for a minute or two. Everything is normal until the cab pulls up wherever the passenger wanted to go. And she isn’t there anymore.

http://www.amazon.com/Escarpment-David-Turri-ebook/dp/B016LX8U60/ref=asap_bc?ie=UTF8Japanhttp://www.amazon.co.jp/Escarpment-English-David-Turri-ebook/dp/B016LX8U60/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1449998013&sr=8-1&keywords=Escarpment

Keiko had spent the time engaged in an intense Google search. When I got home, my dinner stood on the dining room table, each dish and bowl carefully protected with saran wrap, and she was waiting for me with the results of her investigations.

“Listen to this.”

As I peeled off the wrapping and ate the cold fare, she read out:

“Two weeks after our honeymoon, when the dreams were still continuing, I went to a psychologist and he told me I was being taken over by a ghost for minutes or even hours at a time.”

Thus it started, and so it went on.

A man in America, while sleepwalking, had stabbed his mother-in-law to death and tried to throttle his father-in-law.

Another, who had started sleepwalking when he was a teenager, once, while staying over with a friend, awoke to find that the friend’s kitchen walls were filled with doodles he had done while sleepwalking. Now he paints in his sleep, and galleries buy his works.

There are cases, Keiko informed me, of people sleepwalking outside and freezing to death.

Of falling out of windows.

Of engaging in sex with strangers.

Of mowing the lawns naked.

Of trying to strangle their wives as they lay in bed together.

(This last I did not feel, of course, sympathy with, only an intuitive understanding of.)

She related stories she had found on the internet of inanimate objects being possessed by spirits – a haunted grandfather clock, an eerie stuffed leopard, a possessed rocking horse…While I tried to dislodge a fish bone from between my back teeth, she sat down at the table opposite me and read out from her notes in a slow, morbid tone:

“…Latent energy is the name given to the individual, collective or residual energy that remains with a specific object after the passing of its owner, who had a strong connection to it in life, or the energy left by a traumatic event that had once taken place involving the object…

“…At times, uneasy or unnerving feelings may be experienced when handling artifacts. Frequently, this experience occurs with items that have been picked up on wartime battlefields…”

The GHQ apparatus rebuilt Japan during The Occupation. But one thing it couldn’t revive was the economy. That remained in critical condition. At death’s door.

Unable to rely on GHQ to put food on their tables and money in their pockets, the Japanese people had to use their own resources. The most important was the underground economy of the black market. Another phenomenon was the “Panpan” girls. That was the name given to the amateur prostitutes who thrived throughout most of The Occupation.

There was a saying on the streets at the time: “Onna wa panpan, otoko wa katsu giya.” Women become prostitutes, men work in the black market. Many of the girls came from respectable homes, forced into the trade by the economic plight of their families. But others were attracted by the excitement the GIs brought into their drab and hard-scrabble lives.

Unlike the other Occupation forces – the Aussies, Kiwis and Brits – the American troops had cash to burn. Arm in arm with a GI, a panpan girl could stroll through the PXs, be showered with gifts of lipstick and dresses and nylon stockings. She could take good money home and she could sell the gifts on the black market.

The panpans communicated with their customers in broken English that was dubbed “Panglish”. Sometimes, the girls specialized. Those who fluttered from customer to customer were called Butterflies. “Youpan” – as in Hey, you – limited their field of enterprise to GIs, who were usually single, with no familial demands on the money in their pockets. “Only One” panpans devoted themselves to a single client, usually a rich officer or GHQ bureaucrat.

If you would like to find out more about The Occupation, that almost forgotten time, and enjoy a gritty tale of terrorism and assassination in Tokyo, then read the first 5000 words of my book “Incident at the Citrus Heights” at the link below. If you like the extract, click “Nominate.” There are only three days left. Your click would be sincerely appreciated.

https://kindlescout.amazon.com/p/E4KHAA2HUGY8

https://kindlescout.amazon.com/p/E4KHAA2HUGY8

The stories surrounding the biggest and most flamboyant yakuza bosses of that time are legendary.

In Kobe, gambling on bare-knuckled street fights was a major source of income for the gang that controlled the city’s waterfront – the Yamaguchi-gumi. One of the professional fighters of the time, Kazuo Taoka, caught the eye of the gang’s kumicho.

Taoka’s ferociousness during bouts earned him the nickname of The Bear, because he went for his opponent’s face and tried to scratch out his eyes. The Boss took the young brawler under his wing, and Taoka rose from enforcer to his wakagashira (number two man).

In 1937, Taoka was charged with murder and spent six years in prison. He became the third kumicho soon after his release.

When he took over the Yamaguchi-gumi, it was a small and local dockland gang. He moved it off the docks into loan sharking, gambling and into legitimate business investment, especially in the world of sport and entertainment.

Baseball and laughter.

About the only laughter the people of Osaka got in those grim post-war days came from the vaudeville shows, the stand-up comics and the burlesques. All of these were controlled by the Yamaguchi-gumi. If you went to a baseball game in the Osaka/Kobe area, part of the entrance fee and part of the cash you paid for the beer you drank went into the gang’s coffers. They also controlled the wide-spread and illegal baseball gambling that went on, which meant they controlled the players and the outcome of the games.

Taoka ruled the Yamaguchi-gumi for more than thirty years and saw it grow into the biggest underworld family in the country, with more than fifty thousand members. Despite many attempts on his life, a heart attack took him, in 1981.

Kakuji Inagawa’s father had been a graduate of Meiji University. The young man himself found his vocation in gambling and in judo. Like Taoka in Kobe, Inagawa’s physical strength and fighting skills brought him to the attention of a gang boss in Atami, and he was hired as an enforcer.

Like Taoka, too, he rose to become the kumicho, and expanded the gang’s operations into Tokyo. The Inagawa-gumi eventually became the biggest organized crime syndicate in eastern Japan. It was built around gambling.

In the exclusive Atami inns and hotels, Inagawa formed relationships with the bosses of big business interests in the coal, construction and transport industries.

Their workers gambled in dens run by Inagawa, in slums far removed from the glamor of Atami. Through the skill of his gamblers, Inagawa was able to retrieve a big percentage of the workers’ wages and return them to the bosses, after taking his cut. The Inagawa-gumi expanded from gambling into the drug trade, blackmail and extortion.

Chong Gwon Yong, known later by his Japanese name, Hisayuki Machii, was a street-smart Korean thug who arrived in Tokyo with the Occupation forces. I have mentioned “The Ginza Tiger” already. He moved into the Ginza and established there a gang called Tosei-Kai, the Voice of the East.

He controlled that classy entertainment district for a generation. His soldiers were called the “Ginza Police” and enforced law and order in its streets more effectively than the Tokyo Met was able to do.

In later years, the Inagawa-gumi the Yamaguchi-gumi fought bloody wars to expand their territories. But both had to sit down with the Tiger and exchange sake cups in a ceremony of respect before he allowed their organizations entrance to the lucrative business at the heart of the Japanese capital.

Incident at the Citrus Heights

A neon sign – The Citrus Heights Tavern and Motel – winking against the night-time sky of downtown Tokyo in the summer of 1949. A jeep full of US Military Police bursts in the motel’s seedy twinkle. Weapons are drawn. Men freeze under the barrels on the motel’s irons stairways and landings. Yakuza punks. A bullhorn blares, summoning two more thugs from a third floor motel, with arms raised. The MPs open fire, killing eight men, including an army Colonel and his American driver.

The massacre heralds a surge of violence unparalleled during The Occupation and leads one counter-intelligence unit through the underbelly of Tokyo, into the world of the yakuza, the black market and drugs. They are on a hunt for a cadre of Japanese Communist terrorists – former prisoners of war – who have been infiltrated into Tokyo to wage a campaign of indiscriminate terror and assassination designed to unhinge the still fragile Japanese democracy and plunge the country into chaos.

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