The Face with the Thin scar
Daiki Shishidō was said to know every man’s threshold. Ryōta Ogawa knelt on the board and learned his.
At first there was only the wood. Five sharp ridges pressed up into his shins. He shifted, and every ridge found the bone. His feet went numb. Then the edges began to cut.
Daiki sat on a plastic crate in front of him. In this room, with oil on the floor and dust sifting down every time a truck crossed the expressway overhead, he looked like a mistake. The wakagashira-hosa, or other clan’s lieutenants Ogawa had served before were men in their fifties who met him in coffee shops, took three sugars, and collected their cut in envelopes. Bad teeth. Old suits.
This one was barely past thirty, and looked like he worked on the top floor of a bank in Umeda.
Ogawa had heard the hostesses in Kitashinchi talk about the face with the thin scar.
“A man in Namba,” Daiki said. “His name.”
Ogawa said nothing.
Daiki nodded.
Two men lifted the first stone from against the wall.
It came down on his thighs, and its weight drove his shins into the board, all five ridges into the bone at once. His breath stopped. He tried to rise, and the rope held him to the post.
Kenta Watanabe lashed the stone down so it wouldn’t slide.
The pain spread outward. Under the stone, the flesh of his shins gave way against the wood, a little at a time. Sweat ran into his eyes. His calves knotted with cramp and had nowhere to go. Overhead a truck went by, and the floor carried its shudder straight up into his shinbones. A low sound came out of his throat that he didn’t recognize.
Daiki waited. Dust settled on his shoulder. He brushed it off with two fingers.
“His name.”
Ogawa shook his head. He didn’t know why. Pride, maybe. Habit.
The second stone came down on the first.
Something split. The rough edge tore the skin from his lower legs, and warm blood ran down into his socks. The pain left his legs. It was everywhere now: in his teeth, behind his eyes, in the tips of his fingers.
He was screaming.
He heard it from far off, as if it belonged to someone else. He would have sold his mother. He would have sold anyone.
Through the tears he saw the third stone, leaning against the wall. Waiting. He knew what it would do to the bone.
“Endō,” he said. “Endō. In Namba. The money goes to Kobe. A man they call Sensei. Through a bar in Sannomiya. Bar Lune. Please. Please. Please.”
Daiki looked at him.
“Take them off.”
He had expected the pain to stop when the stones came off. It got worse. Blood rushed back into his crushed shins and calves all at once, and the pain from the knees down was so savage that he sagged against the rope and vomited.
Shun cut the rope.
When Ogawa could breathe again, there was a block of wood on the workbench. A kitchen knife. A hammer. A coil of fishing line.
“You know what to do,” Daiki said.
Ogawa knew. It was the rule.
It took three blows to take the finger off.
Through the roaring in his ears, he watched Watanabe wrap it in a white handkerchief and drop it into a small paper gift bag.
“Kinoshita,” Daiki called the clan’s youngest. “Take it to the Kashira. Tell him Ogawa apologizes.”
Megumi Kirishima landed at Kansai International Airport on a Tuesday in early September, and the heat hit her the moment the doors opened: thirty-one degrees, wet air, the smell of jet fuel and the sea. Brooklyn had been sticky too, but this was heavier. This one she had to wade through. Her blouse was stuck to her back before she reached the curb.
She had two suitcases, one carry-on, and a cardboard tube with her latest project inside.
Mr. Tsuda was waiting at arrivals with a sign that said Kirishima in black brush letters. He was sixty-eight. He had driven her to school every morning from the age of six to eighteen, and since she’d last seen him, his hair had gone white.
“Tsuda-san!”
She walked faster, then gave up and ran the last few meters, the tube bouncing against her hip. She hugged him. He stood stiff for a second, his arms held out from his sides, and then he patted her back twice.
She had forgotten. He let her anyway.
“Ojōsama,” he said. “Welcome home. You shouldn’t run in those shoes.”
Ojōsama. Nobody had called her that in years.
“How’s Mei-chan? Did she get into the swim club?”
The corners of his eyes creased. “She did. She came second in the backstroke at the city meet.”
“Second! Show me a picture. You have one, right? Show me in the car.”
He had forty-two pictures of his granddaughter. Meg looked at all of them in the back of the black Century while he drove north across the bridge, and she asked about every one. What time did Mei swim? Was the pool indoors? Did she still hate goggles? Mr. Tsuda answered every question, and his eyes kept finding her in the rearview mirror.
She knew what she was doing. Every picture of Mei was another minute before she had to be the daughter they expected at the house at the top of the slope.
When he turned onto the Hanshin Expressway, she gave him back his phone and looked out the window.
Osaka came at her all at once: gray rows of apartment blocks with laundry on every balcony, pachinko towers flashing, elevated roads stacked one over another. She had left for New York at eighteen. Eight years, and only two short trips home: her grandmother’s funeral, and one New Year.
The city looked lower than she remembered, and denser. After Manhattan, everything here hugged the ground.
Her father had asked her to come home. She had said yes before he finished the sentence.
At the top of a slope in Tezukayama, the Kirishima house was waiting.
