“Miyasato and Katsuro were just like Takashi and my father. Katsuro enjoys being yakuza. He likes the things he’s asked to do. He has always been a violent man, and he takes pleasure in causing pain and suffering. Miyasato was more like my father. Gentle and thoughtful. He didn’t tell me everything that he was asked to do—I could see that he was unhappy, but he said that he couldn’t see any way that he could leave.” The look of regret returned to her face. “I should have been more forceful,” she said. “I should’ve made him leave, but I didn’t. It would have made things different for us. He might still be alive.”

“But something changed—something made him want to leave?”

She nodded. “There was a girl—I don’t know her name. She was seventeen or eighteen, I’m not sure. There were four of them—Katsuro and three other chimpira. They picked her up off the street and took her to a warehouse that Takashi owned. They… they did things to her, over the course of a week, and, after that, they murdered her. Katsuro bragged about it and Miyasato found out. He came home and told me, and that was that—we decided that we had to leave.”

“You didn’t tell the police?”

She shook her head. “Miyasato said they cremated the girl’s body—there was no evidence, just what he’d heard.”

“You think it was true?”

Sakura nodded. “Katsuro told me himself. And it’s the kind of thing he does. And, even if there was evidence, it wouldn’t have mattered. Takashi has connections with the police in Sanya, where he has his place. He would have found out and, when he did, he would have done everything he could to protect his son. And the penalty for speaking to the authorities is severe. Miyasato would have been killed—me too, probably, and the baby.”

“And so he quit?”

She shook her head. “Not quite. We’d made up our minds that we would leave, but we had no money. Takashi would have come after us if we’d stayed in Japan, so we decided that we would go to London. I had a friend there who said that we could live with her until we were settled, but we knew that we would need money. That was when Miyasato had the idea about the sword.”

65

Milton refilled their mugs with fresh coffee and Sakura continued.

“Takashi is old now, like my father. The yakuza isn’t what it once was. The government cracked down, and other organisations have taken its place. Takashi and my father are traditionalists. Old school. They both collect things that remind them of a time when Japan was different. You know—nostalgia. The older they get, the more they look back at a time when they’d say things were better. My father collects porcelain.”

“And Takashi collects swords?”