Red Shark

Achauffeured Maybach 57 carrying Iseda Tokugawa swept across a rain-wet Shuto Expressway No. 7. The big car flashed over the Sumida River and exited at Kabukicho, Tokyo’s Pink District, where last night Tokugawa had entertained his Iranian clients. Now the driver inched through a fine drizzle into the heart of the district, which glittered under a greasy pall of smog.

Tokugawa gazed from behind the car’s tinted windows at sex emporiums, sushi bars, Burger Kings, and discos; at clubs with names like In and Out, Climax, and Boys and Girls. He saw fortune-tellers’ stalls, disco joints pulsing with heavy metal and rock, and knots of long-haired young men loitering in the streets. On every corner touts shouted enticement to wide-eyed sararimen — salarymen — and European tourists parading past theaters displaying naked women on their marquees. A tout waving a flyer lunged at the Maybach; Tokugawa turned away. At the Koma Theater, he ordered his driver to pull to the curb.

A wiry Japanese known as Ojima stepped from under the theater’s flashing marquee and got into the car. Ojima gave Tokugawa a head bob but said nothing. He settled back and stuffed his hands awkwardly into the pockets of his rain-spotted, jade-green suit.

“Drive us,” Tokugawa commanded through the car’s intercom. The big sedan hissed away from the curb and blended into traffic. At Yasukuni-dori, the driver turned left and rocketed onto the Shuto Expressway loop toward the Imperial Palace grounds. He exited at Hibiya-dori, cruised past the Babasaki Moat that surrounded the palace’s Outer Garden, then around the perimeter of the Imperial Palace grounds.

Tokugawa silently watched the passing scene with the air of a jaded tourist. Now and again he studied his reflection in the door glass, smoothed his thick, silver-white hair, and adjusted his black silk necktie. Ojima remained silent.

They sped past Tokyo’s Marunochi District, where blocs of banks, investment houses, and trading companies that made up “Japan Incorporated,” the heart of the nation’s financial empire, stood shoulder-to-shoulder like stones in a fortress wall. Tokugawa noted the gleaming marble headquarters of the Commerce Bank of Japan, Nippon Heavy Industries, Sumitomo International, and Chikara Electronics.

Tokugawa was on a first-name basis with the executives who ran these businesses. His connections and influence had helped many of them build their empires. In return, their enormous financial resources were always at his disposal. Yet there were times when Tokugawa needed more than financial muscle. Sometimes he needed the kind of muscle only a man like Ojima, Kabukicho’s most powerful yakuza chieftain, could deliver.

Tokugawa looked at Ojima and said, “Business is good, yes?”

The wiry man shrugged. He had a hard face that remained immobile, like a Kabuki mask. Tokugawa knew he was a good judge of refined heroin and had an unquenchable lust for money. “Yes, Iseda-san. But the foreigners, the Taiwanese Mafia, AIDS,” he shrugged again, “they all take a bite. I miss the simpler times.”

Tokugawa said, “Yes, we are both vulnerable to the vagaries of economics and social turmoil.” A long pause. “And our friend Naito, he poses a different kind of problem, no?”

At one time Masayuki Naito had been Ojima’s protégé and partner. Now he wanted to oust Ojima as Kabukicho’s supreme yakuza and take control of Tokyo’s pink industry. Worse, he was muscling in on the lucrative drug trade Ojima controlled.

Ojima said, “Yes, he is a problem. I have enough trouble from the metropolitan government without worrying about him. And now the foreigners are making inroads, trying to buy up the clubs. Even women are becoming club owners.”

Two wealthy Indonesian women had recently opened The Crystal Palace, a lavish sex club that catered exclusively to high-level salarymen who paid to unwind in private rooms with classy prostitutes. The women’s success angered Ojima. “Naito backs them,” he said, his face stony.