PRISON JAPAN / day eight

MONDAY, MAY 21, 2007 ---- Prison Planet.
It has now been a week since I was arrested after bursting out of a Tokyo karaoke club without paying the bill, and entered into captivity at the Kitazawa Police Station. It's funny how you get used to things. If some soothsayer had told me the weekend before last, that I would soon be spending an entire week behind bars, I would have laughed. I would have said "As if", in a mild Australian accent. Indeed, the first few days were hell. But interestingly, in the past 24 hours I have felt the beginning of a sense of ease, an acceptance of my fate here in lockup. The afternoons are tough, and I long to be outside, but on top of that, it is not actually that bad here. I just finished reading THE DA VINCI CODE last night, and acting upon my accomplice Dennis's advice, I started reading HARD RAIN this morning. It is appropriate the prison stocks a copy of this exploration of the seamy underside of Tokyo, when here there are probably yakuza to every cell. While the food is pretty basic here, it seems to be nutritionally balanced... and the complete prohibition on alcohol is no doubt doing wonders for my body. I have probably not gone a whole week without alcohol for more than 10 years!

Prison in Japan can be like staying at a health farm. I don't know how much weight I have lost since coming here, but I am sure it is substantial.

That said, I don't want to be here forever -- I won't be here forever. Being behind bars gives you plenty of time to think about the future. The irony is, the longer I stay inside, the more determined I will be to definitively change my life once I get out. Like leaving Japan and going back to Australia. But since I am in Japan for now, I might as well savor this rare opportunity to witness Japanese life, underworld style:

HARD RAIN

By Barry Eisler

This is the perfect read if, like me, you find yourself staying in a Tokyo lockup. At this police station there are three English books which can be borrowed by detainees: THE DA VINCI CODE, some dragon and dungeon epic, and HARD RAIN by American author Barry Eisler. When I first picked up the book I thought it was somehow related to BLACK RAIN, that infamous 1980s film about the Osakan underworld. Of course I was wrong. HARD RAIN is in fact a recent novel, published in 2003, and centered on Tokyo rather than Osaka. But it is just as noir, and judging by the first few pages, just as ruthless. The protagonist, John Rain, is as relentless a killer as you could imagine (and he is certainly a lot more believable than the albino monk in THE DA VINCI CODE.) His speciality seems to be assassinations designed to resemble death by natural causes. In the first few pages of the book, he eliminates a yakuza gym junkie by goading him into lifting beyond his limit. Rain then jumps on the bar to ensure it suffocates the poor yakuza. On the way home after the job, Rain encounters a group of chimpira, young lowlevel yakuza, at Nogizaka north of Roppongi-dori:

"Fragments of their conversation skipped off the concrete wall to my right, the words unintelligible but the notes tuned as tight as the tricked-out exhaust pipes of their machines. They were probably jacked on kakuseizai, the methamphetamine that has been the Japanese drug of choice since the Government distributed it to soldiers and workers during World War II, and of which these chimpira were doubtless both purveyors and consumers. They were waiting for the drug-induced hum in their muscles and brains to hit the right pitch, for the hour to grow suitably late and the night more seductively dark, before emerging from their concrete lair and answer the neon call of Roppongi...

The trouble is, John Rain comes walking down their overpass, and the drugfuelled chimpira feel compelled to challenge him. Or at least one of them does. It is only page 20, and the action is on again. Rain narrates:

"I prefer my violence sudden. Keeping him to my right, I stepped past him with my left leg, shooting my right leg through the same side immediately afterward and then sweeping it backward to reap his legs out from under him in osoto-gari, one of the most basic and powerful judo throws. Simultaenously I twisted counterclockwise and blasted my right arm into his neck, taking his upper body in the opposite direction of his legs. For a split second he was suspended horizontally over the spot where he had been standing. Then I drilled him into the sidewalk, jerking upward on his collar at the last instant so the back of his head wouldn't take excessive impact. I didn't want a fatality. Too much attention...

As other commentators have noted, that while Rain is ruthlessly and efficiently violent, he is also likeable. After assassinating the yakuza at the gym, Rain spends hundreds of dollars on drinks at a Nogizaka hostess bar, just to check up on his friend Harry's new girlfriend. Later in the book, he agrees to take on a difficult assignment he would rather do without, in order to avenge of the murder of the said friend, by the aforementioned girlfriend. And he kills the girl with his bare hands. If you ever wanted to be friends with a hitman, John Rain is probably your best choice. The guy is warm, beneath the cold hitman exterior. Nonetheless, he is able to kill at the drop of a hat... with no mercy or remorse.

Random violence aside, what I really like about this novel is the depiction of life in Tokyo, a city I have lived in for more than six years. Eisler brings the place to life in an exceptionally vivid, exotic way. Take this description of downtown Roppongi:

"The facility occupied the ground floor of a gray commercial building hemmed in by rusting fire escapes and choked with high-tension wires that clung to the structure's facade like rotting vegetation. Across from it was a parking lot crowded with Mercedeses with darkened windows and high-performance tires, the status symbol of the country's elite and of its criminals, each aping the other, comfortably sharing the pleasures of the night in Roppongi's tawdry demimonde. The street itself was illuminated only by the indifferent glow of a single arched lamplight, its base festooned with flyers advertising the area's innumerable sexual services, in the shadows of its own luminescence looking like the elongated neck of some antediluvian bird shedding diseased and curling feathers..."

Pure noire... pure Tokyo!

Here is a description of my old quarter of town -- the Shitmachi district around Asakusa:

"I headed west. The din receded, to be replaced by an odd, depressing silence which hung over the area like smoke. Outside the tourist-fuelled activity of Sensoji, it seemed, Asakusa had been hit hard by Japan's decade-long decline.


"I walked, my head swivelling left and right, logging my surroundings. Hanayashiki amusement park sulked to my right, its empty Ferris wheel rotating senselessly against the ashen sky above. The esplanade beyond was given over mostly to a few pigeons that had wandered there from the nearby temple complex, the occasional flapping of their wings echoeing in the surrounding silence. Here and there were small clusters of homeless men smoking secondhand cigarettes. A mailman removed a few letters from the back of a postal box and hurried on, as though vaguely afraid he might catch whatever disease had decimated the area's population. The owner of a coffee shop sat diminished in the back of his deserted establishment, waiting for patronage that had long since vanished. Even the pachinko parlors were empty, the artificially gay music piping out of their entranceways bizarre and ironic...

Read the complete Prison Japan chronicles:
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PRISON JAPAN... PRISON PLANET.
Contact the author Rob Sullivan at coderot@gmail.com. All comments will be published at the bottom of this page. Anticopyright August 2010.