Free Confessions of a Yakuza by Junichi Saga

would I be doing going to bed at this time of day?” He put his hands under the quilt over the sunken hearth and, sitting hunched up, coughed thickly again and again.
    It was in September 1923 that I stopped working on the boat. As you know, the first of that month was the day of the Great Earthquake.
    Kenkichi and me and a girl called Iyo, a worker in a spinning mill who was due to become Kenkichi’s wife, were having a meal in a place in Monzen Nakacho. Just then, there was this awful rumbling sound and the room began to sway. The china bowls and dishes and other things up on the shelves came raining down. A two-story house on the other side of the road lurched over to one side, then all of a sudden collapsed.
    We knew right off this wasn’t any ordinary quake. We’d have been crushed under the building if we’d stayed put, so we scrambled out, started running, and kept going till we got to the canal. But a warehouse right by the boat we’d left tied up there had collapsed, and the boat was half sunk. It was useless, and poor Kenkichi really took it hard. “God, look at that!” he kept saying. “I’ll never be able to use it again.”
    Before long the sky began to turn red.
    “It’s the mill!” yelled Iyo, and she began to run again; the Amagasaki spinning mill where she worked was pouring smoke. So we set off after her. The fires were spreading at a terrific rate.
    Morishita-cho was already a sea of flames. People were in a real panic, with old folk and children yelling at the top of their lungs.
    “It’s no good,” said Kenkichi, grabbing at Iyo to hold her back. “There’s nothing you can do even if we get to the mill.”
    A policeman was bellowing in a hoarse voice, “Go to the Army Clothing Depot!”
    We ignored him and went on running steadily in the opposite direction. When we got to Eitai bridge we found that the whole area on the other bank, for hundreds of yards from Nihombashi on to Asakusa, was like a roaring furnace. Looking back, we saw that the fires were right behind us, too. A whirlwind had got up, and we saw a cart being blown high up into the air. Bits of houses and roofs were being sucked up into the whirlwind too and were dancing about in the sky like leaves. A horse that had gone crazy was galloping about the street and finally jumped into the river.
    We decided we’d try to get to the Clothing Depot and went on blindly, forcing our way through the waves of people. It had got dark before we noticed, and the fires were getting fiercer and fiercer. Just as we reached a point slightly beyond the Oshima river, there was a great roar and a huge column of red flames went up. The Clothing Depot, which had also caught fire, had fallen in. It made your flesh crawl—the whole night sky rocking with screams and shrieks. There’d been thousands of people inside.

     
    The Great Earthquake
     
    I gave up any hope of getting through safely; whatever happened now, I thought, we’d had it. But it was too hot to stand around, so we let ourselves be carried on by the crowd, on in the direction of Aikawa bridge. It was packed solid on the bridge too, so tight you could hardly move. Then, of course, people’s belongings started to catch fire. If we hadn’t done something, we’d have been burned alive.
    Just then, we noticed a barge below us, under the bridge.
    “I’m going in!” Kenkichi shouted, and jumped in with Iyo in his arms. I went in straight after them. There were dozens of people already on the barge, and someone soon helped us on board. But in no time hundreds of people were jumping from the bridge, with lots of them grabbing hold of the boat and trying to clamber in. A handful of them made it, but the barge looked like sinking at any moment.
    “Keep off! The boat’s full!” somebody on board bellowed.
    “Are you going to leave us to die?” someone in the water shouted back. But then a sudden wind got up, the barge was carried away like a chip of wood, and we drifted off in the