Routledge, 2006, 234 pages including photographs, ISBN: 9784770030429, Hardback £13.99p
Review by William Farr
At once a horrifying and powerful exposé on the limits of personal endurance, Yakuza Moon is the true story of one women’s struggle against the odds. Born into a family where the head of the household also happens to be a local yakuza boss, Tendo has the cards stacked against her. Local neighbours and children who verbally attack her as some sort of representative of the yakuza make Tendo brutally aware of the power of her father’s position.
Tendo’s father, at once kind and traditionally Japanese – almost Bushido in his philosophical outlook – comes over however as a Mr. Hyde figure in his youth. He sits as an overarching figure throughout most of the book, either by virtue of sporadic violent outbursts or in weak dotage, yet he remains an important figure for Tendo.
The family garage in Tendo’s youth is littered with expensive cars and motorbikes, but as time passes the family hits hard times and loan sharks come calling. Tendo’s house and home is destroyed as the worm turns on the once powerful yakuza boss. Financial “feast or famine” become the watchwords of Tendo’s youth.
Yet in this midst of all this confusion Tendo is surprisingly doing well at school, in spite of the criminal underworld she inhabits. But one crazy night with her older sister tips the balance. Tendo slips into a world of drugs and abuse at the hands of yakuza lovers, only swinging back every so often to normal relationships. The yakuza lovers treat her appallingly, beat her relentlessly, yet the abuse cycle is difficult for Tendo to break free from. The normal lovers seek either to turn Tendo into a concubine, or save her from herself. Both viewpoints and attitudes towards her ultimately fail as Tendo has too much of her own self to uncover and come to terms with. Her older sister is in a similarly abusive pattern of behaviour and struggles to stand on her own feet whilst supporting a gambling addicted boyfriend. Members of Tendo’s family often have to move away to other cities to escape impending trouble in the form of loan sharks or ex-lovers.
But the book is an exercise in catharsis, and whilst the epilogue at the end of the book by Manabu Miyazaki exclaims that Tendo hates the yakuza, this does appear to be the case, so perhaps a degree of hostility is lost in translation. Rather, Tendo accepts the yakuza as a reality of her past; she cannot avoid who she was, and so she turns to yakuza symbols as a way of coming to terms with her cultural heritage. This begins with a trip to the tattooist. Tattoos in Japan whilst being a clear badge of the yakuza, are portrayed by Tendo as a way for her to extract herself from a difficult upbringing by placing herself clearly within it. The tattoos that she has emblazoned upon her body grow and become a major living work of art. This is coupled with a growing self-awareness as the young woman reinvents herself aesthetically.
The gangster’s daughter falls pregnant at a significant point in this self-development, at which point reality jolts her into understanding the importance of her own life, and how others rely upon her for strength. Ultimately Tendo makes peace with her past, concluding that her reality is defined by the people that make it, without whom her life is lessened in its meaning. So as her mother, followed by her father, die the clarity of who she is and who she wants to be, becomes clearer. At this point in Tendo’s journey – as she comes up for air – she realizes that her life is a vital message to the world because of the path that she has walked. Our heroine at this point decides to live out her childhood dream and write for a living.
This journey is critically empowering for women. The long suffering girl’s inner strength is astonishing, as is her ability to rise like a phoenix from the flames many times after being so close to the edge. A number of times Tendo throws in the towel and gives up on life; but whether through fortunate circumstance or an inner will which encourages her to stay alive for the sake of life – she endures. Whilst some books such as Joe Simpson’s Touching the Void take the reader to the inner depths of personal hell and back again through the journey of an individual in a natural environment, this book is surely the lifetime urban equivalent of having climbed Mount Everest a least twelve times over. Some of what happens to this misfortunate woman is agreeably self-inflicted, but Tendo is the result of a difficult upbringing but is fiercely strong in spite of it. Sadly many in society go through a Tendo-like journey and do not come positively out of it on the other side. Many individuals live forever in the hell of a maturity that has been tarnished by a childhood of abuse. This is not the case for the author of Yakuza Moon.
