Listen: I once lived next to a man in his late fifties who had been a Japanese gangster for most of his life. He even had a lapel pin from the Yamaguchi Gumi crime syndicate [1] , just like any respectable salaryman might have.

Perhaps it was only mutual curiosity, but we really hit it off, that gangster and me, and during the year or so that we were neighbors, we would often drink together. On one of these drinking sessions in the messy, sunless little rabbit hutch he was living in, he said there was something he wanted to show me.

The man was always playing Show and Tell.

“This is the knife I cut my pinky off with,” he said on one occasion, and, opening a small wooden box, pulled out a shriveled little brown digit. “And this here’s my pinky.”

I’d expected more of the same, memorabilia of his life in the yakuza, only this time, the crazy old man, hopped up off the tatami floor and pulled his pants down, showing me his dingdong. It was as bumpy as a crook-necked squash. He fingered one of the bumps and moving it around explained that he’d had pearls implanted just under the skin.

“Women love it,” he assured me.

“Oh, I’m sure they do. Now can you put that thing away?”

[1] The Yamaguchi Gumi (山口組) is Japan’s largest organized crime syndicate with as many as 36,000 members. It accounts for about 46% of the gangsters in Japan.

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