A Lonely Resurrection

than Caucasians, some suppressed homoeroticism like the one that drove Mishima. Maybe some of the same impulses that had led him to become a gangster to begin with.
    His obsession had nothing to do with health, of course. In fact, the guy was an obvious steroid abuser. His neck was so thick it looked as though he could slide a tie up over his head without loosening the knot, and he sported acne so severe that the club’s stark incandescent lighting, designed to show off to maximum effect the rips and cuts club members had developed in their bodies, cast small shadows over the pocked landscape of his face. His testicles were probably the size of raisins, his blood pressure likely rampaging through an overworked heart.
    I’d also seen him explode into the kind of abrupt, unprovoked violence that is another symptom of steroid abuse. One night, someone I hadn’t seen before, no doubt one of the club’s civilian members who liked the location and thought that rubbing elbows with reputed gangsters made them tougher by osmosis, started removing some of the numerous iron plates weighing down the bar the yakuza had been using to bench-press. The yakuza had walked away from the station, probably to take a break, and the new guy must have mistakenly assumed this meant he was through. The guy was pretty sizable himself, his colorful spandex sleeveless top showing off a weightlifter’s chest and arms.
    Someone probably should have warned him. But the club’s membership consisted primarily of
chinpira
—low-level young yakuza and wannabe punks—not exactly good Samaritan types who were interested in helping their fellow man. Anyway, you have to be at least mildly stupid to start disassembling a bar like the one the yakuza had been using without looking around for permission first. There were a hundred and fifty kilos on it, maybe more.
    Someone nudged the yakuza and pointed. The yakuza, who had been squatting, reared up and bellowed,
“Orya!”
loud enough to vibrate the plate glass in the front of the rectangular room. What the fuck!
    Everyone looked up, as startled as if there had been an explosion—even the new guy who had been so clueless just an instant earlier. Still bellowing expletives, the yakuza strode directly to the bench-press station, doing a good job of using his voice, either by instinct or design, to disorient his victim.
    Everything about the yakuza—his words, his tone, his movement and posture, screamed
Attack!
But the man was too frozen, either by fear or denial, to move off the line of assault. And though he was holding a ten-kilo iron plate with edges considerably harder than the yakuza’s cranium, the man did nothing but drop his mouth open, perhaps in surprise, perhaps in inchoate and certainly futile apology.
    The yakuza blasted into him like a rhino, his shoulder driving into the man’s stomach. The man tried to brace for the impact, but again he failed to move off the line of attack and his attempt was largely useless. The yakuza drove him backward into the wall, then unleashed a flurry of crude punches to his head and neck. The man, in shock now and running on autopilot, dropped the plate and managed to raise his arms to ward off a few of the blows, but the yakuza, still bellowing, slapped the attempted blocks out of the way and kept on punching. One of the shots connected to the left side of the man’s neck, the real estate over the carotid sinus, and the man began to crumble as his nervous system overcompensated from the shock of the blow by reducing blood pressure to the brain. The yakuza, feet planted widely as though he had an axe and was splitting logs, continued to hammer at the top of his victim’s head and neck. The man fell to the floor, but retained enough consciousness to curl up and protect himself to some extent from the hail of kicks that followed.
    Huffing and swearing, the yakuza bent and caught the prostrate man’s right ankle between an enormous bicep and forearm. For a moment, I thought he was going to apply a leglock and try to break something. Instead, he straightened and proceeded to drag the man’s prone form to the club’s entrance and out into the street.
    He returned a moment later, alone, and, after taking a moment to catch his breath, resumed his rightful place on the bench without looking at anyone else in the room. Everyone returned to what they were doing: his affiliates, because they didn’t care; the civilians, because they were unnerved. It was as