Confessions of a Yakuza / to be released in October 2024

First published in Japan in 1989, the book Asakusa bakuto ichidai is a record of the life story of the head of the yakuza (Japanese mafia), Eiji Ijichi. It was collected by the physician and writer Junichi Saga, who visited the 70-year-old man in the last months of his life to relieve his pain and, on that occasion, listened to and wrote down his story. 

The series of stories chronicles Ijichi's adolescence in his family home in Ucunomiya, his move to Tokyo's then Fukagawa district to work in the family coal shop, his entry into the gang that controlled the gambling district of Asakusa, and then the journey that led him to the head of the yakuza. The very honest narrative also includes love affairs, service in the army and prison experiences, all set against the backdrop of events that took place in Japan in the first half of the 20th century. The content of this extremely interesting book illuminates the situation of pre-war Japan. Moreover, there is almost no literature on the subject of the Japanese underworld in Czech, and therefore this project can serve to better understand the background of contemporary Japanese society.

The translator is the Japanologist Alice Kraemerová, an expert on Japanese society and culture, who was awarded the Japanese Order of the Rising Sun with Rosette in 2015 for her long-standing dissemination of Japanese culture.  

Confessions of a Yakuza is another book published in our series on Japanese culture and aesthetics. The aim of this edition is to introduce the Czech reader to Japanese culture through carefully selected Czech and Japanese literary works. In the case of translations, we always select titles that have not yet been translated into Czech and translate them directly from the source language, i.e. Japanese, to guarantee the greatest possible fidelity to the original. All books in this edition were quickly sold out and had to be reprinted due to high demand. Confessions of a Yakuza is our second book by Junichi Saga we have published. The first were Memories of Straw and Silk, published in 2019, about life in small-town Japan a hundred years ago.