ura hello work FINAL CHAPTER: c.20: internal organ broker
What is Shinya Kusaka’s URA HELLO WORK?
Where can I buy it?
20 – INTERNAL ORGAN BROKER IN THE HOUSE (臓器ブローカー：ZOUKI BUROUKAA)
RISK:*****
SALARY: *****
HARD LABOR:*****
ILLEGALITY:*****
Perhaps you’ve heard rumors that the underworld deals in not just guns, drugs, and women, but in human organs as well. I head those rumors too, but I couldn’t feel as if they were real. It just seemed like a threat that a gangster or loan-shark would say to his victim– “If you can’t pay me back, why don’t you sell a kidney?” Like something out of a crime-movie, not real life! I asked my underworld contacts, but they all said, “I heard about it too, but I don’t know if it’s for real!” Even my mobbed-up yamikin (loan-shark) acquaintance said, “What’s up with that stuff anyway?” But, one source who was a soushiki daihyousha (相識代表者：literally ‘representative’ of an ‘organization’, but I’m sure you can figure it out )told me, “Yeah, ihou (違法： illegal) zouki buroukaa exist, I’m pretty sure. There’s none in our soushiki (相識：organization) but I could get ahold of one if I had to.” When I asked him if he could do it for me, he said, “Quit talking shit!”
I asked everyone to put me in touch if they knew anything, but it was futile. I resolved to go ahead and publish the book without any zouki buroukaa.
THE MIDDLE-OF-THE-NIGHT PHONE-CALL
One night around two AM, my cell-phone rang. I was at home alone, working on the manuscript. In my line of work, it’s normal for me to get late calls, but not this late! Also, the caller’s number was ‘unlisted’ – almost certainly a prank or a threat. (incidentally, could you please stop calling me at weird times, and then not saying anything?) But I wasn’t making much headway with the manuscript, and I needed a nice distraction. Sure, prank calls make me so mad I can’t sleep – but maybe the anger would keep me awake and give me energy to finish the ‘script!
So I picked up: “Is this Mr. Kusaka?” a man’s voice said. It’s very rare for pranksters to take the time to confirm my identity. So I replied, “Yes, that’s me! What do you want?” The voice lowered to a whisper: “I heard you’re looking for zouki buroukaa, so I called.” As soon as I heard that, I scampered around my house, phone to my ear, looking for my digital recorder. I never managed to find it- maybe it was back at the office – so I conducted the interview at my computer, listening while typing notes!
“What is your name?”
Silence.
“Who told you I was writing about zouki buroukaa?”
Silence, again.
“Have we met before?”
“I can’t answer that either. It’s safer for both of us if we assume we’ve never met.”
I decided not to ask him anything that might tangentially reveal his identity. After all, he was being kind to me by volunteering for the interview. He was very polite and formal during the interview. I asked him what he would prefer to be called: he said, Mr. Origin. His age? “Please write that I’m in my mid-thirties.”
I’M JUST AN INTERMEDIARY
After making me promise many times to preserve his anonymity, Mr. Origin began to tell me about his operations:
“My work is mostly that of mediator, an assen (斡旋：intermediary): I look for sick people wishing to receive an zouki (for transplant) and then I take care of them.”
He was choosing his words very carefully. I couldn’t tell if he was being arrogant or paranoid. His story emerged in dribs and drabs, one word at a time.
“Finding people who want zouki is the easiest part of my job. I get ahold of the official “waiting list” for zouki , which all the hospitals use. Then I contact the families directly. I can meet a lot of clients quickly that way. What’s more, everyone is in a big hurry to save their loved ones, so they don’t haggle. I can get the job in a single meeting. It’s probably the easiest thing to sell in the world! Of course, it does cost a lot of money. But once I’ve established that they can pay, we can conclude the contract immediately.”
The people who hire Mr. Origin are people who have already tried to obtain zouki legally and been turned away by the system because of the long waiting lists. They are desperate enough to straight-up barter money for human organs, he said: “There’s a huge shortage of ‘legitimate’ zouki donors. The odds of a deathly ill patient getting a needed zouki are astronomically small – they say you’d have better luck winning the lottery. For instance, in Japan, 10,000 people sign up every year for a kidney transplant, but there are only 200 donors a year. So that’s why so many people come to me.”
He seems to be arguing that his job is moral because he’s only trying to help sick people. Having established this moral foundation, he proceeded to summarize his operations:
“First, I make contact with the person who wants zouki. Then, they have to meet a variety of conditions- many people don’t qualify. For instance, they have to be OK with doing the operation in a foreign country. The Phillipines is the best, because ishoku (移植 : organ transplants) are legal, and they have first-world-quality hospitals. But some other Asian countries are also ok. Some Japanese people don’t want to go overseas – either they don’t trust foreign doctors or they are concerned by the long wait-time for a Phillipine transplant. SO reassuring the clients is the first part of my job.
This is not as racist as it sounds because getting zouki from different ethnic groups increases the chances of the patient’s body rejecting the zouki. (ed. note: so he says)
“After that, we decide on the zouki fee, which varies widely from organ to organ. It’s difficult to generalize about the price, but roughly speaking, kidneys and corneas are the cheapest. In The Phillipines, such a transplant will cost between $200,000 and $400,000. But a heart transplant can cost an order or magnitude more: over $1,000,000. Besides the cost of the zouki, other factors also affect the price: the age of the client, the choice of the hospital (better quality hospitals cost more), and the time-urgency of the patient’s condition. After I conclude the contract with the client, then I have to find the zouki! It’s comparatively easy to find adult zouki on the black market in the daisan sekai (第三世界：third world), but finding children’s zouki I not easy at all. Those will cost you a pretty penny, I tell you!”
So how does one purchase black-market zouki in the daisan sekai, anyway? When I ask him, Mr. Origin once again cautions me that he bears no responsibility for ‘harvesting’ the zouki, he is merely the assen (intermediary) in these transactions.
“Poor people are selling them, that’s who! That’s what it is! The dollar goes a long way in those impoverished countries – $1,000 for a kidney is a lot of money to them. With that kind of money, they can open their own business, open their own store, improve their lives! That’s how it happens in the Phillipines sometimes, but mostly it’s Indians who sell their own organs. If you offer $5,000, you’ll get a huge crowd of applicants, each yelling, ‘Buy mine! Buy mine!’
Hearing this, I can’t help but imagine a whole bunch of Mr. Origins, in various daisan sekai countries, who go round all the poorest cities buying organs, and then selling them to the Japanese Mr. Origin The ‘industry’ begins to make sense to me, falling into established capitalist common sense and patterns.
“Some of the zougi-sellers are hideous parents. They’re harvesting their own childrens’ organs. One time I was talking with a mother who was selling her daughter’s zougi. She was pregnant again at that time. When I asked her about it, she said she was going to harvest that baby as well, after it was born. I was deeply shocked – it seemed that the world was going dark before my eyes. But in all my years on the job, that’s the sickest thing I have seen, so it’s not average.”
So now we know about the zougi -buying, now we turn our attention to the actual surgery:
“As you might imagine, the whole family is stressed. They get on the airplane, not knowing if everyone will return to Japan alive. You can see the lingering doubts on their faces. You talk to them and they don’t really hear you. I try to encourage them, but. . . .
“The sense of fear increases on the plane. Many people vomit. But also a lot of people feel kind of relieved as well- they feel for the first time that their drastic plan has actually, really come together, and they realize it’s not a dream. When I look at them, I feel a very complex web of emotions radiating from them.”
By this time, I had been interviewing Mr. Origin for almost an hour. If I ask him a risky question, he might just hang up on me. And I have no way of getting back in touch with him if he does. I have to tread carefully.
THE BODY CRIES, ‘I DON’T WANT TO DIE’
“Some of the clients are selfish – they only want a Japanese donor, only want a Japanese surgeon. All opening up a briefcase full of cash money, asking ‘What can we get for this much?’ My fingers start to itch! ‘We don’t want to wait in line for the surgery. Find us a Japanese hospital where they know how to play ball.’ Of course these clients get charged a special rate.”
I asked him, are there really Japanese hospitals that crooked? But he ducked the question. Pressing on, I asked how he obtains zougi in Japan, as opposed to the daisan sekai. Is that old rumor about the loan-shark who says, “Why don’t you sell your kidneys?” really true?
“I can’t deny it.” He continued, “I try to avoid domestic zougi brokering as much as I can.”
I remarked that his statement implied that yes, he did harvest domestically. This resulted in the longest, most awkward silence of our whole conversation. Which was saying something!
Finally, he continued: “Let me just say this: a client might broach the topic this way – ‘How would you feel if I said something about, say, for instance, doing the surgery here in Japan?’ I would reply that, if such a thing were to, perhaps, occur, that the zougi donor would still have to be a foreigner. I might say, ‘Someone would have to get that person a passport and fly them over here, with the contraband, as it were, smuggled inside their body. It would still be difficult to find a ‘compliant’ hospital, and then find a way to smuggle the donor inside and hide the procedure from the medical association. But in the end, the only real obstacle is money and do you have enough of it.’
“In the cases where the client agrees to these hypothetical conditions, I have usually been able to succeed in arranging the transplant. For instance, if an Indian wants to sell a kidney, we pay him – well it’s like paying an allowance to a Japanese child, really – but to him it’s a lot, so you can’t say anyone got burned on that deal.”
So far we’ve been talking about foreign donors, daisan sekai donors. But behind that phenomenon is the huge economic difference between the countries. Isn’t that a bit like prejudice? Paying the Indian $2,000 and then selling the organ for $300,000? That’s a distorted structure no matter how you look at it. Plus it seems as if the ‘helpful assen’ Mr. Origin only helps sick people with lots of cash.
“What I have in common with the daisan sekai donors is this: we both know that they’re starving, and they can’t exchange their kidneys for wheat and milk!”
Seriously, bro, what kind of man are you???
Mr. Origin got very worked up at this, and responded : “Look, I can’t single-handedly evacuate everyone in the third world! But a few Japanese people are calling on me to save them, and I can do that! It’s not like the client says, ‘Hey, I’m so rich – why don’t I buy a new liver just for fun!’ That’s only a small minority! My clients are very old people, people in pain – children born with terrible diseases, children born to die. Who can refuse someone who is screaming with their whole body, ‘I don’t want to die!’ Who can look at them and then shrug and walk away? Not me. That’s why I chose this business!”
HONESTLY, THE SCARIEST THING IS KIDNAP-HARVESTING
In 2000, in Guatemala, two Japanese tourists were mistaken for child-stealing hitosarai (人さらい：kidnappers). They were killed by a mob. Mr. Origin has also talked to other brokers who actually DO ‘procure’ zougi by kidnapping people.
“What I’m going to tell you next is incredible but it’s not a lie. In a lot of foreign countries, parents have to take their children to school, and pick them up. If the children go on their own, they’ll be yuukai (誘拐: kidnapped). To a Japanese, this might sound like an exaggeration because you have no sense of the daisan sekai. But security is a big issue in these countries. I’ve heard all kinds of crazy rumors – that the organs are sold to rich Americans with sick children. I’ve heard about two or three children being kidnapped from Myanmar. Or Indian hospitals where a baby is born ok, but they tell the mother it was still-born- it just disappears. I’ve heard lots of terrifying stories like this.”
I should have asked what happened to the children afterwards, but I couldn’t. I was paralyzed by a mixture of horror on one hand, and on the other hand, doubt. Mr. Origin’s stories were getting more and more shocking. Could a real criminal really talk about such deep things openly? Mr. Origin’s voice began to quiver and quake over the receiver.
“When you hear things like that, you wonder what human life is worth. You can’t do this job if you think about that all the time, but now and then I stop and wonder, and it makes me afraid.”
As he said this, his tone of voice had subtley changed- there was a trace of regret.
Our interview had already passed the two-hour mark, so I decided we should finish it up. My final question: I asked him who told him about my book. He wouldn’t answer. I explained that I needed to send him the manuscript later, for fact-checking. But he wouldn’t tell me how to contact him. “Just write what you feel like,” he said. And we hung up. I was in my empty room in the middle of the night, holding a phone that I couldn’t put down.
What is Shinya Kusaka’s URA HELLO WORK?
Where can I buy it?
12 comments Tags: ura hello work —
12 Comments so far
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Christ, what a final chapter…
Jesus fuck.
Thanks for translating all of this, it has been very educational.
^
Thankyou for your effort in translating this book, i’ve enjoyed reading each part of it.
God damn, that’s tough shit right here….
Is this really the end? I was looking really forward to the mahjong chapter!
Still, thanks for translating. Man. What a book!
This whole thing was awesome. Good Job!
@taoisticbeer: Sorry, the mahjong chapter was INSANE. They had a whole “mahjongg tile FONT” and it was all about arcane rules.
@fish, js, tomd, z: you’re welcome! Thanks for reading, and hopefully the next translations will be a bit better. Haven’t decided what to do yet, though . . .
great read! thank you for your work on all of these
This was very cool of you to translate and post. And yeah, crazy last chapter. I worked for a security firm a long time ago, and one night one of the higher ups came and covered a 3rd shift spot for my partner. We sat there and he told me all kinds of crazy stories about how he used to work as a private detective tracking down missing children, and of the child export business he claims is mainly run out of New Orleans. On the one hand he could have been bullshitting me, but on the other it made me feel kind of icky just to hear it, but I couldn’t stop listening. I imagine it was the same sort of horrible fascination that this guy listened to stories about children abducted for organs.
I’m kind of sad this is over, I looked forward to this every Sunday! Great book, thanks for translating.
fuck, that was intense! homeboy knows how to go out with a bang. wonder if he’s written anything else.
thanks for translating that man, you are the shit!
I think this sort of crime was more prevalent in the wilder days of the yakuza, before they really got corporate. I’m guessing the person being interviewed wasn’t around then.
Awesome translation dude!
This bit creeped me out the most I think:
"It’s not like the client says, ‘Hey, I’m so rich – why don’t I buy a new liver just for fun!’ That’s only a small minority!"
I mean, holy shit, all sorts of crazy crap happens in the world but to know that in some — albeit minority but this quote seemingly confirms it DOES happen does it not — cases all the horror is justified purely by some fucktard wanting a new liver for shits and giggles!? Thats utterly atrocious!