Sometimes the phenomenon is caused by fear. Fear not so much of the requirements, but rather the consequences of life as a hard target. Seriously protecting yourself calls for the annihilation of ties with society, ties that most people need the way they need oxygen. You give up friends, family, romance. You walk through the world like a ghost, detached from the living around you. If you were to die in, say, a bus accident, you’d wind up buried in an obscure municipal graveyard, just another John Doe, no flowers, no mourners, hell, no mourning. It’s natural, probably even desirable, to be afraid of all this.

Other times there’s a form of denial at work. Circuitous routes, extensive security checks, an ongoing internal dialogue consisting of If I were trying to get to me, how would I do it? all require a deep acceptance of the notion that there are people out there who have both the motive and the means to cut short your time on Earth. This notion is innately uncomfortable for the human psyche, so much so that it produces enormous stress even for soldiers in battle. A lot of guys, the first time they come under close-range fire, they’re shocked. “Why’s he trying to kill me?” they’re asking themselves. “What did I ever do to him?”

Think about it. Ever look in a closet or under the bed, when you’re alone in the house, to ensure that an intruder isn’t hiding there? Now, if you really believed that the Man in the Black Ski Mask was lurking in those places, would you behave the same way? Of course not. But it’s more comfortable to believe the danger only in the abstract, and to act on it only half-heartedly. That’s denial.

Finally, and most obviously, there is laziness. Who has the time or energy to inspect the family car for improvised explosive devices before every drive? Who can afford a two-hour, roundabout route to get to a place that could have been reached directly in ten minutes? Who wants to pass up a restaurant or bar just because the only seats available face the wall, not the entrance?

Rhetorical questions, but I know how Crazy Jake would have answered. The living, he would have said. And the ones who intend to go on that way.

Which leads to an easy rationalization, one that I’m sure is common to people who have taken lives the way I have. If he’d really wanted to live, the rationalization goes, I wouldn’t have been able to get to him. He wouldn’t have permitted himself that weakness, the one that did him in.

The yakuza’s weakness was his addiction to weights. Who knows what fueled it-a history of childhood bullying that made him want to appear visibly strong afterward, an attempt to overcome a feeling of inadequacy born of being naturally slighter of build 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 having to loosen 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 its 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 that were 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 wanna-be 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 was using without looking around for permission first. There were probably 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 although 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. I saw the man try 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. I saw one of his shots connect to the left side of the man’s neck, to 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 ax 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 biceps and forearm. For a moment, I thought he was going to apply a jujitsu 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 though nothing had happened, although the silence in the club indicated that indeed something had.

A part of my mind that’s always running in the background logged what I saw as the yakuza’s assets: raw strength, experience with violence, familiarity with principles of continuous attack. Under weaknesses, I placed lack of self-control, shortness of breath after a brief and one-sided fight, relatively minimal damage caused despite ferocity of assault.

Unless he was a borderline sociopath, which was statistically unlikely, I knew the yakuza would now be feeling slightly uneasy about what people must have made of his outburst. I took the opportunity to stroll over to the bench-press station and ask him if he needed a spot.