What Goes Around

I was a professional witness to a powerful Yakuza family based on Hawaii. For reasons absolutely unfathomable to me, an organised crime family needed me to be the witness to observe and confirm that the forms of Family justice had been properly observed, and punishment conducted in the proper manner.

I was accompanying the Oyabun's daughter, a young adult and already truly a member of her family. She was a machine, and I was entrusted to take care of her - not that she needed much caretaking, since she was a well-tempered killing machine, capable of handling any threat.

I witnessed as she cut off a man's little finger, with signet ring (not depicted, but worth more than double the price of the one illustrated above). She pulled off the ring, and disposed of it by catapulting it into the Pacific off the edge of a grassy, forested cliff. The finger was wrapped in a box and origami paper to be delivered to the Oyabun.

The Oyabun himself disposed of the boss of the nine-fingered man. For her crime of exposing the Family to the scrutiny of the authorities, the Oyabun took it upon himself to dispense justice in person, while sitting beside the boss.

She hardly felt the tanto slip between her ribs. The Oyabun might have been cutting fish to make sashimi, and there was hardly any blood on the blade when he handed it to me, wrapped in white silk, a single red spot spreading symbolically outward from the centre where the blade sat.

Lastly, her job done, the daughter remembered that she had a duty to perform, as well. We bowed deeply, mournfully, and then she calmly walked into a busy street and got run over by a bus.

It was a harrowing dream ... but it ended with superb irony, almost as if I were watching an episode of the Lenkov Hawaii Five-O reboot being played out as if on a screen. Steve and Danno had been taking some well-earned leave, and had gone out to sea to sink a few tins, shoot the breeze, and of course to catch some fish.

Steve landed a huge one; and it cut to later that evening, to where Steve was cutting up the fish to serve at a celebratory luau. He gutted the fish ... and the signet ring fell out onto his chopping board.

That concluded one of the oddest dreams I ever experienced.