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The devil's child. The rise and fall of the only female yakuza by Sean Williams, read by Amy Okamura Jones. In almost 40 years, Marco Nishimura never lost a fight. She told me this as if it were as obvious as night following day.

Nishimura is five footfoot-nothing and slight of build.

She is also probably the only woman ever to have been a full-fledged yakuza,

a member of Japan's feared and rule-bound criminal underworld.

She must have defeated many male gangsters.

How, I asked, did she do it? First the legs, she said, hands clasped, maintaining the calm demeanour of a village priest.

You cut him down with a club or a plank of wood.

Then you get to work.

Nishimura's relaxed attitude to violence, you suspect speaking to her that it's a little more than

that, is what first caught the attention of Yakuza members in 1986 when she was a 19-year-old

runaway and a former juvenile prison inmate living in Gifu,

a city near Nagoya. One night that year, Nishimura received a phone call. A pregnant friend named

Ayah was in trouble. Nishimura grabbed a baseball bat, ran down the street, and found Ayah surrounded by five men.

When one of them kicked Ayah in the belly, Nishimura yelled for her friend to run,

then went for the attackers with her bat.

By the time the police arrived, the attackers were covered in blood and Nishimura had fled.

She went into hiding 170 miles away in Tokyo. A fortnight later, when she returned to Gifu, a local man

approached her in a nightclub. He was a member of the Inagawa Kai, one of Japan's largest

organized crime syndicates,

...