Bullfight Read online

  YASUSHI INOUE

  BULLFIGHT

  Translated by

  Michael Emmerich

  PUSHKIN PRESS

  LONDON

  BULLFIGHT

  Contents

  Title Page

  Bullfight

  Afterword

  Also Available From Pushkin Press

  About the Publisher

  Copyright

  THE LARGE, eye-catching announcement ran in the Osaka New Evening Post in mid-December 1946: early the next year, from January 20, the paper would sponsor a three-day bullfighting tournament at Hanshin Baseball Stadium. As soon as the page proofs came off the presses, Tsugami, the editor-in-chief, slipped a copy into his pocket, collected Tashiro, whom he had left to his own devices in the chilly reception room long enough already, and stepped out with him into what one might describe as a classically wintry afternoon—air that over the past two or three days had become genuinely cold, gusts of biting wind that kept starting restlessly up off the street.

  “Ah, it’s out!” Tashiro took the newspaper Tsugami offered him and peered intently down at it, his expression relaxing into a brief, uncharacteristic smile, only to turn serious again an instant later. “From here on you just have to keep advertising, right up to the very end…” The paper flapped in the wind as he strode forward; he folded the few sheets in four and shoved them in his pocket. “Speaking of which, there’s something else I’d like to talk to you about, if you don’t mind.”

  Tashiro never seemed to tire. By the time he had one project on track, he was already heading toward his next goal. They had expended an enormous amount of energy just getting to the stage where they could finally print this notice, but none of that seemed to have had any effect on him.

  “So how’s this for a plan—why not buy the bulls? All twenty-two. Say they’re fifty thousand yen a head, that comes to a million one hundred thousand. A bargain, right? It’d be really easy if the paper bought them, and my guess is the people down in W., at the Association, as long as you’re interested they’ll be willing.”

  Tashiro rattled on without a pause, so focused you would have thought he had come all the way up from Kyushu specifically to make this proposal. The paper could sell the twenty-two bulls right away, as soon as the tournament was over, without having to go to the bother of looking after them. Of course, if they could afford to let their investment rest a while, they could hold on to them, see how the situation developed. After going to all the trouble of hauling twenty-two bulls up from Shikoku, though, all that distance, they couldn’t just send the animals back the second the tournament ended, right? You got more guts than that! Buy the bulls for a million one hundred thousand, right, and just transporting them to the Hanshin area ought to make it possible to turn that into a million and five or six hundred thousand. And if you could put them to sleep and turn them into meat, well, that would be a bit of a hassle, but right there you’re talking two million yen easy. Such, at any rate, were Tashiro’s calculations.

  A thick-set and broad-shouldered man of average height, Tashiro was bundled from head to toe in a heavy leather overcoat; he carried a somewhat aged but still stiff alligator-skin Boston bag—the sort of thing that had become rather valuable of late. Every so often as they hurried along the largely deserted, bombed-out street toward Midōsuji he would stop in his tracks, anxious that the wind hitting their faces was preventing Tsugami from hearing him, and stand there with his head lifted, talking to his taller companion.

  Tsugami listened, nodding, though obviously he had no intention of getting involved in any such scheme. The Osaka New Evening Post had been established with a hundred and ninety-five thousand yen; given how small it was, it was no exaggeration to say that sponsoring the tournament was already more than it could manage. This was a gamble on whose success the future of the company depended. Their finances were so strained right now that they had struggled just to scrape together funding for the tournament itself; the idea of buying the bulls was so ambitious as to be ludicrous. The paper had gotten started a year ago, in December 1945, with a staff composed largely of former employees of B. News, known as one of the two biggest newspapers in the country; even after all these months, they still relied on the larger paper for everything from typesetting and printing to photographs and use of its liaison department. People tended to assume as a result that Osaka New Evening Post was a subsidiary of B. News, and was run using the same capital. In actual fact, despite all appearances to the contrary, there was no connection at all between the two papers’ management. Tashiro, who was as sly a showman as any you were likely to find, had surely made a thorough investigation of the Osaka New Evening Post’s finances before contracting to help out with the tournament; that he was proposing such a substantial investment even so, suggested that he had overestimated the significance of the connection with B. News, and assumed that any losses would be covered, even if things went awry. For him to make so grand a misjudgment concerning a little paper that had only been around for a year—to be trying so earnestly to interest its editor in a second big project on top of the tournament—revealed a naïve optimism that seemed utterly typical of a country showman, and at the same time a willingness to drop all pretenses once you had started working together, to expose his true nature as a schemer, that was so open and unabashed it made you want to avert your eyes.

  Still, Tsugami felt no particular misgivings or anxiety about collaborating with Tashiro on this event. He had, he thought, made a fairly accurate assessment of his character as a showman when they first met—his cunning, his shamelessness, the likelihood that he would stray from the straight and narrow if it proved necessary to bring in a bit of money. He had no fear, despite all of this, that he would get burned in the course of their collaboration. In part this was because he sensed that there was a limit to how deep these admittedly caution-inspiring traits went—test any one of them and you would hit bottom soon enough—but more reassuring still was the oddly pure enthusiasm Tashiro showed for his work on occasion, a sort of passion that made Tsugami think with a start that he himself probably had a lot more bad inside him than Tashiro. “I’m telling you, this is going to be huge!” he would say, stressing each word, rolling each one around in his mouth, his expression radiating an incongruent air of abstraction. His gaze, at such moments, would be fixed in midair, as if he were watching something in the distance, and as the seconds passed he would slowly turn his eyes upward, higher and higher. It was as though some mysterious flower only Tashiro could see was hovering there, airborne, calling to him from afar. His mind, then, was free of calculations. Tsugami would regard with an unforgiving eye the stupid expression of this showman who had let all thought of profits and losses slip from his mind, his attitude that of a man examining a sculpture, and then all of a sudden he would find himself looking coldly into his own heart, which was no longer capable of losing itself in anything.

  “And if the paper doesn’t buy them?” Tsugami asked.

  “Actually,” Tashiro said, his tone suggesting that he had been waiting for Tsugami to ask precisely this question, “someone else has said he’d like to buy them. Matter of fact, that’s why I’ve imposed upon you today like this—I’d like you to come meet him. I wanted to have someone lined up, you see, just in case the paper isn’t interested. You could make it a joint investment, if you like, and even apart from this, I’m sure he can be of assistance in other ways. His name is Okabe Yata—perhaps you’ve heard of him? He’s quite a man, I must say.”

  Coming from Tashiro, that “quite a man” didn’t bode well. But Tsugami decided that if Tashiro wanted him to go meet this man, he would do him that favor—today, at any rate, he could do that. The relief he felt now that they had made it this far, now that the notice was abo
ut to go in the paper, had left him feeling buoyant and willing to oblige.

  “He’s from my hometown. I really look up to him, though he’s a bit younger than me. He’s one impressive guy, really. President of Hanshin Industries, though he owns three or four other companies, too. No one else from Iyo has made it as big as him.”

  No sooner had Tashiro said his piece than he leaned his broad, screen-like body forward and started walking on again, striding forward with big steps.

  *

  Tashiro Sutematsu had first presented himself at Tsugami’s house in Nishinomiya about a month ago, proffering an extra-large business card that described him rather dubiously as “President of Umewaka Entertainment.” As a rule Tsugami never received work visitors at home, but Sakiko had come over the previous evening and they had started quarreling, as they always did, about whether or not to break up; this morning, Tsugami was more than happy to have an excuse to escape the icy glitter in her eyes, the stubborn silence that could be read as expressing either love or hatred.

  Tsugami’s first meeting with Tashiro left him with the impression that he was precisely what his business card said he was: a country showman. His lively, ruddy face and his booming voice gave him a relatively young air, but he was clearly well past fifty. His double-breasted, brown homespun jacket and his wide-striped shirt were flashy enough for a man in his twenties, and he wore two silver rings on his coarse, stubby fingers; oddly, even after he came inside he kept his thin black muffler, which was the only part of his outfit that looked cheap, wrapped around his neck.

  Tashiro was trying to sell a bullfighting tournament. After outlining the origins and the history of “bull sumo,” which existed only in the town of W., in Iyo, and nowhere else in Japan, he went on to explain in a cadence that verged at times on the incantatory, as though he were addressing an audience, that the one thing he most wanted in life was to be able to introduce this traditional local sport to the rest of the country.

  “I myself, it is true, am just a nameless showman, no different from any other, but bullfighting is special—my efforts to promote it are unrelated to my business. I’m fortunate enough to have various other sources of income. As a matter of fact, you could say I’ve been touring the island of Shikoku with local theater troupes and naniwa-bushi performers these past thirty years, none of the troupes particularly good, solely on account of this dream I’ve cherished that one day I would have a chance to take Iyo bull sumo up to Tokyo or Osaka, to bring the sport into the limelight.”

  Despite his protestation that this was not a business venture, Tashiro emphasized more than once that it would be very hard indeed to find a project more certain to yield a profit.

  Tsugami sat with his pipe in his mouth, allowing himself to be swept up in the overdramatic flood of words Tashiro directed at him; he gazed out at the trunk of the sasanqua in the corner of the small garden, his eyes cold and unmoved. He met with characters like this every day at work. His practice was to listen noncommittally with half of his mind, while he allowed the other half to lose itself in utterly unrelated, often deeply lonely musings. From the speaker’s perspective it was like sticking a lance into something again and again with no result, although when Tsugami did offer the odd brief comment it would be so precisely attuned to the moment, for all its rote conversationality, that the visitor would succumb to the peculiar illusion that Tsugami was actually listening in rapt attention.

  Tsugami grew ever more impassive; Tashiro waxed increasingly eloquent.

  “Now, when someone mentions bullfighting, people who don’t know much about it will assume it must be a very rowdy, boorish sport, but I assure you this could not be further from the truth. The thing is, you see, from time immemorial the locals have always bet on which of the—”

  “They bet?” Tsugami exclaimed.

  According to Tashiro, tournaments were held three times each year in W., and even now almost everyone who attended gambled on the matches. Until then Tashiro’s words had passed Tsugami by without having any effect, but somehow, in an odd and warped way, this bit of information managed to penetrate his mind. All at once, in the most natural manner, Tashiro had caused the scene to rise up before Tsugami like a frame from a movie: the vast modern bleachers at Hanshin Stadium or Kōroen Stadium; the contest between two living creatures playing itself out within a bamboo enclosure at the center; the riveted spectators; the loudspeakers; the bundles of bills; the rocking, cheering waves of people… It was a slow-moving, cold, but distinctly palpable picture, executed in lead. After that, Tsugami hardly paid any attention to what Tashiro was saying. Betting, he was thinking, yes, this could work. Everyone would put money on the bulls—it would be no different here in the urban Hanshin region than it was in W. In these postwar days, perhaps this was just the sort of thing the Japanese needed if they were going to keep struggling through their lives. Set up some random event for people to bet on, and everything would take care of itself: they would come and place their bets. Just imagine it—tens of thousands of spectators betting on a bullfight in a stadium hemmed in on every side by the ruined city. It could work. Baseball and rugby were finally getting started again, but it would be two or three years still until they could regain their former popularity. In times like these, bull sumo was as much as people could manage. The first bullfighting tournament in Hanshin, ever—not a bad project for a newspaper to sponsor, not bad at all. In the short term, at least, the Osaka New Evening Post was unlikely to find anything better.

  Tsugami’s eyes, as he sat thinking these thoughts, had the same moist, untamed look in them, cold and yet somehow viscous, burning, that made it impossible for Sakiko to leave him, try as she might. He sat up and said, in a sharp, conclusive tone completely different from the one he had used before, “I’ll think it over. You know, this might just be the thing.”

  Half an hour or so later Tashiro left, and in the sudden stillness of the room Tsugami realized that he was mildly excited. As was his habit when he began planning a new project, he sat for a long time in a chair out on the verandah, saying little and moving not at all. At such times, he wanted more than anything to be alone.

  Suddenly, Sakiko’s voice broke the silence. “You’d love a project like that.”

  She was sitting in a corner of the room in the same posture she had been in before Tsugami went outside, her head down, knitting needles glinting white and cold in her hands.

  “Why do you say that?”

  “Oh, I don’t know, just seems that way. You’d get totally wrapped up in it, I can tell. You’ve got that side to you.” Then, raising her eyes and casting a quick, cold glance his way, she said in a tone that could have been either reproachful or resigned, “The unsavory side.”

  She was right. The word described a certain facet of his personality.

  Tsugami had been one of the best reporters in the city news section at B. News, and as such he had made his way largely unscathed through three years as deputy managing editor of that ever troublesome section—a job at which everyone else had failed. The creases in his pants were invariably crisp; he was nimble both in his interactions with visitors and in the manner in which he disposed of his work, and sharp to the extent that he sometimes came across as unfeeling. No matter how odious the incident, he could always find some clever way to soften it in print. Naturally, he had made his share of enemies in a world populated by demanding journalists. They said he was loose with money, or smug, or an egoist, or a stylist, or a literature boy, and to an extent the criticisms they leveled at him hit the mark; but these very faults lent him an intellectual air that set him apart from most city news reporters.

  When the war ended, B. News decided that the most rational way of dealing with its huge surplus staff was to establish a printing company and an evening newspaper; it moved a significant number of employees to these affiliated companies. Tsugami was immediately tapped to become the new paper’s editor-in-chief. At thirty-seven he seemed slightly young for the post, but clearly no one
else had the abundant talent required to create a brand-new kind of publication capable of beating the competition at a time when countless such papers kept sprouting up; and since Omoto, the former film-industry man who had landed in the president’s seat, was a total amateur who didn’t know the first thing about producing a newspaper, whose only selling point was his boldness, what they needed above all was a solid, reliable individual capable not only of working under the president, taking charge of the editing, but also of serving as the central axle around which the paper’s management would revolve. In this respect, too, the impression of thoroughness and caution that Tsugami had given his colleagues had played strongly to his advantage.

  When Tsugami assumed his position as editor-in-chief of the Osaka New Evening Post, he first made the bold decision to give the paper a new format, wider than it was long; then, having clearly identified its target readership as urban intellectuals and salarymen, he settled on culture and entertainment as the two subjects for which it would be known, and decided to emphasize satire, irony, and wit in every aspect of its reportage, from its prose style to its coverage and editing. This innovative path he chose for the New Evening Post achieved a certain measure of success: it gained popularity as a different breed of publication among salarymen, students, and the like throughout the entire region, in Kyoto, Osaka, and Kobe, and when the street hawkers came around it was the first to sell out. A paper of this sort had a genuinely attractive freshness in the eyes of readers accustomed to the oafish wartime papers. A certain young professor at Kyoto University, who had been restored to his post after the war ended, commented in a mini column he wrote for the university newspaper that the New Evening Post was “a paper for the slightly unsavory intellectual,” and to an extent he was right. A sensitive poet type would undoubtedly have been able to point out a certain shadow of emptiness, of devil-may-care negligence, of loneliness darkening the pages of a paper that was popular among smart city kids. These were qualities that Tsugami, who gave the paper its editorial direction, carried within himself, though he kept them carefully concealed. The one person who had sniffed out these elements of his personality better than anyone was Sakiko, the woman with whom he had been living off and on for three years now, since the middle of the war, and who kept insisting she was going to leave him, this time she really was, only to let their hopeless relationship keep dragging on and on.