Bullfight Read online

  “No one else knows you have this side to you,” she would say when she was feeling happy. “This sneaky, sloppy, unsavory side. No one else, just me.”

  Her eyes would shine, as though that element of Tsugami’s character were a trace of the love she had given him. On other occasions, however, she would utter the exact same words but as a criticism directed at her lover.

  Tsugami had a wife and two children who were still living in his hometown in Tottori, where he had sent them to escape the bombing; Sakiko had a husband, a college friend of Tsugami’s, who had died at war and whose bones had not yet come home. Tsugami and Sakiko had first gotten involved while the war was still on, and their relationship continued just as it was after the fighting ended. Still, even Tsugami’s colleagues at the newspaper, who usually had such sharp eyes when it came to things like this, had yet to catch wind of their affair—a circumstance that Sakiko interpreted, at least at times, as another sign of his cunning.

  Sakiko had first become physically involved with Tsugami about a year after she was notified, by back channels, of her husband’s death. She had been in the habit of going and talking with Tsugami whenever she wanted to discuss her plans for the future, and one summer evening she had gone to visit him at home. He had only just come back from the office, and when she walked around to the verandah as she usually did she found him slumped in a wicker chair inside the house, still dressed in his work clothes, his hat tipped back on his head, taking sips from a glass of whiskey with the attitude of a man who just doesn’t care anymore.

  The second he noticed Sakiko, Tsugami leaped up and straightened his jacket, transforming himself into his usual proper, austere self, but by then Sakiko could already feel the blood stirring hotly in her body—a sensation she had all but forgotten. There had been something forlorn in the sight of him there, unguarded, exhausted, that left her oddly moved, touched in a sensuous, moist way. Even after they started sleeping together, she still remembered Tsugami the way she had seen him that evening, and felt that the man she had encountered then was who she loved, that isolated, lonely soul no one else knew, that was somehow being eaten away, emitting a sort of rotten phosphorescence.

  Tsugami’s love was not the sort that burned hot and deep. Somewhere down inside him was a core that refused to catch. She could throw herself bodily into his arms and still she would sense that same unbridgeable gap between them. Tsugami’s eyes were unassailably sober, untouched by Sakiko’s heart or by her thirty-year-old body. His were not a lover’s eyes. But neither were they the eyes of a man who would simply toss her aside, like a piece of trash on the road. He gazed at her like an outside observer, watching from a distance, waiting to see how matters would develop—cold, fish-like, and therefore irresistible.

  Whenever Sakiko brushed up against this coldness in Tsugami’s heart, so deep he himself seemed unsure how to handle it, the same phrase rose up in her mind: a bad man. But there were times when those emotionless, wicked eyes of his would push themselves toward drunkenness. Sakiko knew that very well. How she loved Tsugami for those eyes: their frenzied, lawless, mournful light. But then she realized that she would never be able to strip them of their sobriety, and her love began, from time to time, to turn itself into a hatred that glistened with sadness.

  The fact that Tsugami had let himself be tugged along so easily by the bait Tashiro offered him, by the thought of the bullfight, may perhaps have owed less to his reporter’s instincts than to those sober eyes of his, and the rebellious urge he felt to make them drunk, finally, for once, on something. Sakiko had been right to speak of the hidden “unsavory side” of his personality.

  *

  The day after Tashiro came to talk about the bullfight, Tashiro convened a meeting in the remodeled building where the Osaka New Evening Post had its offices—a structure in Yatsuhashi that had survived the firebombings. Also in attendance were Omoto, the paper’s president; K., director of the copyediting department; S., advertising director; and Tashiro.

  Omoto immediately gave the project his approval. “Terrific idea, I love it. We’ll have to sponsor it ourselves, with support from the town of W. and the Bull Sumo Association—that’s the way to do it. We ought to be able to bring in a hundred and fifty thousand people over three days, I’d say, assuming fifty thousand a day. We’ll go big on publicity, like we brought the bulls over from Spain or something.”

  Omoto was so corpulent he looked like a somewhat poorly trained fighting bull himself, and was talking so loudly he was almost shouting, as was his wont when his mood was good. Having raised himself by his own bootstraps from a humble beginning as the owner of a movie theater out in the country to his present position, he had confidence and guts when it came to business matters; he was the sort of man who decided everything on the basis of his own inimitable instincts. Now that Omoto and Tsugami were in favor of the bullfight, no one else could possibly express any real opposition. And so, just like that, the issue was decided. They would bring the tournament that was held at S. Shrine in W. each New Year’s Day up here and hold it in one or the other of the two gigantic, modern baseball stadiums in the Hanshin area. They would have to work on the town and the Bull Sumo Association to make sure to get their support, both in name and in terms of the actual logistics. The tournament would be held over the course of three days in late January, during the off season for outdoor sports. The newspaper and Umewaka Entertainment would split the difference between total expenditure and total income—they would share all profits or losses, in other words. Umewaka Entertainment would not be mentioned in any of the publicity, however; as far as the public knew, the tournament would be carried out solely under the auspices of the Osaka New Evening Post. The expenses that accumulated along the way, until they did their final calculation at the conclusion of the tournament, would be divided with Tashiro taking responsibility for the costs of renting the bulls and transporting them to the stadium while the paper covered whatever costs there were after their arrival, along with those of readying the stadium, doing other preparatory work, and advertising the event. Such were the main points covered in the contract. That night, Omoto and Tsugami took Tashiro to a nice Japanese restaurant in Kyoto. The following night, Tashiro returned the favor by taking them and a few of the paper’s directors to a sukiyaki place in Osaka’s black market and buying everyone round after round of sake.

  “I’m not a superstitious man,” he said, “but I thought sukiyaki might be just the thing, even if it is in somewhat poor taste. Either way, we’re going to get fat off these cows!”

  Tashiro was in high spirits, thrilled at how well things had turned out. Soon the sake started going to his head, and he proposed that when the bulls reached Kobe they ought to dress them in really showy aprons, those ceremonial things worn by sumo wrestlers, and parade them along the streets from Kobe to Nishinomiya, and then the next day they could have another parade in Osaka, to kick things off in the grandest possible manner. He rubbed his oily face with his palm, then bent to fill Omoto’s and Tsugami’s cups. At moments like these, Tsugami was struck by the childlike look on Tashiro’s face.

  When Tashiro went off to use the restroom, Omoto, who had been as drunkenly giddy as the rest of them, declared in an oddly solemn tone, “The problem is all the money we’ll have to sink into this thing until cash comes in from ticket sales. I did some rough calculations, and it looks to me like we’ll need about a million yen.”

  “Yeah, it’ll take that much for sure.”

  “So what do we do?”

  “Oh, we’ll find it somehow.”

  “You think?”

  “We’ll link all the publicity to advertising, and I’ll find some way to convince the stadium to wait until after the event for the rental fees. The only worry is, we’ll need two to three hundred thousand yen just to build the ring and the stable.”

  “We can’t get three hundred thousand, not all at once!”

  “It’ll be all right, just leave it to me.”

 
; Tsugami had no clear plan in mind, but if all else failed they could raise the cash by selling tickets in advance. Right now his thoughts were focused less on financial details than on the parade of bulls that Tashiro had suggested. Twenty or so bulls. It would make an eye-catching article, nice photos. At the very least it was sure to get everyone talking. Somewhere deep in his head, which was throbbing a bit now from the mixture of sake and whiskey, he kept carefully sketching out that marvelous scene, then erasing it; sketching it, and erasing it.

  The next day, Tsugami formed a Bullfighting Tournament Preparation Committee. He appointed as its members T., who couldn’t write a newspaper article to save his life but had an extraordinary talent for negotiating; M., who came up with great ideas but couldn’t carry them out; and a few other young men from advertising.

  Only two months remained until the date of the tournament. The first announcement would have to appear in the paper at least a month in advance, which meant running it in the middle of December. The arrangements would have to be finished by then. Bargaining with the stadiums could wait; first they needed to get the bulls. And so, just two or three days after Tashiro went back to Shikoku, Tsugami and the young reporter T. made the trip down to W. As it turned out, by the time they arrived Tashiro had already done all the necessary negotiating with the locals and the Association—they had agreed to a bull-rental fee of twenty thousand a head and selected twenty-two glorious bulls for the ring; there was nothing left for Tsugami and T. to do. Naturally the Association and the owners were as enthusiastic as could be, and treated Tsugami and T. with such reverence—almost like two messiahs—that they wondered how Tashiro had talked them up.

  The owners were all wealthy locals; it appeared that in this region it was everyone’s dream to be rich enough one day to possess a sumo bull. People who, had they lived anywhere else in the country, would have built themselves a grand storehouse spent their money instead on massive animals bred purely for bullfighting, and they had been doing so for ages.

  Tsugami and the others paid a visit to the house of Atomiya Shigesaburō, an old man who served as vice-president of the Association and who was himself the owner of one of the bulls selected for the tournament. Atomiya, who was the most successful farmer in the region, was almost maniacal in his devotion to bullfighting; already in his seventies, he had the robust, hearty air of an aged warrior. Evidently he had inherited his craze for bullfighting from his father, who was such a bull-sumo fiend that, according to the truth-is-better-than-fiction story people told, his last words as he lay on his deathbed had been, “I made my fortune, I built this house, so I have no real regrets. The one regret I have is that my bull always lost to Tamura’s. Avenge me, son.”

  Naturally Atomiya, who was still young at the time, devoted himself with all the energy he could muster to training the family bull, in accordance with his father’s dying wish. At the April tournament three years after his father passed away, the story goes, the bull upon which he had lavished so much attention and love finally took down Tamura’s bull, and Atomiya tied his father’s picture to the bull’s back and paraded the animal in its slow, rocking way through the streets of W.

  Listening as the old man slowly told his stories on that first night, the haori and hakama he wore giving him an air so formal that he might have been welcoming the prefectural governor to his house, Tsugami felt himself flirting oddly with depression, his gloom strengthened by his exhaustion after the lengthy trip. It wasn’t old man Atomiya who had this effect on him; for some reason, whenever he felt the heat of the bull fever that gripped this region radiating across his face, his heart would sink rather than rise to match the excitement around him. Each morning as he sat on the verandah at the inn, facing the undulating azure sea, its color vivid and intense in the way it only ever is in the south, he would stare out over the water, struggling not to give in to some feeling he could not define.

  Tashiro was busy the whole time Tsugami and T. were in town. He took the two visitors to see the shrine where the bull-sumo tournament was held each January, showed them the major bull stables scattered throughout W. and its environs, and then on the way back made a detour to lead them past a house where he said his brother lived, which was ringed by a stone wall—a rarity in the countryside. Everywhere they went he wore his heavy leather overcoat and rushed about in a hurry, the tip of his nose glistening with sweat. Almost every night there was a party, which he would inaugurate by saying a few words, calling Tsugami and the reporter T. “Sensei” and sometimes referring to the New Evening Post as “our company,” as though he himself were an employee.

  As soon as Tsugami returned to Osaka, he got started on the next stage of activities. Everything had gone smoothly in W., but here he met with one unexpected hitch after the next. First there was the all-important matter of booking a venue. Only one of the two stadiums in the area, Hanshin Stadium, would be available around the time they needed it, and after they had already concluded negotiations for use of the building during a three-day period starting January 20, just as they were on the verge of signing the contract, the other side started making difficulties. According to Naniwa Railway, which owned the stadium, the place had long had a reputation for being harder to play baseball in than the other stadium, which was owned by a rival railway company. After the war they had done everything possible to upgrade the field, hoping to wipe away once and for all this negative image, and they were damned if they were going to let anyone come in and hammer stakes into it now, and erect some big round bamboo fence, and have bulls kicking holes in it with their dirty hooves. They were right to object. After any number of determined exchanges, the two sides finally reached a tentative agreement that would enable the paper to rent the stadium, but no sooner had they heaved a sigh of relief at that than the pro baseball team that played in the stadium started grousing because they wouldn’t be able to play during that period. The paper barely managed to mollify the players by asking two or three big-boss types to intervene, but it took a shocking sum of money to make it happen. And then the prefectural Safety Division refused to grant permission for the event. The reason they gave was that the form of entertainment known as “bullfighting” had no history in Japan, so there was no protocol for dealing with it. The paper telegrammed Tashiro to come up right away from Shikoku, only to learn that even in Ehime Prefecture, the original birthplace of bull sumo, permission had never once been granted to present the sport as an entertainment. Omoto went to talk to the authorities, Tsugami went to talk to the authorities, but even after endless wrangling back and forth the authorities still refused to budge. Meanwhile Tashiro, who had made the trip between Shikoku and Osaka three times, began building support in Ehime by asking prominent local figures for help. After all this had failed, the reporter T., with his genius for negotiating, took over. He paid a few visits to the Prefectural Office, provided a signed statement explaining that in the event of an accident they would immediately cancel the entire tournament, and came back having persuaded the chief of the Safety Division to approve the bullfight. That had been just two or three days ago. And now here it was—the draft for the notice announcing the tournament, which Tsugami had almost given up on ever seeing in print, laid out by a young man in the copyediting department, right there on the front page: two bulls ramming their heads together, cut out of a photograph, inserted into a large box right between the day’s two lead stories, one about a teacher’s strike and another about infighting in the Socialist Party, where it would catch anyone’s eye. To Omoto and Tsugami both, the ad was like a hunting dog that had broken free from their grasp.

  *

  Tashiro walked for two blocks along a road like a gash in the burned-out ruins, feeling the wind first at his back and then hitting him from the front so he had to lean into it; then, suddenly, he stopped before a half-destroyed building, raised his right hand slightly in a signal to Tsugami that this was it, and plunged through a doorway one could easily have missed and on down a stairway that led b
elowground.

  In part because his motions were so exaggerated, it seemed as if Tashiro had simply disappeared, just like that, from the earth’s surface. Tsugami followed behind, proceeding one step at a time down a dim flight of steps so narrow he could barely squeeze through. Arriving at the bottom after turning a corner partway down, he found himself in a surprisingly wide room, brightly illuminated by numerous electric bulbs. In the center there were a few shrubs and even a stone lantern, suggesting a traditional Japanese-style garden, and around the garden were four neat little rooms with tatami floors, each one a separate structure, still in the process of being built. One was being made into a bar, judging from the tall, narrow-backed chairs stacked in the corner with a few blue-painted beer barrels. Four men stood before the barrels, rotating a tiled sink this way and that, working on installing it in the washroom.

  In another small room at the back, the only one that was about ninety percent done, Okabe Yata sat at a kotatsu with a half-empty bottle of whiskey before him on the tabletop, a padded kimono over his drab wartime “national uniform.”

  “Hey, come on in!”

  By the time Tsugami had time to sit down, Okabe had already peeled off his padded kimono and was warmly bowing his head. He looked rather insubstantial with his diminutive stature and his small face, which filled with tiny wrinkles when he spoke, but something in his casual affability suggested on the contrary that he possessed a certain brashness, a willingness to walk right over other people.