Bullfight Read online

  She called the newspaper and learned that for the past few days Tsugami had been working from Hanshin Stadium, where the tournament would be held, and staying over at a hotel in the area. And so, though he had warned her repeatedly never, under any circumstances, to come to see him at work, she went to Hanshin Stadium. The day was cold, the sunlight pale; one had the sense that snowflakes might start fluttering down at any minute. She got off the train at Nishinomiya Kitaguchi. She always saw the stadium from the train, but this was the first time she had ever been inside the vast, round, modern structure. She walked through the massive emptiness of the bowl to the other side and went in and to the left, and there was the office: a cramped room like a ship’s cabin that seemed entirely out of place in a building so large.

  When she opened the door, four or five men who could have been from the paper or just visiting, she couldn’t tell, were gathered around a lit charcoal brazier, puffing away on their cigarettes. Beyond them was Tsugami: he was talking loudly to someone on the phone on the desk, the receiver pressed against his ear, the collar of his overcoat turned up. The cool, accusatory glance he shot at Sakiko when he noticed her standing in the doorway was like a knife in her heart. When he finally finished his long phone call, he stood and strode out of the room. He walked ahead of her up the dim, gently sloping concrete corridor, which turned back on itself, then turned back again, zigzagging upward in a shape like a bolt of cartoon lightning, his angry footsteps echoing through the building. On the fourth floor, he walked through the passageway to the stands and stopped just outside to wait.

  “Why are you here? What do you need?” he said finally, as she came out.

  His cheeks were wan, and he had lost a lot of weight. He glared at her for just a second with a look that could kill, then looked away. He always looked at her like that when he was in a bad mood.

  “Am I only allowed to come if I need something?” she asked, trying to sound casual. She glanced up at him, keeping her face down, burying the lower half in her navy overcoat. If she wasn’t careful, she might say something harsh. They were in the infield stands, on the uppermost level; down below, as far as they could see, the vast, deserted stadium was filled with shoddily installed wooden seats that formed bleak stripes as they fell away step by step toward the playing field at the center. The wind was strong, perhaps because they were so high up; the weak afternoon sun gave the entire gray building a rough and gritty appearance.

  “I told you how insanely busy I am, right?”

  “Please, this is the first time I’ve seen you this year. Don’t look at me in that scary way, like I have no business being here. Is that the kind of relationship we have?”

  “Don’t start with that again. I’m too tired.” Tsugami’s tone was so stony she didn’t know how to reply. She stood directly in front of him, equally pale, peering up at him as he sulkily put a cigarette in his mouth. The chill wind tousled his hair. The way they were standing made them seem almost like two men facing off in a duel; realizing this, he told her to sit down, then immediately lowered himself on to the nearest bench. She sat down next to him.

  Around the stadium, to the west and to the east, as far as the eye could see, dead fields extended into the distance. During the war, all the major munitions factories in Osaka and Kobe had relocated here to this wide plain between the cities; from here, the buildings looked oddly weightless, like scraps of paper dotting the vast landscape. One resembled a shipwrecked boat with its steel beams jutting up into the sky; another had a small mountain of scrap iron out in the yard. When you actually looked at the scene, you were struck by how many smokestacks and electric poles there were, and by all the wires crisscrossing the field like spider silk. Every now and then a suburban train, small as a toy, would pass by, weaving its way among the factories, the woods, the hills. Off in the distance, to the northeast, you could see the Rokkō mountain range. And then there was the overcast sky, hanging low over the desolate, wintry expanse of land and its haphazard mixture of industrial mess and natural severity.

  Sakiko let her eyes roam across the frozen scenery, saying nothing, but in her heart she was already plumbing the depths of the pain Tsugami’s iciness would cause her after they had parted. She realized, at this almost absurdly late stage in the game, that all she had really wanted from Tsugami was a little love, just a scrap, to warm herself by—that was the only reason she had come. A few gentle words were all she needed; they didn’t even have to be true. Even the cruelest, most insincere display of affection would make her happy. She stared at the face of the man who sat beside her, utterly unconnected to her agony. All at once, a fresh sense of rage bubbled up within her at his unwillingness even to make the effort to deceive himself, and in her rage, for no other reason than that the thought had occurred to her, her tone as flat as if she were demanding the repayment of a loan, she told him that a friend in Kyoto had invited them to a tea ceremony at a temple, at Ninnaji, and she wanted to go. He didn’t reply. His expression registered his disbelief.

  “It’s the 14th. Just that one day.”

  “There’s no way.”

  “Just the afternoon, then—half a day.”

  “It’s impossible. Until the bullfight is over, I really can’t do anything.”

  With that, his moody expression softened: a placard descended over his face that announced that this woman beside him was his lover, even now. Anyway, he said, he’d be damned if he was going to make the trip all the way up to Ninnaji, like he had all the time in the world.

  “It seems negotiations have broken down,” Sakiko said hoarsely. “Stupid of me even to suggest it when I knew you would just push me away.”

  “I’m not pushing you away.”

  “Oh really? Is that what you think?” A sudden flash of anger at his coldness crushed her restraint. “Go on and push me, then! Give me a push so hard I’ll go rolling down those benches like a ball! I’d love to see the look on your face as I go tumbling down.”

  They fell silent. Her anger faded, leaving her with nothing more to say, and an irredeemable sense of sorrow diffused itself slowly through her heart, like a shadow crossing the surface of a pond. One of them would have to get up; there was no other way to break this awkward impasse.

  After a moment, Tsugami said he had remembered something he had to do and left for the office. Five minutes later he came hurrying back out and explained that he still had three or four tasks left to take care of today, and it would be like this every day until the tournament. Maybe they could take a trip to one of the hot springs in Kishū or something, as soon as the bullfight was over. There was a hint of kindness in his tone that had not been there before.

  “Everything keeps going awry,” he said, as if he wanted to make her understand. “All our plans are falling apart.”

  He pointed to a white ring drawn in the center of the field and told her that they needed to erect a bamboo enclosure there, a ring thirty-five meters in diameter, and even that, something as simple as that, wasn’t going at all smoothly. They had asked someone from the Bull Sumo Association to come up as soon as he could to supervise the construction of the ring, and he came, but then the bamboo didn’t materialize. It had finally arrived this morning, but now it seemed the all-important supervisor had come down with a cold the day before and couldn’t get out of bed. Sakiko could see that he was telling the truth: he had been dealing with an overwhelming amount of business. The phone call he had been making when she turned up at the office had been about the fireworks they were planning to send up over Nakanoshima Park the night before the tournament: they had already negotiated for permission, but now for some reason that permission had been retracted. The town authorities were hesitant because this would be the first aerial firework display since the end of the war, and of course rules governing the use of gunpowder were very strict; they would do what they could to help, but they couldn’t say for certain that permission would be granted as a matter of course.

  “I can’t give up on those
fireworks, though. That’s the one thing. We’re going to have dozens of strings of firecrackers going off during the day, so I’d really like to send up a few fireworks at night, too, something showy.”

  Tsugami’s irritation was plainly written on his face.

  “Yes, that would be lovely. Maybe you can do a big chrysanthemum! How nice it will look blooming in the total darkness over the charred rubble of Osaka.”

  Sakiko had promised herself she wouldn’t say another word, but somehow this bit of irony slipped out. Please don’t tell me he wants to have them go up in the shape of a cow, she thought. But then she noticed how earnest he looked, as if that might be exactly what he had in mind, and all at once her mood rocked. In her mind’s eye she saw Tsugami’s face, raised toward the doubly black darkness that follows a burst of fireworks—a face that only she knew, and that felt, somehow, soothingly cool.

  The men waiting for him in the office right now, Tsugami went on to say, were from the printer, a transport company, and a funeral parlor. They were wrangling over costs with all three companies, and the men had come to talk things over, but it was starting to look as though no progress would be made unless he took them out drinking. The man from the funeral parlor was there because he used part of his gasoline rations to operate a number of sound trucks. He was going to dispatch his trucks all around Osaka and Kobe to advertise the tournament.

  “These sound trucks, each one loaded with comedians and revue girls, a record player, they come barreling out of the same garage as the hearses headed for the crematory, and it’s the same company—can you believe that?” Tsugami said, without so much as a smile. “Not that there’s anything wrong with that, exactly…”

  Sakiko understood now how overworked and frazzled he was. At the same time, she didn’t fail to notice that despite his dejected tone, he was also—in a manner entirely characteristic of him—feeling a bit giddy, inextricably caught up as he was in these rather shady business dealings, the not-quite-right incidents, all so emblematic of this confused age, fighting against the odds to make things work.

  Standing on the platform at Nishinomiya Kitaguchi Station, waiting for the train to Osaka, Sakiko could not have felt more different from when she had come. Her body and heart were both so cold nothing could have warmed them. She was leaning on the wooden fence, her head wrapped up in her muffler, when it occurred to her that this bullfight of Tsugami’s might be a total failure. The thought burst in her mind like a flash of lightning out of the blue. Shivering uncontrollably, she kept feeling that premonition, so strong it was almost a conviction, kept feeling that he was headed for disaster, he was going to fail, seeing him in her mind’s eye, turned away from him, looking very cold, just as he had earlier, when they had parted ways, and she couldn’t tell whether the emotion that welled in her breast was affection or a wish to see him destroyed.

  *

  The bullfighting tournament was only ten days away, and both the front and second pages of the Osaka New Evening Post were now covered with articles relating to it. This was one of the advantages of being a small evening paper—a more prominent newspaper could not easily have set aside space to publicize one of its own enterprises, while the New Evening Post could eliminate all the news it wanted, as long as it wasn’t too significant, replacing each article with publicity. They used photos of bulls’ heads in the picture box that went with the editorial, and bullfighting made an appearance in a popular comic strip they serialized. Tsugami kept hearing that the sarcastic fellows over at B. News had been mocking him, saying he had started putting out a cowspaper, but he and Omoto acted as if they hadn’t heard a thing—they would go on publishing their cowspaper right up to the day of the tournament, no matter what anyone said. No sooner had they published the prize-winning Bullfighting Tournament Theme Song than they ran an announcement soliciting fighting names for the twenty-two bulls who would participate in the great event. The same day, a young reporter proposed that they let people vote on which bull they expected to win—a plan the reporter himself worried might be a bit too much, but which Tsugami instantly approved. At times like these, Tsugami would sit briefly with his cigarette dangling from his mouth, a far-off, unfocused look in his eyes, and then all of a sudden, so quickly it was hard to see how he could have had time to think, he would issue his decision in a somewhat shrill tone. He gave the impression less that he had thought things through than that he had been struck by an almost divine inspiration. As the tournament approached and the number of little tasks he had to take care of kept increasing, he grew progressively less talkative and more active.

  At the same time all this was going on, a rather flashy advertising campaign was unfolding in other venues, apart from the paper itself, largely as a result of the young reporter T.’s efforts. Large, well-placed posters depicting two bulls locking horns caught the gazes of the crowds gathered in the bus terminals and subway stations of Umeda, Naniwa, Ueroku. Small posters with the exact same design hung in every bus and in every car of every suburban train. Once they had held a ceremony to introduce the Bullfighting Tournament Theme Song at a certain theater in Shinsaibashi, they started sending the sound trucks around to the now colder-than-ever shantytowns, the song blaring from the microphones on their roofs. Day after day, three trucks drove around Osaka and two around Kobe, each stocked with a supply of dancing girls.

  The expenses associated with these activities greatly exceeded expectations, and, when the costs of building the ring and the stable were added, the financial burden was considerably heavier than the Osaka New Evening Post could bear. The accountants were the first to raise the alarm. They drastically reduced allowable expenses for travel, parties, and miscellaneous costs, and ended the almost openly acknowledged system of payday loans, tolerated in silence by the higher-ups as a temporary means of alleviating the penury of the paper’s employees. They even announced that payment of the night-shift allowance, normally distributed on the 15th, would be delayed until the end of the month. When the notice announcing this was posted on the bulletin board, the chief of the accounting department came to see Tsugami and drive home in a rather painful way how serious this was.

  “Mr. Tsugami, I can’t have you spending any more on this, I really can’t. Many of our employees rely on the night-shift allowance.”

  Three days before the tournament, Tsugami received a telegraph from Tashiro that read: “SIX A.M. TOMORROW BULLS ARRIVE NISHINOMIYA.” The stable where the twenty-two bulls would be kept was ready, having been built in a barren area across from Nishinomiya Station; the hundred-plus people who had been brought into town, including the bulls’ owners and handlers, had all been assigned to lodges and inns in Nishinomiya that had survived the firebombings. That night, Omoto and Tsugami clinked whiskey glasses at a bar on Umeda Shinmichi frequented by Omoto.

  “Well,” Tsugami said, “at least we know the bulls will be here.”

  Relief showed on both men’s faces.

  “Tell me about it. Imagine if the train had gone missing or something—boy, would we have been screwed. I have to say, though, it sure cost a lot to get to this point.”

  Tsugami sensed a note of reproach in Omoto’s voice, but he pretended he hadn’t. “They say these days any project will cost five times what you think it will. We’ll have done pretty well if we come out of this just three times over budget, I’d say.”

  “And we ought to be done with the big expenditures, now that we’ve come this far.”

  “I think so. Even if we do need more money, we’ll figure something out.”

  “Spoken like a true reporter. Coming up with one or two hundred thousand yen isn’t actually all that easy, you know.”

  Tsugami caught himself just as he was about to comment that if worst came to worst, Omoto had enough, didn’t he? He restrained his irony and instead said quietly, “Five days from now, we’ll have a million extra yen pouring in.”

  They were banking on an audience of thirty thousand each day, yielding a three-day total o
f about a hundred thousand. There would be five thousand fifty-yen ringside tickets, twenty thousand forty-yen infield tickets, and seventy-five thousand rear infield and outfield tickets that would go for thirty yen each. Total sales should come out to three million three hundred thousand yen; subtract a million for expenses and you were left with two million three hundred thousand in pure profit. After splitting the profits with Tashiro, the paper would take in about a million. That, at any rate, was how Tsugami had calculated it.

  Omoto had a reputation both inside and outside the company as a generous, reckless manager, in contrast to Tsugami, who was known for keeping a tight rein on everything; somewhere along the way, though, the two men had swapped roles. They themselves saw this most clearly. Tsugami had noticed the unexpectedly nervy, calculating core concealed within Omoto’s seemingly openhanded, nonchalant manner; Omoto, with all his years of experience taking stock of people, had noted with a certain unease that underneath his stern outer shell, this young reporter, reputed to be so sharp, so clearly fastidious, even picky, harbored a tendency to wallow half-wittedly in his desires that made it unwise to trust him too far.

  *

  The next morning Tsugami took the first train on the government line to Sannomiya Station, only to discover that the freight train had arrived at dawn, around four, about two hours earlier than Tashiro had expected, and the whole party was milling about in one corner of the train yard. The twenty-two magnificent bulls, each of which must have weighed over seven hundred and fifty kilograms, stood with their handlers, tied to the station’s wooden fence, steam rising from their bodies. Tashiro, who had been with a group of men surrounding a bonfire near the freight house, strode over looking cold, chin tucked into his leather overcoat. As he approached, he jubilantly cried out, “Ah, Mr. Tsugami! What do you think?” He nodded toward the bulls. “Splendid, aren’t they! They’re not like these cows in Kobe and Osaka, fed on leftovers.”