Bullfight Read online

  Tsugami grabbed a quick lunch near the office, and then, around one o’clock, just when the proofs were coming off the presses, he stopped by the editorial department. Both the articles and the photos dealing with the parade had made it in with no problem; they occupied about a third of the paper. A photo of the parade’s departure from Sannomiya Station looked a bit too imposing where it was placed, but with the tournament only two days away it was impossible to be too flashy. The article the young city news reporter had written about the parade had more substance than Tsugami had expected, and a fittingly jokey, sensationalistic tone—it would do. Things were going as well as could be expected, he thought, lighting up a cigarette with a sense of relief, only to remember that he still had to find a hundred thousand yen and arrange for the bulls to get their feed, both before the day was over.

  At three, Tashiro left the office and took a car to Okabe Yata’s company in Amagasaki. Hanshin Manufacturing was housed in a two-story wooden structure in a corner of a burned-out expanse of land slightly off the highway, up toward the mountains; it was much bigger than he had anticipated. The whole building was painted light blue, and it had an unusual number of windows, each one fitted with a large pane of glass—it had a cheerful atmosphere, reminiscent of a sanitarium. The president’s office was a luxuriously spacious room at the end of a hall on the first floor; Okabe was there, slumped in a revolving chair with his arms and legs dangling. He was facing his big, completely bare desk, but as soon as he saw Tsugami he swiveled around, shouting out a welcome, “So you came!” A coal stove was burning in one corner; the heat had made the room stuffy. The sky was overcast, but the entire southern wall was a single huge window, and the light that streamed in through the vast pane left the room almost utterly devoid of shadow, open and bright. Seeing him in this context, Tsugami found that Okabe looked considerably older than he had late last year in that dim basement in the building on Umeda Shinmichi.

  He was as genial as ever. Within moments, he’d had an office worker bring whiskey.

  “Better than tea, right?” he said. “Today you ought to take it easy.”

  He kept pressing whiskey on Tsugami, cajoling him to drink two or three glasses while he himself tossed down five or six in his usual rough manner, as if it were medicine rather than alcohol. Once he had a bit to drink, he became noticeably more loquacious. When Tsugami said he couldn’t stay too long because the bullfighting tournament was the day after tomorrow, Okabe laughed blithely.

  “Listen, you gotta let the underlings do the work. Your job is to come up with the ideas, then have people make it happen. That’s all there is to it. Never take on any more responsibility than that. Just look at me. All day I’ve been here like this, doing nothing. That’s how it should be. Of course, that’s not to say I’m not needed here. Without me, this company would collapse this very day.”

  “I’m afraid it’s different with newspapers—”

  “That’s where you’re wrong. At any rate, if you’re having to run around like this now, it means the bullfight is already a failure. Right? What you gotta do is just forget it all, you can’t be bothered. Stay here drinking whiskey with me.”

  Okabe seemed constantly to be looking back on the path he had taken, delivering lectures on the articles of faith he had invented for himself and abided by, enraptured by the sound of his own voice.

  “All right, then. I’ll join you,” Tsugami said, playing along even though he truly did not have the time for this. “But first, we need to take care of the matter I came to—”

  “What matter? I’m all ears.”

  “I have an urgent need for three hundred and sixty liters each of rice, barley, and sake.”

  The quantities Tsugami named were much larger than was necessary. He was using this request as a way to plumb the depths of Okabe’s personality, his badness or his goodness—to take the measure of this man who, though this was only their second meeting, he had already discovered was peculiarly difficult to figure out. Tsugami was curious to see how Okabe would respond. He explained what the various goods were for, and that he hoped Okabe might be able to deliver them all to the Bullfighting Tournament Office at Hanshin Stadium by noon tomorrow.

  “Quite a troublesome guest!” Okabe laughed. Then, “Sure, I can do it.”

  “And the cost…?”

  “Hanshin Manufacturing will donate it all. In celebration of the tournament.”

  Tsugami protested and asked him to name his price, but Okabe simply chuckled. “This company of mine doesn’t need to gobble up a newspaper to get fat. Well, that takes care of business! Now let’s drink. I don’t know what it is, but I’ve taken a liking to you, Mr. Tsugami.”

  Tsugami gave in and took up his glass. He knew he was being tricked, and yet somehow he simply couldn’t imagine this small man, happily tossing back glass after glass of whiskey, doing something as grasping and underhanded as loading up a train with goods for the black market without even asking permission.

  Okabe called a woman on his staff and had her bring cheese, then told her to prepare something for dinner, too, and bring it in when it was ready. The two men talked and drank for another two hours after that, although in actuality Okabe did almost all the talking, while Tsugami half listened and half mused about the bullfight. Okabe talked about business, and when he was done with that he moved on to politics, then on to religion, women, and so on, his garrulousness finding outlets anywhere and everywhere, moving in all directions. His best observations and critiques seemed to glitter with an odd vibrancy only as long as he was offering them, in his own words; when Tsugami reflected on what he had heard, much of it was reduced to the status of distasteful commonplaces.

  At a certain point, as Okabe’s speech grew considerably slurred, Tsugami’s reporterly habits kicked in and he changed the topic. “Three hundred and sixty liters is a pretty big quantity of rice and barley. How will you get your hands on so much?” All along he had been waiting for an opportunity to ask.

  “Oh, there’s all kinds of ways,” Okabe said, his expression arrogantly disengaged. “Makes sense if you think about it. We send agricultural tools out to farming villages, right? So I have them send up big straw bags. How do you think it looks when you dump two liters of rice into a really big bag? Like nothing, just a little layer at the bottom. Even if someone checked, they’d think it was left over from when the bag was emptied. Ten bags and you get twenty liters. And with a hundred, a thousand…”

  Tsugami was feeling sluggish now and his eyelids were growing heavy, both from the accumulated exhaustion of the past few days and because the alcohol was starting to take effect. Glancing over at the windows he realized that it was dark out now; the heat of the room had produced condensation that was running down the glass in innumerable rivulets.

  “Say I do business with thirty villages in each prefecture, that’s one hundred eighty villages in the six prefectures in the Kinki region alone, and say each of them sends up a hundred bags…”

  Okabe must have been drunk, too, judging from the way the hand holding his tumbler was weaving in the air. Tsugami listened to Okabe’s calculations, his consciousness a blend of haziness and clarity, unable to decide whether they were legitimate or fake, or to judge whether Okabe himself was a big-time criminal or a petty thief.

  *

  Tsugami awoke at eight the following morning in the night-duty room at the office. After a simple breakfast in the basement cafeteria, he went up to the editing department on the second floor for the nine-o’clock appointment he had made with Miura. Omoto, who ordinarily only came to the office in the afternoon, was sitting beside the large ceramic hibachi by the window, chatting with three young employees who had been on night duty.

  Seeing Tsugami, he called out, “Pretty cloudy. I sure hope it doesn’t rain.”

  The air was bitingly cold now that winter had begun in earnest, but for the past few days the sky had been beautifully clear; according to the radio, though, the run of good weather had star
ted to take a turn for the worse the day before. The temperature had risen suddenly, too, and the sun felt warmer. Both these changes seemed cause for concern.

  “I’m sure it will be fine—this weather should last another four or five days,” Tsugami said. “And the meteorologists say there’s a low pressure system in the south that’s heading up east, too.”

  He had telephoned the observatory the second he got up. From his perspective, though, the more pressing problem was the hundred thousand yen he needed to get to Tashiro by two o’clock. Late the previous night, when he returned from Hanshin Manufacturing, he had called two businessmen he’d had in mind, enduring the throbbing in his head, only to learn that one of the two was unfortunately not at home, having gone up to Tokyo, while the other could probably get the funds together somehow in three or four days, but not in one or two. As emphatically as he had rejected Miura Yoshinosuke’s proposal the day before, Tsugami had been recalling the man’s face in little flashes ever since he woke up. At this point there just didn’t seem to be anywhere else he could go for a hundred thousand yen, despite his big talk; it was Miura’s plan or nothing. He mentioned the proposal to Omoto, to see what he would say, and Omoto suddenly turned grave.

  “With the sky looking this ominous, my guess is Miura will retract the offer. You should have taken him up on it yesterday.” Omoto was clearly displeased with how Tsugami had responded.

  “No, I think he’ll come,” Tsugami said. “He said he would be here at nine, and I don’t think he’s the sort to back down—he’ll keep his word. He’s not a man who changes his plans overnight.”

  In fact, Tsugami suspected Miura would come even if it started raining.

  “You’re talking about one of the best-known businessmen around,” Omoto said sourly.

  Tsugami’s prediction turned out to be correct, though: Miura turned up five minutes before nine. Soon Tsugami, Omoto, and Miura were sitting around the table in the reception room.

  “I’d say there’s an eighty percent chance it will rain, twenty percent chance it won’t. It’s a dangerous tightrope to cross, but I’m ready to put my money on that twenty percent. How about it, Mr. Tsugami? The idea we discussed yesterday…”

  Despite the dangerous tightrope metaphor, there was no trace of uncertainty in his attitude. He held his head up in the same proud manner as the day before, keeping a close and equal watch on Omoto and Tsugami, waiting with such unruffled calm for a yes or no that it was almost cheeky. And then something odd happened.

  “It’s kind of you, but I’m afraid we still can’t accept.” Omoto, not Tsugami, had spoken. He was coughing so hard that he could hardly breathe. Miura’s peculiar assertiveness had gotten on Omoto’s nerves in an odd way, and he had started feeling all of a sudden that it would be intolerable to let him make off with six hundred and sixty thousand yen that was practically theirs, as he might well do.

  “I see,” Miura said, a smile on his lips that could have meant anything at all. He went on to chat for a time about recent economic trends, never once touching on the deal that had been on the table, and then he left, his stride so springy that he looked like a man who had just successfully concluded a negotiation. As soon as he was gone, Omoto and Tsugami returned to the editorial department.

  “I’ll get the hundred thousand somehow. Let’s say I’ll have it by noon,” Omoto said excitedly. “The weather’s going to be fine tomorrow, I’m sure of it. No way we’re going to have it rain on us.”

  After that he went around informing everyone he encountered that it would be nice out tomorrow, as if this were some sort of deeply cherished belief, wiping his nose with his handkerchief practically without pause, and then he hurried off somewhere. Sure enough, he returned slightly past noon with a hundred thousand yen wrapped up in bundles.

  As he handed them over to Tsugami, he made sure to add a note of clarification: “I got a friend to lend it to me.” His suggestion that it wasn’t his own money but a friend’s was a sign of his attentiveness to detail—he had factored the interest he would collect into his calculations.

  He still had some time until his two o’clock appointment with Tashiro, but Tsugami headed over to the office at the stadium anyway. Tashiro was already waiting when he arrived, warming his crotch over the hibachi, smoking a cigarette. The second he saw Tsugami, he blurted out, “Have you brought what I asked for yesterday?”

  Tsugami could see from Tashiro’s expression how concerned he was.

  “I have. Is this enough?”

  Tsugami took the stacks of bills from his briefcase and tossed them loudly on to the table.

  “Absolutely! Wonderful, thank you…”

  Tashiro picked up the bills and, now moving extraordinarily slowly, started slipping the packets into the big pockets of his leather overcoat. He wrapped those that wouldn’t fit in a furoshiki.

  “It would have been best for you to have another twenty or thirty thousand available, but I don’t like having large sums on cash on me, you know?” Tashiro laughed hoarsely.

  Just then a young reporter named M. who had been staying over in the office for the past three or four days came in.

  “Mr. Tsugami!” he cried, gesturing exaggeratedly. “I could hardly believe it this morning! Someone comes in at four and shakes me awake, and I go out wondering what’s going on and find a truck full of rice and barley and sake!”

  When Tsugami had finally left Okabe the previous evening, having refused his insistent invitations to go keep drinking somewhere else, it had been almost nine o’clock. Okabe had finished off a second bottle of whiskey almost entirely by himself, and was noticeably unsteady on his feet, but even so he must have managed, sometime after Tsugami left, to convey to one of his employees in badly slurred speech that he wanted the feed delivered. Tsugami answered M. with a simple “Ah,” without shifting his gaze from the stark, cold-looking branches of the trees visible through the window. He seemed to feel Okabe’s small, bright eyes looking at him—glinting, no doubt, with a mischievous light.

  That night, Tsugami hosted a pre-tournament dinner at a fancy restaurant in Nishinomiya, in part to thank the bulls’ owners. A few reporters who had been involved came along, as did Omoto. During the festivities, Tsugami and the others found themselves witnessing a startling scene: the owner of one of the bulls regarded as an obvious contender for first place, a woman named Mitani Hana, suddenly started shouting hysterically, kicked over her tray, and got up from her seat. She was a plump woman whose clothes revealed a certain flair that was hardly typical of a forty-something housewife from a small farm.

  “As if I’d drink from a cup you filled, Mr. Kawasaki—you of all people! I’ve put my life on the line for this! Right about now my old man and the kids are dumping cold water over themselves back home, purifying themselves and praying that we win!”

  Her expression was pleasantly taut, her face slightly flushed from two or three cups of sake; she leaned unsteadily against one of the sliding, paper-paneled walls as she yelled, her gaze roaming over the faces in the room. She was not drunk. The fierce intensity of her desire to see her bull win had stretched her nerves to the limit, pushing her into a state resembling temporary insanity. The Kawasaki bull stood right up there with the Mitani bull as a potential winner, and when that other bull’s owner had filled her cup she had been unable to suppress the gush of antagonism that welled up within her, all the stronger because she was a woman and he was a man.

  Tashiro went around the room with his cup, trying to liven the dampened mood. Soon he arrived at Tsugami’s place. “Can’t blame them,” he said. “The owners are bound to get excited with all this attention, being written up so much in the papers and so on.”

  As Tashiro spoke, it suddenly struck Tsugami that he had entirely forgotten that the bullfight was part of this world. He had forgotten the most essential element of bullfighting. And not only him, but Omoto, Okabe, and Miura, too—they had all lost sight of the simple fact that the bullfight was a fight, a battle be
tween two living creatures. Even Tashiro, who had come to explain Mitani’s outburst, was no different…

  *

  Tsugami awoke in the night-duty room at the office. The second he realized it was raining he jumped out of bed, slid the window open in both directions, and thrust his hands out into the freezing air. Icy raindrops pummeled his bare arms. It didn’t seem to have been raining for long. He glanced down at his watch: five o’clock. All at once, as he stood motionless in his pajamas by the window, the dawn cold began penetrating his whole body. He pulled his overcoat on over his pajamas, groped his way down the dark stairs to the editorial department on the second floor, and switched on the lamp on the first desk he came to. He grabbed the phone’s receiver, dialed the observatory, and asked the man on the night shift about the day’s weather. “Back and forth, clear sometimes, then cloudy,” the man said bluntly, his annoyance at having been so rudely woken up evident from his tone. Then he hung up.

  Tsugami returned to the night-duty room and went back to bed, but he couldn’t sleep. Soon he heard the rain start falling in earnest, with the sound of hail mixed in; every so often it blew in sideways gusts against the window by the bed. At seven he got up. Shortly after, Omoto called.

  “Doesn’t look good, huh.”

  “If it’s a light rain, we can go ahead. We’ve still got two hours until nine.”

  “What are you talking about? It’s coming down harder and harder.”

  Tsugami could picture the annoyance on Omoto’s face. At eight, everyone who had been involved in planning the tournament gathered in the office. The rain had been tapering off, then falling harder. They decided to head over to the stadium office as a group to wait and see how things went, loaded themselves into five cars, and left. Raindrops streamed ceaselessly down the car windows as they sped along the Hanshin Highway.