Bullfight Read online

  Tashiro was in the office when they arrived, gulping down tea at an incredible pace, his dripping overcoat hung on the peg. “One hell of a mess we’ve landed in. Well, that’s business for you.”

  The wrinkles on his face stood out today, making him look older than usual; he had an air of calm resignation that seemed like exactly what one would expect of a showman down on his luck. Omoto arrived a few minutes later. It was clear at a glance that he was in a foul mood. He paced restlessly, hardly talking to anyone; from time to time he went out to the stands, then came back all wet, heaved himself down on a chair, and sat slumped in an unpleasantly arrogant manner, stuffing his pipe.

  Around ten, the rain turned into a drizzle and the sky brightened.

  “It’s going to clear up!” someone said.

  “Great, we’ll start at one,” Omoto declared immediately.

  “We’ll get three thousand people at best. Ah, bullfighting in the rain!” Tsugami said. He had been quiet all morning; now there was a coldness to his tone that could have been either self-mocking or supercilious, and seemed like a rebuff aimed at everyone around him.

  “Two, three thousand is fine!” Omoto said even more firmly. “Rain or snow, anything we can do is better than nothing.”

  At eleven the sky looked as dreary as ever, but the rain had stopped. The paper’s employees went out to every part of town with flyers reading “Bullfight Tournament Today at 2:00” that they posted in stations along the train lines out to the suburbs. They rotated the microphones in the stands, broadcasting an obviously pointless announcement about the two o’clock start toward the largely empty residential areas around the stadium, and toward the stations for the three train lines in the area.

  Still, as two o’clock neared, a crowd began to gather. Elderly people, students, children, married women holding bundles wrapped in furoshiki, young men back from the war, young couples in flashy clothes… in short, a perfectly random mix of ticket buyers. From the office window, they could be seen passing in small groups through the plaza outside the stadium.

  Tsugami stood on the top level of the infield stands, gazing with a cold and dispassionate eye, as though none of them had anything to do with him, at the crowds of spectators streaming through the dozens of passageways into the vast bowl of the stadium and then scattering in all directions. He checked his watch and calculated that people were pouring into the stands at a rate of about a hundred every ten minutes. The speed seemed to be increasing, but even so they weren’t going to have much of an audience by two. The game was over. They had reserved the stadium for as long as it was available, so there was no possibility of extending the tournament even a single day. There could be no rain check. Today, tomorrow, and the day after—they had three days to fight this battle, and that was it. One black spot made it clear almost beyond any doubt how things would turn out.

  From where Tsugami stood at the top of the stands, he could see the paddies and fields stretching all the way to the foot of the Rokkō mountains, and the clumps of factories and small houses that lay strewn across that bleak expanse under a canopy of heavy, dark gray rainclouds. The landscape had a cold, frozen look that made him feel as though he were regarding a landscape painted on a ceramic dish. Close to the peak of Mount Rokkō there were a few white streaks of lingering snow. Those few unmelted patches were the only thing that offered Tsugami any relief from his weariness. It seemed to him that something pure had managed to hold on there, something that had otherwise vanished from this defeated nation, little traces gathering, huddling together, talking quietly among themselves about who knew what. Omoto and five or six of the paper’s employees were walking around near the seats that had been prepared for the judges in a corner of the field. Someone had planted the banners dyed with the bulls’ names in front of the ringside hitching posts, where they hung limp and heavy, utterly still, as though they had agreed amongst themselves to do this. Not once during all the hectic running around of these past three months had Tsugami imagined the bullfight being like this, so bleak and sad. How enormously different reality was. And yet still he kept everything at arm’s length, himself included, turning a detached gaze on all he saw. He didn’t even feel the tenacious determination, the urgency that had inspired Omoto to try and find some way, any way to lessen the staggering losses it was already clear the company would suffer. All he felt was an unbearable sense of desolation at the miscalculation he had made, the enormity of which was becoming ever more apparent. He had gripped his opponent as hard as he could, pushing him to the edge of the ring, only to have the tables turned on him at the last second, and find himself being flipped lightly outside. It disgusted him that he had made such a blunder. All morning he had been fighting instinctively against the loss of his self-esteem, his confidence. Never before had his eyes looked so cold and haughty.

  In the end, at two o’clock, about five thousand spectators sat spread out around the inside stands. Then, just as Omoto’s opening remarks boomed out from the thirty-six speakers mounted throughout the stadium, echoing hollowly through every corner, the rain started again. By the time the first two bulls were led out to the center of the ring, it was falling harder.

  T. came over to Tsugami, who was sitting in the judges’ area, a look on his face like he just couldn’t take it anymore. “Listen, we can’t do this. People are starting to leave. Let’s call it off.”

  “I agree,” Tsugami said briskly. “Make the announcement.” And with that he stood up and strode away, sopping wet, his feet pressing firmly into the earth with each step. He cut diagonally across the field and started climbing the stairs that led into the infield stands. A thousand or so spectators were still standing there, holding umbrellas or with overcoats pulled over their heads, looking fidgety, staring down at the ring, unwilling to give up and go home.

  As Tsugami entered the crowd, he began for the first time to despair. No one was sitting on the wet benches, but he did: he lowered himself on to one at the edge of the stands and sat without moving in the pelting rain. When the announcement that the tournament had been suspended came over the loudspeakers, everyone began moving at once, filling the air with the noise of their voices. Tsugami sat stiffly among the heaving masses, struggling desperately to keep something in him from crumbling.

  At some point he realized that someone was holding an umbrella over him, protecting him from the rain. Sakiko, he thought immediately, and sure enough, it was her standing beside him.

  “Silly, you’ll catch cold out here. Come on, get up,” she said, her tone commanding. She trained her eyes on him, unmoving, half pitying and half unnerved. Tsugami obediently stood up.

  “I think you should just go back to Nishinomiya, don’t you?”

  Tsugami looked blankly in Sakiko’s direction for a moment, his gaze unfocused. Then, coming to himself, he said, “Come wait for me, will you? I’ve got a few things to take care of.”

  The next instant he was heading down toward the field, against the crowd. His gait as he descended from one step to the next struck Sakiko as dangerously unsteady. He was totally exhausted. When they reached the field, he led her over to the main exit on the first floor and asked her to wait there while he went alone to the office. By the time he entered the room, he looked like a different man: his face was still pale, but he had regained his usual imposing air. Omoto wasn’t there. Tsugami asked after him, and someone said he had taken a car back to the company. Tsugami dried his rain-soaked hair with a handkerchief, combed it, retied his necktie, put a cigarette in his mouth, and then, with a sense of decisiveness so intense it seemed almost abnormal, set about running through one item of business after another with extraordinary speed. He put Tashiro in charge of the bulls and issued orders even more detailed than usual about how the article in the next day’s paper should be handled. Finally, in a sort of rebellion against the consideration the paper’s employees were showing him, trying to speak as little as possible, he gathered everyone around him and addressed them in a forcefu
l tone that left it unclear whether he was just making an announcement or issuing a command.

  “Okay everyone, listen up. If it rains again tomorrow morning, we’re canceling the day’s fights, even if it clears up in the afternoon. We’ll just have to make this thing fly the day after tomorrow!”

  About an hour had passed by the time he sent all the remaining employees away and went back out to where Sakiko stood alone and cold at the now deserted exit. They got into the only car still left. Once they were inside, Tsugami leaned back into the seat and closed his eyes. The collar of his wet overcoat had drooped over, covering half his face, and his hat was about to slip off, but he made no move to adjust either. He looked as if he was in terrible pain. Every so often he would bite his lip and groan quietly as he endured it. When Sakiko said something he would nod or shake his head in response, but that was it; he never spoke. She gazed intently at the face of her wounded lover as the taxi rocked him roughly this way and that. For the first time, she saw him—this living being beside her, so badly injured he even couldn’t speak—as her own. Like a dissolute son who had gone out and lived it up until everything fell to pieces, leaving him with nowhere else to turn, he had come back to her—yes, to her. An almost maternal sense of victory flickered within her. She felt a strange love for him, paired with a kind of cruel pleasure, and the feeling made her both cold and gentle. She cradled his head in her arms and caressed him freely, as much as she wanted; his expression did not change. Even if she were to withdraw her hands and push him away, his expression would remain the same. Never before in their three years together had she been in a similar position. Until now he had always been pushing her away, pulling her back, then pushing her away again. She wiped his face with her handkerchief, conscious of the driver’s eyes. The peculiar, completely unfamiliar desire she felt as she looked down coldly at Tsugami had turned her into a different, much bolder woman.

  *

  The rain that kept pouring down on the first and second days of the bullfight let up on the evening of the second day. A cold wind was blowing on the third day, but there wasn’t a cloud in the sky—it was, so to speak, perfect weather for a bullfight. At nine o’clock they had sold about sixteen thousand tickets, which was far fewer than they had expected but still good.

  Omoto stopped by the ticket counter almost every hour, dressed in his morning coat, passionately focused on the question of just how much they would manage to chip away at the enormous losses the paper had sustained. Tashiro, for his part, would periodically climb to the uppermost stands, make a detailed observation of the crowds streaming from the train station to the stadium, and then hurry back down the countless stairs, hampered by the heavy hem of his leather overcoat. All morning he had been mentally running through the same calculations. Unlike Omoto, however, he was subject to intermittent fits of despair. He couldn’t sit still. One second he would be in the judges’ seating area, the next he would be wandering among the spectators at the edge of the ring, pacing back and forth in front of the hitching posts, and then all of a sudden you would spot him in some remote section of the outfield seats, far from everyone. From time to time he paused, took a small flask of whiskey from his pocket, slowly twisted off the lid, and raised it to his mouth. In any event, neither Omoto nor Tashiro was paying the slightest attention to the central event—the bullfighting. Which bull won and which lost was a matter of no concern: an odd, rather stupid, and indeed senseless competition between two animals, two pairs of locked horns.

  Tsugami sat with the judges in the judges’ seats, a program and a tall stack of prizes and certificates before him. He might have been imagining it, but he seemed to sense a certain coolness in the gazes of the paper’s employees when they looked at him—a combination of sympathy, exultation, and defiance, all aimed at him as the man responsible for the failure of this project. Tsugami had been sitting here since morning, casting his eyes almost randomly at the program, at the ring, and at the spectators who had filled about sixty percent of those rows and rows of benches. The truth, however, was that, like Omoto and Tashiro, he was taking nothing in. He looked at everything and saw nothing: not the matches between the bulls, not the stands or the people, not the scoreboard. The loudspeakers issued an incessant stream of announcements, but his ears heard nothing. As far as he was concerned, this whole absurd, pointless festival was irrelevant. Every so often a fierce northwesterly wind blasted the stadium, causing the decorative curtain behind the judges’ seats to whip noisily about and setting the thousands of bits of paper that lay scattered over the field whirling across the ground. Deep in the solitude of his heart he was fixated on a new plan—come summer, he would take the bullfight to Tokyo. He could sell the idea to the Society for the Protection of Cows and Horses, or maybe the Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry, or he could try to get the Ministry of Health and Welfare or the Ministry of Finance interested, persuade them to recognize bullfighting as a form of licensed gambling akin to the lottery. Then he could pay back the huge losses Tashiro had sustained, and somehow compensate the paper for the debt it had incurred. This, he thought, was what he had to do. His failure this time had only dragged him even deeper into that morass—the strange allure of this bullfighting project. The fierce despair that had assaulted him on that rain-drenched first day had smashed like waves on a rock and retreated. The failure of this tournament had left no scar on him at all.

  At three o’clock they had sold thirty-one thousand tickets, but it looked as though they had finally reached the limit. They wouldn’t be selling many more.

  Tashiro came wandering over to the judges’ area and sat down on the edge of the table, which was laden with certificates and prizes. “Assuming this is what we’ve got,” he said to Tsugami, “I’d say we’re about a million in the red. Even if it’s only half that, that’s still five hundred thousand. Pretty bad.”

  One of the judges scolded him for his rudeness, pointing out that people were watching. He called out an apology, slid contritely off the tabletop, and stumbled over to sit beside Tsugami in the seat reserved for the chairman of the event. Giving a hostile sniff that seemed to be aimed at no one in particular, he abruptly plucked the cigarette from Tsugami’s lips and used it to light his own. He was quite drunk.

  “Five hundred thousand yen isn’t much nowadays, Mr. Tsugami, but in my case I borrowed that money from a guy I know, kind of like an older brother to me. High-interest loan. And this guy, he’s really not someone you want to mess with. He’s a devil, actually, an absolute devil. A stingy, grasping, nasty fiend who doesn’t ever give up, that’s what he is. Oh, this is awful, just awful!”

  Tashiro, clearly in agony, threw his hands into the air and clutched his hair with his fingers for a moment, then buried his head in his arms. Tsugami’s eye was drawn to a wide split in the seam of the lining, just inside the cuff of his leather overcoat. Suddenly he found himself wondering for the first time whether Tashiro had a family. He had never mentioned a wife or children; maybe his wife had died or they had split up, and now he was single. Come to think of it, something in his bearing seemed to suggest that he had a sorrowful past.

  “Well, Mr. Tsugami, that’s business for you. Guess I might as well take another spin around.”

  Tashiro got to his feet and wandered unsteadily away, hands stuffed deep into his overcoat’s big pockets. He weaved through the crowd at the edge of the ring, heading for the hitching posts, walking in a manner that could have been nonchalant or precariously wobbly.

  Moments after Tashiro left, Tsugami caught sight of Miura Yoshinosuke striding briskly through the crowd, making a beeline for the judges’ seats. The next instant, without even realizing that he was doing it, Tsugami was on his feet. Miura marched on until he was standing just across the table from Tsugami, his eyebrows raised in his usual proud expression but his demeanor otherwise devoid of all emotion. He thanked Tsugami for their meeting the other day, seeming so matter of fact about things that Tsugami thought he would have tried to shake han
ds if it hadn’t been for the table between them.

  “I’ve come today because I’m hoping you might agree to do me a little favor,” he began. Neither his words nor his air carried any hint of sarcasm or scornful satisfaction at the miserable end to which the tournament had come, though neither did they carry any suggestion of sympathy or pity. He was here for one reason: to try and strike a bargain. “So how does this sound? I’ve heard that you have a fireworks display planned for tonight, after the tournament. It would be nice if you would allow me to send up a hundred Clean & Cool coupons with one of the fireworks. Anyone who finds one will be given a package of Clean & Cool as they leave. I’d be happy to cover the cost of the display.”

  “That will be fine. I’ll call the man in charge of the display so you can talk to him. You’re welcome to send up a hundred or even two hundred coupons. There’s no need to pay for the display. This will be good for us, too—it will brighten the mood.”

  As soon as they had concluded this exchange, Miura turned toward the field and raised his hand. Two men, evidently employees of his company, ran over. He moved away a short distance and talked with them for a few minutes, then came back over to Tsugami. He was leaving everything to the two men, he said, and would be grateful if Tsugami could ask them to do whatever was necessary. He himself had other business to take care of, so he would be leaving. With that, he hurried off without so much as a glance at the ring.

  The whole time he was conversing with Miura, Tsugami had felt a certain tension in his heart. A coldness entered his speech and his attitude, and he found himself stiffening, slipping naturally into a defensive posture. What was it that this man had inside him? What made Tsugami feel such antipathy toward him? Once again, he found himself confronting the same questions that had entered his head at their first meeting. But he remained oblivious. He had not realized that the thing Miura possessed that got his back up had nothing to do with that egoistic refusal to display any emotion, focusing only on the negotiations at hand; nothing to do with his inimitably rational approach, which enabled him to separate business from personal issues with an almost insolent clarity; and nothing to do with that ambitious, arrogant gleam in his eyes—no, it was something altogether different. It was the luck that dogged Miura in everything he did, a sort of destiny that was his birthright, and that stood in perfect contrast to Tsugami’s own relentless tendency toward ruin. This was what set them in irreconcilable opposition. Tsugami hated this man who would always defeat him.