Bullfight Page 8

  Shortly afterward, Tsugami glanced over toward the hitching posts and was surprised to recognize Okabe’s diminutive figure among the crowd of spectators. He was walking slowly along with Tashiro in tow, stopping before each bull for a while and then moving on to the next, as if he were assessing them. Okabe and Tashiro were being followed at a slight distance by a small group of men. Tsugami kept losing sight of Okabe as passing spectators blocked his view, then seeing him again, but even so he sensed in the back of that small, suited figure, bathed in the slanting afternoon sunlight, a solidity that was entirely unfamiliar, that he had never before seen in Okabe, as the man made his way calmly, at his leisure, among the crowds. Not all those twenty-two bulls would be returning to W., Tsugami realized. Here he had been foolish enough to think the matter of Okabe’s buying the bulls had been settled—all of a sudden, he was struck by the comedy of his own obliviousness. How many bulls would never see W. again? Five? Ten? Or none of them? Tsugami stared at Okabe’s small figure as he stood there with his arms folded before a bull, listening placidly as someone told him about the animal, and he felt not rage, exactly, but a sort of self-lacerating satisfaction.

  The main attraction of the tournament, the match between the Mitani bull and the Kawasaki bull, had been going on for an hour already and had yet to be decided. The two bulls simply moved from one place to another every so often, from the center of the ring to the edge, then back to the center, their horns locked, the ferocity of their breathing sending ripples across their tremendous frames—it seemed impossible that the balance of power would ever be broken. The match was dull and it had been going on so long that one judge had suggested calling it a draw. In the end Tsugami proposed asking the audience members to show by their applause whether they wanted to let it end in a tie or to let the bulls keep fighting until one of them won. His plan was adopted.

  Before long, Mitani Hana, who must have heard the officials discussing the matter, came running over to Tsugami, a hand towel wrapped around her neck. “Please let them keep fighting!” she pleaded. “Even just ten minutes more! You can’t let it end in a tie!” Her face was pale from the tension of the long match. “Please, anyone can see which bull is going to win!”

  Just then, the loudspeakers announced that the organizers wanted the audience to clap to decide whether the match should be declared a draw, or whether the bulls should keep fighting to the end.

  “Those in favor of calling it a tie, let’s hear you now!”

  Clapping broke out on every side of the field, but surprisingly fewer than a third of the spectators were in favor of ending the match. When the announcer cried out, “And now those in favor of letting them fight!” a much louder wave of applause filled the stadium. The match would continue, as Mitani Hana had hoped.

  Tsugami told the judges he was going to take a walk, then left and started climbing into the infield stands behind third base. He had remembered that Sakiko had promised to come this afternoon; she would be sitting in the infield stands, in the top row. In fact, she had been sitting for over an hour in the stands behind first base, near the judges’ seats. The bullfighting did not interest her. She found it incomprehensible that Tsugami had put himself through so much for such a boring, slow sport that was also not at all modern, no matter how you looked at it. Her gaze tended to be focused less on the ring than on Tsugami where he sat with the judges. He was no longer the man he had been two days earlier, the man who lay despairing in her arms, as though it were up to her whether he lived or died. His profile, the way moved when he talked with others or issued instructions—everything about him radiated the same restless energy he had always had. Even this far away, she was dazzled by his vibrancy, so typical of a young newspaper director. The day before yesterday, he’d had a place in his heart for her, there was no question of that—an emptiness that only she could fill. Now, thinking back on the certainty she had felt then of his need for her, it seemed oddly tenuous, like a dream. There he was, the same old egoistical Tsugami who could probably have forgotten all about her a year from now, if he wanted to. It was all over now. He would never come back to her. For some reason, this feeling had taken form within her, becoming an unshakable conviction.

  Sakiko went up after Tsugami, climbing into the infield stands behind third base. They sat down beside each other on the last bench.

  “Nice of you to come. I’m impressed that you remembered me.”

  This was not irony. He seemed so far away today that such words came naturally.

  “That applause just now, when the audience chose to let the Kawasaki and the Mitani bulls fight until one wins—I’d say about seventy percent of this crowd was clapping,” Tsugami said suddenly. “Think about that. Seventy percent of the people in this stadium don’t find this long, tedious match boring.” Until he spoke, his eyes had been roaming around the ring, a look in them that might have been either hostile or disdainful. Now he glanced up and into Sakiko’s eyes. “In other words, that’s how many people here have placed bets on this competition. It’s not which bull wins and which loses that they want to see decided, it’s whether they themselves have won or lost.”

  A faint smile hovered around his mouth. Sakiko thought it looked terribly cold. Sure they’re betting, she thought, but didn’t your paper make the biggest bet of all? You gambled its whole future on this. Tashiro had placed his bets, too. Omoto had placed his. So had Mitani Hana.

  “Yes, everyone is betting. Everyone but you.” These words slipped out before Sakiko knew what she was saying.

  Tsugami’s eyes flashed. They looked proud, but somehow sad.

  “It’s true. I’m not sure why, but I feel it, seeing you here today.” She meant this as an explanation, an attempt to dull the razor-like edge she herself had come to perceive in her earlier comment, but as she spoke a sudden, fierce burst of emotion, half sadness and half anger, came at her out of the blue, making her want to hurl herself bodily against him. When she spoke again, the hatred in her tone was unmistakable. “You’ve never taken a gamble on anything. You’re not a man who ever could.”

  “And you?” Tsugami had said this casually, but Sakiko caught her breath.

  She smiled, the blood draining so completely from her twisted face that even she could feel it. “Yes,” she said, cutting each word apart from its neighbors, “I have placed my bets.”

  It was true—she had. The instant he had asked her that question, she had decided, reflexively, to let the struggle between the two bulls that was playing itself out even now in the middle of the ring decide the issue that had been causing her such agony for so long: whether to break up with Tsugami, or to stay with him. If the red bull won, she would leave him.

  She looked out across the stadium. In the ring, two bulls, one red and one black, stood as still as clay statuettes. Now that the rain had let up, cold winter sunlight streamed down on the ring and the bamboo enclosure, and on the crowds surrounding them. The handlers slapped the bulls’ buttocks and flanks to rile them up. The banners flapped in the wind; as the match continued to stagnate, the speakers kept repeating the same phrases time after time, spewing out scraps of speech that sounded weary and annoyed, almost shrieking. The stands were eerily quiet. There was no laughter, no conversation; the spectators were all staring down at the ring. Sakiko felt something dark and cold and slow, like twilight, filling the stadium, and it hit her in the chest with a feeling of sadness that was almost more than she could bear.

  And then it was over. The quiet shattered as the whole stadium leaped to its feet, cheering. Down in the ring, the balance between the two bulls had finally crumbled, and the raging, pumped-up winner was running around and around the ring, unable to contain the excitement of his victory. Sakiko could not tell at first which of the bulls had won. She felt terribly dizzy. Restraining the urge to reach out and grab Tsugami’s shoulder, she kept her eyes on the ring. All she could see was the strange circling of that sorry red beast, stirring and stirring with its bulk the muck of helpless sorr
ows filling the vast horseshoe of the stadium.

  AFTERWORD

  I began my career as a novelist in 1949, the year I published The Hunting Gun. My next work, Bullfight, earned me the Akutagawa Prize, and with that I became a true writer. When I reread these two texts now, whatever qualities and defects they may have as literature, I find myself dazzled by the beginner’s enthusiasm that animated me in those days.

  I was forty-two when The Hunting Gun and Bullfight were published. In the span of a man’s life this is already verging on old age, but within the context of my life as a writer there is no question that this was my adolescence, and these the works of a very green novelist.

  They say that, as authors mature, they follow the trajectory charted by their first writings—a rule to which, it seems, there are no exceptions. If this is correct, then The Hunting Gun and Bullfight carry within them, alongside their youthful ungainliness, something fundamental from which I have never been able to break free. For this reason, I believe I am more fully present in their pages than in any of my other texts.

  Forty years have flowed by since then without my seeing them go, fifty novels of varying length, a hundred and eighty novellas… When I consider the work I have done, I feel a little like I am gazing out at a garden gone to seed. Amaryllises poking up in random places, roses whose appearance leaves much to be desired. The flowers blooming there belong to the most diverse species, large and small, transplanted from the desert and the Himalayas. Weeds are encroaching everywhere. Yes, it is an untended garden. Each time I look upon this landscape, it seems somewhat different. Sometimes, when the sun is shining, I find it filled with clarity. Other days it is sunk in shadow, hushed and gloomy. No matter how it appears to me, though, this untamed garden is me. No one else but me, all there is to me.

  Just as men are born under lucky or unlucky stars, so, too, literary works are more or less blessed by fortune. Some arrive in the world perfectly formed; others are born sickly. Certain works achieve celebrity, while others languish in the shadows, condemned to huddle all their lives in an out-of-the-way corner. Whether or not a work meets with success is to some extent a matter of caprice. Works the author approves of are ignored, and vice versa. The destinies of literary works are as fickle as those of men. Among the works I have published, some have had the good fortune to be much discussed, while others were forgotten almost as soon as they saw the light of day.

  An author’s attachment to his works is not necessarily proportional to their success. On the contrary, he is overwhelmed by the desire to usher into the world works that he has been unable to complete, that remain unfinished. One notices this, naturally, in collections whose contents he himself has selected. This may well be their principal interest.

  Some years ago, I put together a collection containing twenty-three texts: The Hunting Gun and Bullfight, which launched my career as a writer, and other novellas among the many I had written over the years with which I was particularly pleased. Had critics or readers been in charge of the selection, I have no doubt that the results would have been different.

  YASUSHI INOUE

  Tokyo, 1988

  Originally published as the preface to the 1988 edition of

  Bullfight (Combat de taureaux)

  published by Editions Stock

  Also Available From Pushkin Press

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  Original text © The Heirs of Yasushi Inoue 1949

  Afterword © 1988, Editions Stock

  English translation © Michael Emmerich 2013

  Bullfight was originally published as (Tōgyū). This translation is based on the text in Inoue Yasushi zenshū (Collected Works of Yasushi Inoue), Tokyo, Shinchōsha (1995–1997).

  This translation first published by Pushkin Press in 2013

  ISBN 978 1 782270 69 0

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