Yasushi Inoue - Bullfight

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 between 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.

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.