Yasushi Inoue - Bullfight

*

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 hands 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.