Yasushi Inoue - Bullfight

*

Tashiro walked for two blocks along a road like a gash in the burned-out ruins, feeling the wind first at his back and then hitting him from the front so he had to lean into it; then, suddenly, he stopped before a half-destroyed building, raised his right hand slightly in a signal to Tsugami that this was it, and plunged through a doorway one could easily have missed and on down a stairway that led belowground.

In part because his motions were so exaggerated, it seemed as if Tashiro had simply disappeared, just like that, from the earth’s surface. Tsugami followed behind, proceeding one step at a time down a dim flight of steps so narrow he could barely squeeze through. Arriving at the bottom after turning a corner partway down, he found himself in a surprisingly wide room, brightly illuminated by numerous electric bulbs. In the center there were a few shrubs and even a stone lantern, suggesting a traditional Japanese-style garden, and around the garden were four neat little rooms with tatami floors, each one a separate structure, still in the process of being built. One was being made into a bar, judging from the tall, narrow-backed chairs stacked in the corner with a few blue-painted beer barrels. Four men stood before the barrels, rotating a tiled sink this way and that, working on installing it in the washroom.

In another small room at the back, the only one that was about ninety percent done, Okabe Yata sat at a kotatsu with a half-empty bottle of whiskey before him on the tabletop, a padded kimono over his drab wartime “national uniform.”

“Hey, come on in!”

By the time Tsugami had time to sit down, Okabe had already peeled off his padded kimono and was warmly bowing his head. He looked rather insubstantial with his diminutive stature and his small face, which filled with tiny wrinkles when he spoke, but something in his casual affability suggested on the contrary that he possessed a certain brashness, a willingness to walk right over other people.

“I’ve been waiting for you, Mr. Tsugami!”

Tsugami, staring at Okabe’s thin lips, which moved quite a lot when he spoke, felt slightly turned off by the man’s attitude — so familiar you half expected him to reach out and pat you on the shoulder. Tsugami held out his business card the same way he always would, behaving if anything more stiffly than usual.

Okabe removed his business-card holder from his pocket and felt around inside, then snapped his fingers to call over a young man who seemed to be his secretary.

“Write out a business card for him, will you?” he said, passing the man a notepad and a fountain pen. “Put down the company phone.”

He picked up Tsugami’s card and held it out to Tashiro, who explained what it said: that Tsugami was the editor-in-chief of a newspaper. Okabe nodded a few times but said nothing. Tsugami looked once more at the small, unremarkable man who sat before him with an air that somehow suggested he wasn’t afraid of anything. Unless Tsugami’s acumen had failed him, Okabe, who Tashiro had said was the most successful man from Iyo, was unable either to read or to write.

Someone brought drinks and food. Okabe adeptly kept up a constant stream of talk, his attitude open and informal. “I’m thinking of turning this into kind of a space for people to indulge themselves, see? We Japanese have been starved for good food, so my idea is to make this the place you come to for absolutely the best of the best. When we open, I’ll introduce you to three of the top cooks from Beppu, Kōchi, and Akita. Come see me, all right?”

Tashiro had become so rigid in front of Okabe that it was funny. His hefty frame was completely engulfed by Okabe’s small body, all of one hundred and fifty centimeters tall. He didn’t say a word about the important matter he had brought Tsugami and Okabe together to discuss, but just went on taking the dishes as they were carried out and arranging them on the table, grabbing the bottle and filling the men’s glasses the second they were empty. When he wasn’t doing this, he sat there meekly, unobtrusively, listening as though he didn’t want to miss a word they said.

Tsugami waited with a certain amount of curiosity for Okabe to come out and say what was on his mind. He himself wasn’t a heavy drinker by any means, but each time his cup was filled he raised it to his lips. Right about now, newspaper boys would be walking around the streets distributing the paper with the announcement of the tournament.

“Does company work keep you busy?” Tsugami asked.

“Not at all, nothing to do. I’ve got five or six companies, but to tell the truth, yeah, I have a lot of time on my hands. Can’t expect a company to thrive if the president is busy, you know? I just sit here drinking like this day after day, that’s all they need from me.”

Okabe had a penchant for taking his listeners by surprise, and he seemed to enjoy it. Evidently at the moment he was less concerned with figuring out what sort of man his new acquaintance Tsugami was than with expressing his own sense of himself.

“Seriously, I’m not kidding! You can’t hope for much from a person’s mind until you pour in some booze. You can wrack your brains all you like when you’re sober, but you still won’t turn up anything worth having, you know?” From time to time, as Okabe spoke, his small eyes would sparkle and he would peer into Tsugami’s so long and hard it was almost rude — an effect, perhaps, of all the whiskey he had downed before they arrived. He kept his tumbler in his hand as he talked, sometimes tossing down a few glasses of the yellow liquid in a row, holding it in his mouth for a moment before swallowing, his face expressionless.

“So. Let me tell you how I got where I am, Mr. Tsugami — you too, Tashiro.”

“By all means, please! I’ve always wanted to ask. The Making of the Great Okabe.”

Tashiro was so abject in his pandering to Okabe that it put Tsugami off. Tashiro reached out to pour Okabe more whiskey; rather than hold his tumbler out, Okabe simply pushed it along the table. He sat for a few moments with his small eyes shut, a smug expression on his face, and then suddenly snapped his eyelids open.

“I don’t know if I’m the Great Okabe or the Little Okabe or what. I can tell you, though, all these companies I’ve got, I built them all up after the war ended. Be nice if I could say I’ve accomplished it all in one generation, but the truth is I did it in a year, out of nothing. One year, that’s all. That’s what makes this world so much fun. How fast things change.” He laughed hoarsely.

Okabe had returned from the South Seas in the November after the war ended, about a year ago. He was thirty-eight when he was called up, forty-two when he came back. He had no wife and no children. He borrowed three thousand yen from a woman he had been involved with almost a decade earlier and fled from his hometown in Iyo, coming up to Kobe to shack up with a friend from his soldier days who had a job driving a truck. After lazing about for half a month, he decided that he could make some money selling farm equipment.

He had heard that a company called Akebono Manufacturing in Amagasaki had produced a new kind of thresher with an electric motor, and hit upon the idea of finding some way to acquire a whole bunch of these things and then sell them off — it was the perfect way to sponge up some of the cash that had been flooding into the farming villages of late. The first thing he did was go have a talk with the management at Akebono Manufacturing, introducing himself with a business card that identified him as “Director, Akebono Industrial Co.” Needless to say it was fake: he’d had the cards printed a few days earlier at a department store in Osaka. His little ploy had precisely the desired effect. Well look at that, your company’s called Akebono, too! The coincidence of the two names created a sort of connection, predisposing the men at Akebono Manufacturing toward him, and as a result they agreed to go ahead and ship a hundred threshers to him the very next day. The contract was extraordinarily generous by usual business standards — they would let him pay the following day, when the goods arrived. So now the only problem was how to come up with the three hundred thousand yen he had to hand over when the goods arrived.