Yasushi Inoue - Bullfight

Around the stadium, to the west and to the east, as far as the eye could see, dead fields extended into the distance. During the war, all the major munitions factories in Osaka and Kobe had relocated here to this wide plain between the cities; from here, the buildings looked oddly weightless, like scraps of paper dotting the vast landscape. One resembled a shipwrecked boat with its steel beams jutting up into the sky; another had a small mountain of scrap iron out in the yard. When you actually looked at the scene, you were struck by how many smokestacks and electric poles there were, and by all the wires crisscrossing the field like spider silk. Every now and then a suburban train, small as a toy, would pass by, weaving its way among the factories, the woods, the hills. Off in the distance, to the northeast, you could see the Rokkō mountain range. And then there was the overcast sky, hanging low over the desolate, wintry expanse of land and its haphazard mixture of industrial mess and natural severity.

Sakiko let her eyes roam across the frozen scenery, saying nothing, but in her heart she was already plumbing the depths of the pain Tsugami’s iciness would cause her after they had parted. She realized, at this almost absurdly late stage in the game, that all she had really wanted from Tsugami was a little love, just a scrap, to warm herself by — that was the only reason she had come. A few gentle words were all she needed; they didn’t even have to be true. Even the cruelest, most insincere display of affection would make her happy. She stared at the face of the man who sat beside her, utterly unconnected to her agony. All at once, a fresh sense of rage bubbled up within her at his unwillingness even to make the effort to deceive himself, and in her rage, for no other reason than that the thought had occurred to her, her tone as flat as if she were demanding the repayment of a loan, she told him that a friend in Kyoto had invited them to a tea ceremony at a temple, at Ninnaji, and she wanted to go. He didn’t reply. His expression registered his disbelief.

“It’s the 14th. Just that one day.”

“There’s no way.”

“Just the afternoon, then — half a day.”

“It’s impossible. Until the bullfight is over, I really can’t do anything.”

With that, his moody expression softened: a placard descended over his face that announced that this woman beside him was his lover, even now. Anyway, he said, he’d be damned if he was going to make the trip all the way up to Ninnaji, like he had all the time in the world.

“It seems negotiations have broken down,” Sakiko said hoarsely. “Stupid of me even to suggest it when I knew you would just push me away.”

“I’m not pushing you away.”

“Oh really? Is that what you think?” A sudden flash of anger at his coldness crushed her restraint. “Go on and push me, then! Give me a push so hard I’ll go rolling down those benches like a ball! I’d love to see the look on your face as I go tumbling down.”

They fell silent. Her anger faded, leaving her with nothing more to say, and an irredeemable sense of sorrow diffused itself slowly through her heart, like a shadow crossing the surface of a pond. One of them would have to get up; there was no other way to break this awkward impasse.

After a moment, Tsugami said he had remembered something he had to do and left for the office. Five minutes later he came hurrying back out and explained that he still had three or four tasks left to take care of today, and it would be like this every day until the tournament. Maybe they could take a trip to one of the hot springs in Kishū or something, as soon as the bullfight was over. There was a hint of kindness in his tone that had not been there before.

“Everything keeps going awry,” he said, as if he wanted to make her understand. “All our plans are falling apart.”

He pointed to a white ring drawn in the center of the field and told her that they needed to erect a bamboo enclosure there, a ring thirty-five meters in diameter, and even that, something as simple as that, wasn’t going at all smoothly. They had asked someone from the Bull Sumo Association to come up as soon as he could to supervise the construction of the ring, and he came, but then the bamboo didn’t materialize. It had finally arrived this morning, but now it seemed the all-important supervisor had come down with a cold the day before and couldn’t get out of bed. Sakiko could see that he was telling the truth: he had been dealing with an overwhelming amount of business. The phone call he had been making when she turned up at the office had been about the fireworks they were planning to send up over Nakanoshima Park the night before the tournament: they had already negotiated for permission, but now for some reason that permission had been retracted. The town authorities were hesitant because this would be the first aerial firework display since the end of the war, and of course rules governing the use of gunpowder were very strict; they would do what they could to help, but they couldn’t say for certain that permission would be granted as a matter of course.

“I can’t give up on those fireworks, though. That’s the one thing. We’re going to have dozens of strings of firecrackers going off during the day, so I’d really like to send up a few fireworks at night, too, something showy.”

Tsugami’s irritation was plainly written on his face.

“Yes, that would be lovely. Maybe you can do a big chrysanthemum! How nice it will look blooming in the total darkness over the charred rubble of Osaka.”

Sakiko had promised herself she wouldn’t say another word, but somehow this bit of irony slipped out. Please don’t tell me he wants to have them go up in the shape of a cow, she thought. But then she noticed how earnest he looked, as if that might be exactly what he had in mind, and all at once her mood rocked. In her mind’s eye she saw Tsugami’s face, raised toward the doubly black darkness that follows a burst of fireworks — a face that only she knew, and that felt, somehow, soothingly cool.

The men waiting for him in the office right now, Tsugami went on to say, were from the printer, a transport company, and a funeral parlor. They were wrangling over costs with all three companies, and the men had come to talk things over, but it was starting to look as though no progress would be made unless he took them out drinking. The man from the funeral parlor was there because he used part of his gasoline rations to operate a number of sound trucks. He was going to dispatch his trucks all around Osaka and Kobe to advertise the tournament.

“These sound trucks, each one loaded with comedians and revue girls, a record player, they come barreling out of the same garage as the hearses headed for the crematory, and it’s the same company — can you believe that?” Tsugami said, without so much as a smile. “Not that there’s anything wrong with that, exactly…”

Sakiko understood now how overworked and frazzled he was. At the same time, she didn’t fail to notice that despite his dejected tone, he was also — in a manner entirely characteristic of him — feeling a bit giddy, inextricably caught up as he was in these rather shady business dealings, the not-quite-right incidents, all so emblematic of this confused age, fighting against the odds to make things work.

Standing on the platform at Nishinomiya Kitaguchi Station, waiting for the train to Osaka, Sakiko could not have felt more different from when she had come. Her body and heart were both so cold nothing could have warmed them. She was leaning on the wooden fence, her head wrapped up in her muffler, when it occurred to her that this bullfight of Tsugami’s might be a total failure. The thought burst in her mind like a flash of lightning out of the blue. Shivering uncontrollably, she kept feeling that premonition, so strong it was almost a conviction, kept feeling that he was headed for disaster, he was going to fail, seeing him in her mind’s eye, turned away from him, looking very cold, just as he had earlier, when they had parted ways, and she couldn’t tell whether the emotion that welled in her breast was affection or a wish to see him destroyed.