Yasushi Inoue - Bullfight

THE LARGE, eye-catching announcement ran in the Osaka New Evening Post in mid-December 1946: early the next year, from January 20, the paper would sponsor a three-day bullfighting tournament at Hanshin Baseball Stadium. As soon as the page proofs came off the presses, Tsugami, the editor-in-chief, slipped a copy into his pocket, collected Tashiro, whom he had left to his own devices in the chilly reception room long enough already, and stepped out with him into what one might describe as a classically wintry afternoon — air that over the past two or three days had become genuinely cold, gusts of biting wind that kept starting restlessly up off the street.

“Ah, it’s out!” Tashiro took the newspaper Tsugami offered him and peered intently down at it, his expression relaxing into a brief, uncharacteristic smile, only to turn serious again an instant later. “From here on you just have to keep advertising, right up to the very end…” The paper flapped in the wind as he strode forward; he folded the few sheets in four and shoved them in his pocket. “Speaking of which, there’s something else I’d like to talk to you about, if you don’t mind.”

Tashiro never seemed to tire. By the time he had one project on track, he was already heading toward his next goal. They had expended an enormous amount of energy just getting to the stage where they could finally print this notice, but none of that seemed to have had any effect on him.

“So how’s this for a plan — why not buy the bulls? All twenty-two. Say they’re fifty thousand yen a head, that comes to a million one hundred thousand. A bargain, right? It’d be really easy if the paper bought them, and my guess is the people down in W., at the Association, as long as you’re interested they’ll be willing.”

Tashiro rattled on without a pause, so focused you would have thought he had come all the way up from Kyushu specifically to make this proposal. The paper could sell the twenty-two bulls right away, as soon as the tournament was over, without having to go to the bother of looking after them. Of course, if they could afford to let their investment rest a while, they could hold on to them, see how the situation developed. After going to all the trouble of hauling twenty-two bulls up from Shikoku, though, all that distance, they couldn’t just send the animals back the second the tournament ended, right? You got more guts than that! Buy the bulls for a million one hundred thousand, right, and just transporting them to the Hanshin area ought to make it possible to turn that into a million and five or six hundred thousand. And if you could put them to sleep and turn them into meat, well, that would be a bit of a hassle, but right there you’re talking two million yen easy. Such, at any rate, were Tashiro’s calculations.

A thick-set and broad-shouldered man of average height, Tashiro was bundled from head to toe in a heavy leather overcoat; he carried a somewhat aged but still stiff alligator-skin Boston bag — the sort of thing that had become rather valuable of late. Every so often as they hurried along the largely deserted, bombed-out street toward Midōsuji he would stop in his tracks, anxious that the wind hitting their faces was preventing Tsugami from hearing him, and stand there with his head lifted, talking to his taller companion.

Tsugami listened, nodding, though obviously he had no intention of getting involved in any such scheme. The Osaka New Evening Post had been established with a hundred and ninety-five thousand yen; given how small it was, it was no exaggeration to say that sponsoring the tournament was already more than it could manage. This was a gamble on whose success the future of the company depended. Their finances were so strained right now that they had struggled just to scrape together funding for the tournament itself; the idea of buying the bulls was so ambitious as to be ludicrous. The paper had gotten started a year ago, in December 1945, with a staff composed largely of former employees of B. News , known as one of the two biggest newspapers in the country; even after all these months, they still relied on the larger paper for everything from typesetting and printing to photographs and use of its liaison department. People tended to assume as a result that Osaka New Evening Post was a subsidiary of B. News , and was run using the same capital. In actual fact, despite all appearances to the contrary, there was no connection at all between the two papers’ management. Tashiro, who was as sly a showman as any you were likely to find, had surely made a thorough investigation of the Osaka New Evening Post ’s finances before contracting to help out with the tournament; that he was proposing such a substantial investment even so, suggested that he had overestimated the significance of the connection with B. News , and assumed that any losses would be covered, even if things went awry. For him to make so grand a misjudgment concerning a little paper that had only been around for a year — to be trying so earnestly to interest its editor in a second big project on top of the tournament — revealed a naïve optimism that seemed utterly typical of a country showman, and at the same time a willingness to drop all pretenses once you had started working together, to expose his true nature as a schemer, that was so open and unabashed it made you want to avert your eyes.

Still, Tsugami felt no particular misgivings or anxiety about collaborating with Tashiro on this event. He had, he thought, made a fairly accurate assessment of his character as a showman when they first met — his cunning, his shamelessness, the likelihood that he would stray from the straight and narrow if it proved necessary to bring in a bit of money. He had no fear, despite all of this, that he would get burned in the course of their collaboration. In part this was because he sensed that there was a limit to how deep these admittedly caution-inspiring traits went — test any one of them and you would hit bottom soon enough — but more reassuring still was the oddly pure enthusiasm Tashiro showed for his work on occasion, a sort of passion that made Tsugami think with a start that he himself probably had a lot more bad inside him than Tashiro. “I’m telling you, this is going to be huge!” he would say, stressing each word, rolling each one around in his mouth, his expression radiating an incongruent air of abstraction. His gaze, at such moments, would be fixed in midair, as if he were watching something in the distance, and as the seconds passed he would slowly turn his eyes upward, higher and higher. It was as though some mysterious flower only Tashiro could see was hovering there, airborne, calling to him from afar. His mind, then, was free of calculations. Tsugami would regard with an unforgiving eye the stupid expression of this showman who had let all thought of profits and losses slip from his mind, his attitude that of a man examining a sculpture, and then all of a sudden he would find himself looking coldly into his own heart, which was no longer capable of losing itself in anything.

“And if the paper doesn’t buy them?” Tsugami asked.

“Actually,” Tashiro said, his tone suggesting that he had been waiting for Tsugami to ask precisely this question, “someone else has said he’d like to buy them. Matter of fact, that’s why I’ve imposed upon you today like this — I’d like you to come meet him. I wanted to have someone lined up, you see, just in case the paper isn’t interested. You could make it a joint investment, if you like, and even apart from this, I’m sure he can be of assistance in other ways. His name is Okabe Yata — perhaps you’ve heard of him? He’s quite a man, I must say.”