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Yasushi Inoue is not a household name in the U.S. (no Japanese writer is a household name in the U.S., not even Haruki Murakami), but he appears to be experiencing a moderate revival of interest here, amongst aficionados of Japanese literature, anyway. 2010 saw the publication of his historical novel Tun-Huang by NYRB, and now the Pushkin Press has released one of his earliest works, a novella called Bullfight, which was originally published in Japan in 1949, where it won the Akutagawa prize.
It�s certainly a strange little book. It depicts the efforts of a newspaper editor in postwar Osaka to sponsor a �bull sumo� competition. The editor, Tsugami, is drawn in by a small-time huckster named Tashiro, and together they sink huge sums of money into their misguided scheme to popularize bull sumo. Tsugami�s motives are perplexing. His newspaper, although struggling like most publications in the aftermath of WWII, isn�t in desperate need of cash. Neither is Tsugami, for that matter. But nonetheless we bear witness to a man destroying himself for no reason by embarking on a very strange, very futile venture that, on its surface, would not be out of place in a P. G. Wodehouse story.As the novella progresses, one begins to suspect that perhaps Tsugami is doing this�the bullfighting scheme, that is�because of a lack of anything else to do. He doesn�t seem to have any friends (he has colleagues, but that�s not the same). He�s in an extremely dysfunctional relationship with a woman named Sakaki, the wife of a friend of his who disappeared during the war. Brief mention is also made of Tsugami having a wife and children, who were evacuated from the city during the war and with whom he�s made no effort to reunite. The jacket blurb dubbed the book �existentialist,� and perhaps they were right. Tsugami demonstrates positively Mersault-levels of alienation, and a similar inclination to do things because there�s no reason not to.
Bullfightwas written by a novice writer, and it shows in some places, but one nevertheless comes away from it with a distinct sense of disquiet. Tsugami�s is a cautionary tale of the perils of alienation in a materially and spiritually devastated society.
