The Best American Magazine Writing 2015

by The American Society of Magazine Editors

  Then the atmosphere changes. The crowd grows quiet. The rikishi toss one last handful of salt and stamp back to their marks, fat torsos shining. The referee’s fan hangs in the air between them. And in the last split second before the combatants launch at one another, the yobidashi, who has never changed his pace, who has never at any point moved without perfect deliberation and slow, sad care, lifts his broom and steps down from the dohyo.

  And here is something you should register about sumo: how intensely hierarchical it is. It is not only the sumotori who are ranked. Referees are ranked, too. So are yobidashi.

  Hakuho glides through his first five matches. On day 2, he lets the diminutive and root-vegetable-like Toyonoshima—five feet six inches tall and maybe five-foot-eight from rump to navel—push him almost to the edge of the ring, only then, when Toyonoshima lunges in with what looks like the winning shove, Hakuho just isn’t there; Toyonoshima does an arms-flailing slapstick belly flop over the line. On day 3, Hakuho gets a grip on the mawashi of Okinoumi, a wrestler known for his movie-star looks. Okinoumi outweighs the yokozuna by twenty pounds, but Hakuho lifts him half off the clay and guides him out of the ring; it’s like watching someone move an end table. On day 4, against Chiyotairyu, a wrestler whose leg he once snapped in a match, Hakuho slams his adversary with the first charge, then skips aside; Chiyotairyu drops; the bout lasts one second. On Day 5, he grapples with Ikioi, a physically strong wrestler known for controlling his opponent’s mawashi. Hakuho ducks out of Ikioi’s grasp, plants a hand on the back of his adversary’s neck, and thrusts him to the floor. It takes a sumo novice perhaps ten seconds of match action to see that among the top-class rikishi, Hakuho occupies a category of his own. What the others are doing in the ring is fighting. Hakuho is composing little haiku of battle.

  There is a feeling of trepidation in the crowd over these first five days, because the Yokozuna Deliberation Council has come to the stadium to observe Kisenosato, a wrestler of the second rank, ozeki, who is being considered for promotion. This is a rare event. Unlike a sumotori of any other rank, a yokozuna can never be demoted, only pressured to retire, so the council must make its recommendation with great care.9 It has fifteen members, all sumo outsiders, professors and playwrights, dark-suited dignitaries from various backgrounds. For five days they tilt their heads back and scrutinize the action. They are austere and haughty, their lips as shriveled as bacon. The crowd is anxious because Kisenosato is Japanese, his country’s best hope for a native-born yokozuna, and he has already failed in one promotion attempt.

  After sumo’s scandal-torn recent past, the desire for a native-born yokozuna is palpable.10 The council has recently announced that if Kisenosato wins thirteen matches here, he could be promoted even if he does not win the tournament. In fact, Kisenosato has never won a tournament, and the number of yokozuna of whom that could be said at the time of their promotion is very small.

  The hope of Japan is sour-faced and prim, a six-foot-two, 344-pound maiden aunt in a crimson loincloth. His stomach protrudes inflexibly straight in front of him; his soft breasts hang to either side. When he enters the dohyo, his posture is erect. When he swings his arms before the fight, he does so with a strange, balletic slowness. On the first day, with the council looking on, he wrestles Toyonoshima, the root vegetable.

  The crowd is afraid because Kisenosato is thought to be weak under pressure. The smack as their bellies collide is thunderous. Toyonoshima drives his stubby legs into the clay, trying to force Kisenosato backward. Kisenosato gets a right-handed grip on Toyonoshima’s pale green mawashi, but he fails to lift Toyonoshima, his hand slips off, and his fallback attempt to throw his opponent also fails. Now he is in trouble. Toyonoshima is a little locomotive, churning forward. The wrestlers’ guts grind together. Muscles leap in their thighs. With a huge effort, Kisenosato grunts his way back to the center of the dohyo, gets Toyonoshima in check. Toyonoshima twists his torso hard to divert the larger man’s momentum, and the throw works; Kisenosato’s knee folds, and he goes over onto his back, then rolls over the edge of the clay platform and into the photographers’ trench. He rests on his hands and knees, defeated, surrounded by flashbulbs.

  On the fifth day, Kisenosato goes over the edge again, this time battered out by the frenzied shoves of Aoiyama, a gigantic Bulgarian. The frowns of the Yokozuna Deliberation Council go right to the pit of your stomach. There is talk later that Kisenosato has suffered a toe injury. Regardless, he will lose more than he wins at the hatsu basho, finishing 7–8, falling to Hakuho on day 13, and there will be no Japanese yokozuna in the sport that most embodies the history of Japan.

  I thought about Hiroyasu Koga.

  The drummer in the tower outside the Kokugikan started pounding his taiko at eight o’clock each morning of the grand tournament, but the elite wrestlers, like most of the crowd, didn’t arrive till late afternoon, when the makuuchi division made its formal ring entrance. For a day or two it was fun to watch the skinny teenagers and midlevel hopefuls who wrestled first. But if I spent all day in the stadium, I started to feel like the yobidashi was sweeping around the edges of my brain rather than the edges of the dohyo.

  So I wandered, lost, around Tokyo. I went to the shrine of Nomi no Sukune, the legendary father of sumo, who (if he lived at all) died 2,000 years ago. I went to the food courts in the basements of department stores. I thought I should look for the past, for the origins of sumo, so early one morning I rode a bullet train to Kyoto, the old imperial capital, where I was yelled at by a bus driver and stayed in a ryokan—a guest house—where the maid crawled on her knees to refill my teacup. I climbed the stone path of the Fushimi Inari shrine, up the mountain under 10,000 vermilion gates. I visited the Temple of the Golden Pavilion, rebuilt in 1955 after a mad monk burned it to the ground (Mishima wrote a novel about this), and the Temple of the Silver Pavilion, weirder and more mysterious because it is not actually covered in silver but was only intended to be. I spent one hundred yen on a vending-machine fortune that told me to be “patient with time.”

  As of 2005, I learned from Wikipedia, Koga was a practicing Shinto priest on Shikoku, the smallest of Japan’s main islands. I pictured him in his white robes, standing in a cemetery behind a dark gate.

  Back in Tokyo, I thought the city was a river, the urban element somehow changed to liquid form. In New York, the storefronts come and go but the shape of things stays relatively stable, which is why you can, say, lay a photograph from the 1940s over a neighborhood scene from today. You marvel at the difference, but the edges connect. War, earthquakes, fire, and human ingenuity have annihilated Tokyo over and over again; the city never stops building because it never stops rebuilding. Change comes like a crash, like a wave, the crowd parting and then re-forming around whatever new reality has fallen from the sky. We were shopping for sunglasses, now we’re eating ice cream, let’s listen to music, let’s take pictures with our phones.

  The way you remember things in a dream is not precisely like remembering, yet anything you’ve experienced can come back to you in a dream. Under the shoguns, sumo wrestlers often appeared in ukiyo-e—meaning “pictures of the floating world”—woodblock prints from the pleasure districts whose other great subjects were courtesans and kabuki actors, musicians and fishermen, archers and demons and ghosts. I went to an ukiyo-e exhibit and noted the wrestlers intermixed among the geisha, among the snarling samurai. Their bellies were rendered with one or two curved brushstrokes, their navels cartoon X’s. Their eyes were oddly placid and I thought: It will be a miracle if I can ever finish a thought.

  And I thought about Koga. I’m not sure why. I didn’t know how I’d find him. I didn’t know how I’d speak to him. But I priced tickets to Shikoku. I looked at the sumo schedule to figure out when I could get away. To be honest, Mishima’s suicide had always struck me as somewhat absurd—in bad taste, at the very least. But I thought: It is a small island. If I can get to the train station, I can walk to the shrine, and I will find him there.

&nb
sp; Then I looked at a map of Shikoku. “The smallest of Japan’s main islands” covers 7,300 square miles, is home to 4.1 million people, and contains dozens of Shinto shrines. I gave up.

  But I found that I couldn’t give up. Whenever I stepped onto a subway train, whenever I rode an escalator up into the light, the idea came back, and I thought: If I can track down the shrine, I will find him there. I tried to locate a directory of Shinto sites on Shikoku—but how to make contact with one, how to ask for him?

  Hello, yes, are you familiar with this celebrated author? Wonderful. Now, did one of your priests by any chance decapitate him in the early 1970s using a 400-year-old samurai sword that has since vanished?

  It was an impossible question to imagine putting in English, much less Japanese. And I spoke no Japanese. I pictured the look on the face of whomever I roped into being my interpreter.

  One thing struck me, though: The only source for the “Shinto priest in 2005” line on Wikipedia was a copied-and-pasted Sunday Times article that mentioned Koga only in passing. Even that article was hard to find online. What if it was misinformation? Perhaps Koga was no longer in Shikoku, or had never gone there. Perhaps he was a priest someplace else.

  Finally I wrote an e-mail to my friend Alex, a college professor who studies Japanese literature and film. “WEIRD JAPAN QUESTION” was the subject line. I asked if he had any thoughts about how I could track down Mishima’s kaishakunin. I hit send. And I waited for an answer, wandering through the city, lost. I listened to jazz in blue doorways. I pulled my coat a little tighter. I watched the setting sun float in pale high glass.

  The Mandarin Ducks

  In the Kokugikan there are stories of ghosts, sounds with no sources, invisible hands that seize you from behind. Security guards are reluctant to enter a certain hallway at night. A reporter from the Asahi Shimbun recalls being shoved in the back by something large and round, “like a volleyball,” only to turn and find that “no one was there.” A clerk is pulled from behind while using a urinal. The clatter of sumo practice comes from an empty dressing room. Somewhere under or near the stadium is said to be a mass grave containing victims of the great fire of 1657, which razed two-thirds of Tokyo and killed 100,000. The shogun built a temple to commemorate the dead; the temple became the site of sumo matches whose popularity led to the construction of the first national arena in 1909.

  Even to die in this country, you might say to yourself, is somehow to live the history of Japan. But this thought does not seem to weigh on the fans streaming through the gates under banners of watery silk, nor on the gaijin tourists lined up in the entrance hall to buy the little glitchy radios that offer audio commentary in English. The tourists talk about being tourists, and about the ¥1,000 deposit for the radios: Is it refundable or not? It is refundable. No one talks about ghosts.

  Hakuho is frictionless, devastating. He wins his next eight matches. On day 10, Hakuho hits his fellow Mongolian, the thirtynine-year-old Kyokutenho, so hard that the older man practically rolls out of the ring. On day 13, he wrestles Kisenosato, the Japanese rikishi who has flubbed his chance to be promoted to yokozuna and is fighting only for pride. The match is furious, Hakuho thrusting his open hand repeatedly into Kisenosato’s neck; neither man can get a grip on the other’s mawashi, so they simply bash one another, tactically berserk. Little violent nasal exhalations, the sound of a spray bottle’s trigger being squeezed. Finally, with his foot braced on the edge of the rice-bale circle, Kisenosato twists to throw Hakuho and fails. The yokozuna loses his balance and lurches forward but Kisenosato also stumbles backward; Kisenosato’s foot touches out of bounds a fraction of a second before Hakuho’s hand. The yobidashi sweeps up the marks.11

  On day 14, Hakuho wrestles Kotoshogiku, an ozeki from Fukuoka who specializes in bodying his opponents with his torso. Kotoshogiku seems to have grappled Hakuho to a standstill, the two men bent at the hips and clinging to one another in the middle of the dohyo, and then Hakuho slaps his left hand against Kotoshogiku’s knee. Kotoshogiku crumples; the move is so unexpected and counterintuitive—and the end so sudden—that the match almost looks fixed. Hakuho shows no emotion. On the second-to-last day of the tournament he is 14–0 and one win away from a perfect championship—a zensho yusho.

  His body is strange, Hakuho’s. It’s smooth, almost unformed, neither muscled like a boxer’s nor bloated like that of many rikishi. Gagamaru, the Georgian wrestler who is currently the largest man in top-division sumo—440 pounds and a little over six feet tall—looks like a canyon seen from the air, all crevasses and folds. Hakuho, by contrast, is a single large stone. His face is vague, broad so that his eyes look small and rimless, but also inexpressive, self-contained. Once in a while he will glance to one side with what looks like critical intelligence. Then he blurs again. The sources of his strength, whether physical or psychological, are almost totally hidden from view.

  Another Mongolian, the ozeki Kakuryu, has fought his way to a 13–1 record, making him the only rikishi with a chance to tie Hakuho and force a playoff. Kakuryu is the son of a university professor who, unlike Hakuho’s father, had no background in Mongolian wrestling. With the championship at stake, he and Hakuho are scheduled to meet on the tournament’s final day.

  “Re: WEIRD JAPAN QUESTION” dinged into my inbox in the middle of the night. “Sounds like a cool piece,” Alex wrote. He had looked into the Koga question, and as far as he could tell, Shikoku was a red herring. Koga had never lived there. Nor was he a Shinto priest. He had indeed joined a religious group, but it was Seicho-no-Ie, “the House of Growth,” a spiritual movement founded in the 1930s. Seicho-no-Ie fuses Christianity with Buddhism and Shintoism. After prison, Koga became the head of its branch in Hokkaido, the snowy island in northern Japan where he had been born and raised. He married the daughter of the group’s leader and changed his name to reflect that he’d been adopted into her family: Hiroyasu Arechi. “Arechi” was an unusual Japanese name, formed from characters that meant wild land or barren ground. “If you want to get really literary,” Alex told me, “Arechi” was also a Japanese translation of the title of T. S. Eliot’s poem “The Waste Land.” But that was only a coincidence.

  Seicho-no-Ie struck a chord, so I looked it up in one of the Mishima biographies. There it was: The writer’s grandmother had been a member. When Koga said at his trial that to live as a Japanese is to live the history of Japan, he was quoting one of the group’s teachings.

  Then Alex sent me a link that made me cover my mouth with my hand. Koga/Arechi retired in 2012 and moved to the other end of the country, to the city of Kumamoto, on the southern island of Kyushu. The link led to a video from the website of an apartment complex in Kumamoto. In it, a sixty-five-year-old man named Hiroyasu Arechi answers questions about being a new resident. He mentions at the beginning that he is from Hokkaido. He wears a black V-neck sweater over a red-and-white gingham sport shirt. His features match those of the young Koga in a photograph I’d seen of him posing with fellow Tatenokai conspirators, looking fierce in their ridiculous faux-military uniforms.

  The older man in the video has warm eyes. As he speaks, we see a bit of his apartment in the background. Flowers hanging on a light-flooded balcony. A cream-colored curtain, tied back. An inset picture on the website shows a console table that holds framed photographs of what look like children and grandchildren. A couple holding hands in front of a landscape. Young people at a wedding. A man or woman in a parka, smiling, surrounded by snow.

  He does not mention decapitation or suicide or Mishima. He says that the bus is very convenient to the building. The sales representatives are compassionate and polite. The park nearby is a good place to take walks. There is a MaxValu store across the street, open twenty-four hours, a handy place to shop. There is a roof garden. He has a wide balcony. There are beautiful views at night.

  I remember the auditorium of the Kabuki-za Theater, warm and high and tinted by lights reflecting off the lavish pictorial curtains—herons in a stream, Mou
nt Fuji, a hummingbird breaking out of a tangle of cherry blossoms. Tiny old ladies in surgical masks sat with bento boxes resting on their knees, looking pleased; packs of theater kids sprawled in fishnet tights. Old men slept in their chairs with both hands balanced on their canes. The kabuki play I had come to see was about sumo or involved sumo; I was not entirely sure. The English-language audio guide I had rented was unclear about the details. The play’s story was fantastically complex and was itself only a tiny peripheral fragment of a larger story about two brothers seeking revenge for the murder of their father, a revenge that spanned decades and flowed inexorably from an equally long back story. The story when the curtain opened, however, was simple. It was a story about love.

  A beautiful young woman was adored by two men. She herself loved the handsome youth with the impossibly sad white face, but the burly cross-eyed villain with the orange-red face was determined to win her hand. The villain (I learned from the voice in my ear) had never lost a sumo wrestling match. So the youth with the sad white face and the wrestler with the orange-red face wrestled to decide who would marry the woman. They danced this, spinning slowly and not quite touching their hands. At last the youth with the sad white face won the match. But the cross-eyed villain explained in an evil aside to the audience that he would yet betray the lovers. Spotting a pair of Mandarin ducks in the lake, he threw his dagger and killed the male (a little wooden duck turned upside down, like a prop in a parking-lot carnival). The villain explained that if he could trick the youth into drinking the duck’s blood, it would drive him mad. And he did so.