The Best American Sports Writing 2015

by Wright Thompson

  Here is what I see when I picture this scene: the orange tassel hanging from the hilt of Mishima’s sword. The twin rows of metallic buttons on the brown tunics of the Tatenokai officers. The polite smile on the general’s face in the moment before he felt himself grabbed from behind.

  Mishima went onto the general’s balcony and delivered a fiery speech to the soldiers, around 1,000 of them, assembled below. He urged the members of the SDF to take their place as a true national army, as warriors devoted to the emperor—a move that, had it succeeded, would have shattered the social structure of postwar Japan. He was asking the men to stage a coup. The soldiers jeered him. There is broad consensus among scholars that Mishima never expected the coup to succeed, that his only aim was to die gloriously. But he had planned to speak for half an hour, and he gave up after seven minutes. “I don’t think they even heard me,” he said as he climbed in through the window. Back in the general’s office, he unbuttoned his uniform jacket. The young officers could hear helicopters circling outside, police sirens wailing. Mishima sat down. He screamed. Then he drove the dagger with both hands into his stomach.

  Here is what I think about when I envision this scene: the moment earlier that morning when the Tatenokai officers, none older than 25, stopped to wash their car on the way to Mishima’s house. Mishima joking on the drive about what sort of music would play in a yakuza movie at that moment. (He began to sing a song from the gangster flick A Lion Amid Peonies; the younger men joined in.) The gagged general’s eyes bulging as one of Japan’s most celebrated writers committed seppuku on his floor.

  “Please,” Mishima gasped, “do not leave me in agony too long.” He was speaking to his lover, Morita, the student leader of the Tatenokai, whose role in the ritual was to cut off Mishima’s head. In a formal seppuku, the kaishakunin decapitates the dying man, sparing him the prolonged anguish of death by disembowelment. Morita hacked at Mishima’s neck but missed, slicing into his shoulder. He tried again and left a wound across his back. A third stroke cut into the neck but not deeply enough. Finally another Tatenokai officer, a law student named Hiroyasu Koga, took the sword from Morita—the writer’s sword, the sword with the orange tassel—and beheaded Mishima in one blow.

  Morita, as planned, then knelt and tried to commit seppuku. He was too weak. At his signal, Koga beheaded him too.

  In the confusion afterward, as Koga and the other officers surrendered, as reporters struggled to piece together the sequence of events,7 Mishima’s sword was taken into custody by police. Sometime later, it went missing.

  Here is what I wonder when I try to imagine this scene: What did this feel like for Koga? To have followed Mishima into that place, and then, unexpectedly, to have been called on to cut off his head? To have lived the rest of his life with that memory?8 To have drifted out of the center of the story, drifted into obscurity, carrying those moments with him? At his trial, where he was sentenced to four years in prison for (among other things) “murder by agreement,” Koga said that to live as a Japanese is to live the history of Japan, that the experience of each Japanese person is the experience of the nation in microcosm. What a history he must have conceived, I thought, to have said that, having done what he had.

  On my third day in Tokyo I discovered that he was alive.

  The Floating World

  Watch the slow, sad figure of the yobidashi with his broom, endlessly sweeping the edges of the ring. For the long minutes between bouts, while the wrestlers move through their preparations, this slight man circles gravely and patiently, smoothing sand, erasing footprints. No mark can be allowed beyond the line because the judges must be able to tell, from a glance, whether a toe has landed outside the dohyo, whether a heel has slipped. Each rikishi is called into the ring by a singer, then announced over the stadium loudspeakers by a voice that sounds strangled and furious, like an oboe filtered through the dive alarm on a submarine. Through this, the yobidashi sweeps.

  The wrestlers face off at their marks, not once but twice, three times, squatting and flexing, glaring intimidation at each other. Then they break and walk to their corners, where they scoop salt out of a bowl and hurl it across the clay—another Shinto purification ritual. The yobidashi sweeps the salt, mixing it into the sand. Tall silk banners, representing sponsors’ bonus prizes—extra money guaranteed for the winner of the bout—are carried around the ring on poles. The yobidashi sweeps around the banners. The wrestlers slap their bellies, slap their thighs, signaling massiveness to their enemies. The spectators, who know the routine, chat lightly, snap pictures, reach out to receive bags of snacks from the tea-shop waiters who circulate through the aisles. At the center of the ring, the referee poses and flits his fan, a luminary in silks; the hilt of his knife, which he wears as a reminder of the days when one wrong decision meant his immediate seppuku, peeks out from the sash at his waist. Through all this, the yobidashi sweeps.

  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 20 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 10 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 recommendation9 with great care. It has 15 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 13 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 th
e 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 100 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 a 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.

  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 email 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-yen 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 39-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.