Impossible Owls

by Brian Phillips

  Everyone in the room gets this: fans, volunteers, media. It’s a close-knit world; people know each other. So when Mitch says, “The brain kind of stops working somewhere along the Yukon. I offered Aliy a cough drop this morning, and she decided it was too complicated to unwrap it,” the laugh that rolls through the room is not the brittle pre-deadline laugh of reporters being fed good copy but a delighted and leisurely laugh of people who’ve been there, or know someone who’s been there, and who just want to share in the moment.

  What are you going to do tomorrow? someone asks.

  “Probably hang out with my dogs and my family,” Aliy says.

  “I’m going to sleep and eat,” Mitch says. “My family can hang out with my dogs.”

  They’d both had hallucinations. Near the end, kind of beautifully, each had visions of the other. Aliy thought she saw Mitch’s yellow sled floating somewhere ahead of her. Whenever Mitch looked behind him, the world kept turning into Aliy. “I saw the raven Aliy. I saw the fuel-tank Aliy. And the upside-down-boat Aliy,” he says. The way he says it, it’s like something from a myth. They share a look, like, hello, vast and terrifying cosmos.

  At around midnight, as I’m on my way out, this happens at race HQ: I see Uncle Dick. From Takotna, remember? He made it, all seven hundred miles on his snow machine. He’s sitting at a folding table with six or seven other race fans, drinking coffee. Team Viagra kept the streak alive.

  There are taxis in Nome. In fact there are whole taxi companies. Somehow this makes economic sense in a town of thirty-seven hundred people just below the Arctic Circle. Small fleets of battered gray minivans, 800 numbers on their sliding doors spackled with winter curb silt. Mr. Kab, Checker Cab, E-Z Transportation. I called one in the middle of the night. My driver’s name was Roxy. She was a young Native woman, maybe twenty-seven, with a round laughing face and sparkly star-shaped glasses. I remember them as sunglasses, which can’t possibly be right. I remember that the reflections of the Christmas lights shone out of them. I was thinking about this city, Nome, which felt like something someone had generated by accident during a first try at a video game, and how it was crisscrossed by all these nonsensical taxis—this arbitrary pattern of routes, so many origins and destinations, dots appearing and disappearing on a map. I asked Roxy how she’d gotten into cab driving.

  She seemed kind of taken aback. “Oh,” she said at length. “I’m only doing this for a while, you know? My family, we’re more into subsistence stuff. Fishing, gathering berries.” She reached into the van’s ashtray, where there was a loose ball of rubber bands, and rolled the rubber bands between her fingers. She spoke so slowly I wasn’t sure she’d go on. “We practice those skills, my family, because who knows, we say. Who knows what’ll still be here tomorrow?”

  I thought of Jay, who’d flown with me for eleven hundred miles, who’d kept me alive, and who’d given me a copy of his book, Survival Flying: Bush Flying Tales and Techniques as Flown and Taught in Alaska, by “The Piper Poet” C. Jay Baldwin. He’d inscribed it, “Read and heed!” It was a textbook, but it opened with a poem about bush pilots, a poem Jay had written himself:

  Here’s to the brave souls that aviate,

  Across that vast Alaskan state …

  The poem was dedicated to the memory of Jay’s friend and mentor Bert, the one who’d disappeared in the waters of the Shelikof Strait.

  Who knew what would be there tomorrow? And it hit me that that was exactly the point of the Iditarod, why it was so important to Alaska. When everything can vanish, you make a sport out of not vanishing. You submit yourself to the forces that could erase you from the earth, and then you turn up at the end, not erased. I’d had it wrong before, when I’d seen the dog teams as saints on the cusp of a religious vision. It was the opposite. Visionaries are trying to escape into something larger. Mushers are heading into something larger that they have to escape. They’re going into the vision to show that they can come out of it again. The vision will be beautiful, and it will try to kill you. And (oh by the way) that doesn’t have to be the last word. That’s why you go to the end of the world—to lose yourself. And not to.

  Sea of Crises

  1

  When he comes into the ring, Hakuho, the greatest sumotori in the world, perhaps the greatest in the history of the world, dances like a tropical bird, like a bird of paradise. Flanked by two attendants—his tachimochi, who carries his sword, and his tsuyuharai, or dew sweeper, who keeps the way clear for him—and wearing his embroidered apron, the kesho-mawashi, with its braided cords and intricate loops of rope, Hakuho climbs onto the trapezoidal block of clay, two feet high and nearly twenty-two feet across, where he will be fighting. Here, marked off by rice-straw bales, is the circle, the dohyo, which he has been trained to imagine as the top of a skyscraper: One step over the line and he is dead. A Shinto priest purified the dohyo before the tournament. Above, a six-ton canopy suspended from the arena’s ceiling, a kind of floating temple roof, marks it as a sacred space. Colored tassels hang from the canopy’s corners, representing the Four Divine Beasts of the Chinese constellations: the azure dragon of the east, the vermilion sparrow of the south, the white tiger of the west, the black tortoise of the north. Over the canopy, lit with spotlights, shines the white-and-red flag of Japan.

  Hakuho bends into a deep squat. He claps twice, then rubs his hands together. He turns his palms slowly upward. He is bare-chested, six feet four and 350 pounds. His hair is pulled up in a topknot. His smooth stomach strains against the coiled belt at his waist, the literal referent of his rank: yokozuna, horizontal rope. He lifts his right arm diagonally, palm turned down to show he is unarmed. He repeats the gesture with his left. He lifts his right leg high into the air, tipping his torso like a watering can, then slams his foot down onto the clay. When it strikes, the crowd of thirteen thousand men, women, and children inside the Ryogoku Kokugikan, Japan’s national sumo stadium, shouts in unison: “Yoisho!”—Come on! Do it! He slams down his other foot: “Yoisho!” It’s as if the force of his weight is striking the crowd in the stomach. He squats again, arms held winglike at his sides, and bends forward at the waist until his back is almost parallel with the floor. With weird, sliding thrusts of his feet, he inches forward, gliding across the ring’s sand, raising and lowering his head in a way that’s vaguely serpentine while slowly straightening his back. By the time he’s upright again, the crowd is roaring.

  * * *

  In 265 years, only sixty-eight sumo wrestlers have reached the rank of yokozuna. Two other yokozuna are recognized as having practiced before 1749, but it’s only with the ascension that year of Maruyama Gondazaemon, the third holder of the title, that we reach a point where we can be reasonably sure about names and dates and whether wrestlers existed outside folklore. Only the holders of sumo’s highest rank are allowed to make entrances like Hakuho’s. Officially, the purpose of the elaborate dohyo-iri is to chase away demons, and this is something you should register about sumo, a sport with TV contracts and millions in revenue and fan blogs and athletes in yogurt commercials—that it’s simultaneously a sport in which demon frightening can be something’s official purpose. But the ceremony is territorial on a human level, too. It’s a message delivered to adversaries, a way of saying, This ring is mine; a way of saying, Be prepared for what happens if you’re crazy enough to enter it.

  Hakuho is not Hakuho’s real name. Sumo wrestlers fight under ring names called shikona, formal pseudonyms governed, like everything else in the sport, by elaborate traditions and rules. Hakuho was born Mönkhbatyn Davaajargal in Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia, in 1985; he’s the fourth non-Japanese wrestler, and second Mongolian, to attain yokozuna status. Until the mid-1970s or so, foreigners were rare in the upper ranks of sumo in Japan. But some countries have their own sumo customs, brought over by immigrants, and some others have sports that are very like sumo. Thomas Edison filmed sumo matches in Hawaii as early as 1903. Mongolian wrestling involves many of the same skills and concepts. In recent years
, wrestlers brought up in places like these have found their way to Japan in greater numbers and have largely supplanted Japanese wrestlers at the top of the sumo rankings. At the time of my arrival in Tokyo, January 2014, there has been no active Japanese yokozuna since the last, Takanohana, retired in 2003. This is a source of intense anxiety to many in the tradition-minded world of Japanese sumo.

  As a child, the story goes, Davaajargal was skinny. His father had been a dominant force in Mongolian wrestling in the 1960s and 1970s, winning a silver medal at the 1968 Olympics and rising to the rank of Undefeatable Giant. Somehow this titan produced a scrawny son. Davaajargal was captivated by wrestling, and he had learned a great deal from his father, but to his bitter frustration he was too small to stand a chance at higher levels. When he went to Tokyo to seek sumo training, in October 2000, he was fifteen years old. He weighed 137 pounds. Sumo apprentices live in training stables called heya. No stable master wanted to take him in. All agreed that he had a stellar brain for wrestling, but he was much too small, they said; too small, too old, and too unfamiliar with the culture. Finally, on the last day of his stay in Japan, an older Mongolian wrestler persuaded the master of the Miyagino heya to give him a chance. The gamble paid off. After a few years of training and a late growth spurt, Davaajargal emerged as the most gifted young rikishi (wrestler) in Japan. He was given the name Hakuho, which means “white Peng”; a Peng is a giant bird in Chinese mythology.

  Hakuho’s early career was marked by a bad-tempered rivalry with an older wrestler, a fellow Mongolian called Asashoryu (morning blue dragon), who became a yokozuna in 2003. Asashoryu embodied everything some Japanese feared about foreign rikishi. He was hotheaded, unpredictable, and indifferent to the traditions of a sport that’s been part of Japanese national consciousness for as long as there’s been a Japan.

  This is something else you should register about sumo: It is very, very old. Not old like black-and-white movies; old like the mists of time. Sumo was already ancient in the mid-eighteenth century, when the current ranking system came into being. The artistry of the banzuke, the traditional ranking sheet, has given rise to an entire school of calligraphy. Outside the few seconds of furious action that make up a match, nothing in sumo is spontaneous; each gesture is prescribed, each moment decorously choreographed. Yet Asashoryu brawled with other wrestlers in the communal baths. He barked at referees. He pulled another wrestler’s hair, a breach that made him the first yokozuna ever disqualified from a match. Rikishi are expected to wear kimonos and sandals in public; Asashoryu would show up in a business suit. He would show up drunk. He would accept his prize money with the wrong hand.

  The six-hundred-pound Hawaiian sumotori Konishiki launched a rap career after retiring from the sport (“Built to last like the Energizer Bunny / Pushin’ seven hundred, and still makin’ money”); another Hawaiian, Akebono, the first foreign yokozuna, became a professional wrestler. That was bad enough. But Asashoryu flouted the dignity of the sumo association while still an active rikishi. He withdrew from a summer tour claiming an injury, then popped up on Mongolian TV playing in a charity soccer match. In 2007, a tabloid magazine reported that Asashoryu had paid his opponents ten thousand dollars per match to let him win one tournament. Asashoryu won a settlement against the magazine, but even that victory carried a whiff of scandal: He became the first yokozuna ever to appear in court. “Everyone talks about dignity,” Asashoryu complained when he retired, “but when I went into the ring, I felt fierce like a devil.” Once, after an especially contentious bout, he reportedly stormed off to the parking lot and attacked his adversary’s car.

  The problem, from the perspective of the traditionalists who control Japanese sumo, was that Asashoryu also won. He won relentlessly. He laid waste to the sport. Until Hakuho came along, he was, by an enormous margin, the best wrestler in the world. The sumo calendar revolves around six grand tournaments—honbasho—held every two months throughout the year. In 2004, Asashoryu won five of them, two with perfect 15–0 records. In 2005, he became the first wrestler to win all six honbasho in a single year. He would lift four-hundred-pound rikishi off their feet and hurl them to the clay. He would bludgeon them with hands toughened by hours spent striking the teppo, a wooden training shaft as thick as a telephone pole. He won his twenty-fifth tournament, then good for third on the all-time list, before his thirtieth birthday.

  Hakuho began to make waves around the peak of Asashoryu’s reign. Five years younger than his rival, Hakuho was temperamentally his opposite: solemn, silent, difficult to read. Asashoryu made sumo look wild and furious; Hakuho was fathomlessly calm. He had an instinct for angles and counterweights. How to slide an inch to the side at the least expected moment. How a fractional shift of his hips could annihilate his enemy’s balance. In concept, winning a sumo bout is simple: either make your opponent step outside the ring or make him touch the ground with any part of his body besides the soles of his feet. When Hakuho won, how he’d done it was sometimes a mystery. The other wrestler would go staggering out of what looked like an even grapple. When Hakuho needed to, he could be overpowering. He didn’t often need to.

  The flaming circus of Asashoryu’s career was good for TV ratings. But Hakuho offered a way forward for a scandal-riddled sport. He was a foreign rikishi with deep feeling for Japanese tradition, a figure who could unite the past and the future. At first, he lost to Asashoryu more than he won, but their contests always ran hot. In 2008, almost exactly a year after the Yokozuna Deliberation Council recommended Hakuho for promotion to the top rank, Asashoryu gave him an extra shove after hurling him down in a tournament. The two momentarily squared off. In the video, you can see the older man grinning and shaking his head while Hakuho glares at him with an air of outraged grace. Over time, Hakuho’s fearsome technique and Asashoryu’s endless struggles with injury and controversy turned the rivalry in the younger wrestler’s favor. When Asashoryu retired unexpectedly in 2010, allegedly after breaking a man’s nose outside a nightclub, Hakuho had won their last seven regulation matches and notched a 14–13 lifetime record against his formerly invincible adversary.

  With no Asashoryu to contend with, Hakuho proceeded to go 15–0 in his next four tournaments. He began a period of dominance that not even Asashoryu could have matched. In 2010, he compiled the second-longest winning streak in sumo history, sixty-three straight wins, which tied a mark set in the 1780s. He has won, so far, a record ten tournaments without dropping a single match. At the start of 2014, Hakuho has twenty-seven championships, two more than Asashoryu’s career total. The record for championships is thirty-two. It is considered a foregone conclusion that Hakuho will break it. He is in his prime, and since winning his first basho in May 2006, he has won more than half of all the grand tournaments held in Japan.

  * * *

  So this is where we are. It is time for Hakuho’s first match of the hatsu basho, the first grand tournament of the year. Rikishi in sumo’s top division wrestle once per day during the fifteen-day derby; whoever has the best record at the end of the final day wins the Emperor’s Cup. Hakuho opens against Tochiozan, a Japanese komusubi—the fourth-highest rank, three tiers below yokozuna. Tochiozan is known for outmuscling his opponents by gripping their loincloth, the mawashi. The wrestlers squat at their marks. The referee stands between them in shining purple robes, holding his war fan up. The crowd calls Hakuho’s name. Spectators roar as the fighters lunge for each other. Nothing Hakuho does looks difficult. He spins slightly out of the way as Tochiozan grabs, unsuccessfully, for his mawashi. Then he uses his rotation as a windup to smash the other wrestler in the chest. Tochiozan staggers back, and Hakuho presses the advantage—one shove, two, three, and now Tochiozan is over the barrier, the referee pointing his fan toward Hakuho’s side to indicate victory. The match lasted four seconds.

  He doesn’t celebrate. He returns to his mark, bows to Tochiozan, and squats as the referee again points to him with the fan. Win or lose, sumo wrestlers are forbidden to betray emotion. That
was the sin Asashoryu used to commit; he’d raise a fist after winning or snarl a happy snarl. Hakuho is not so careless. There are many crimes a sumotori can commit. The worst is revealing too much.

  2

  Some Japanese stories end violently. Others never end at all, but only cut away, at the moment of extreme crisis, to a butterfly, or the wind, or the moon.

  This is true of stories everywhere, of course: Their endings can be abrupt or oblique. But in Japan, where an awareness of evanescence is the traditional mode of aesthetics, it seems truer than in other places.

  For instance: the concept of mono no aware, which means something like “a pleasing sadness at the transience of beautiful things.” The literary scholar Motoori Norinaga described this idea in the mid-eighteenth century while discussing The Tale of Genji, the thousand-year-old novel at the center of the Japanese canon. Genji’s author, Murasaki Shikibu, left her work unfinished, perhaps deliberately. When the protagonist dies late in the book, his death is never mentioned directly; instead, it’s marked by a blank chapter called “Vanished into the Clouds.”

  For instance: my second-favorite Japanese novel, Snow Country, by the twentieth-century writer Yasunari Kawabata. Its last pages chronicle a fire. A cocoon warehouse where a film has been playing burns down. We watch one of the characters fall from a fiery balcony. The protagonist runs toward her, but he trips in the crowd. As he’s jostled, his head falls back, and he sees the Milky Way in the night sky. The book ends there, with no resolution. It’s left to the reader to discover how the pieces fit together, why Kawabata thought he had said everything he needed to say. Why he decided not to give away more than this.