Impossible Owls

by Brian Phillips

  The first time you read a story like this, maybe, you feel cheated, because you read stories to find out what happens, not to be dismissed on the cusp of finding out. Later, however, you might find that the silence itself comes to mean something. You might realize, for example, that you had placed your emphasis on the wrong set of expectations. That the real ending lies in the manner of the story’s turning away from itself. That the seeming evasion in fact conceals a finality, a sudden reordering of things.

  For instance: In January I flew to Tokyo, to spend two weeks watching sumo wrestling. Tokyo, the city where my parents were married. My father was stationed there. I remember gazing up at their Japanese wedding certificate on the wall and wondering what the characters meant. Tokyo, the biggest city in the world, the biggest city in the history of the world, a galaxy reflected in its own glass. It was a fishing village four hundred years ago, and now: thirty-five million people, a human concourse so vast it can’t be said to end, only to fade indeterminately around the edges. Thirty-five million, almost the population of California. Smells mauling you from doorways: stale beer, steaming broth, charbroiled eel. Intersections where a thousand people cross each time the light changes, under J-pop videos ten stories tall. Crowds of schoolgirls in blue blazers and plaid skirts. Boys with frosted tips and oversized headphones, camouflage jackets and cashmere scarves. Throngs of black-suited businessmen. Twelve hundred miles of railway, a thousand train stations, endless alleys, houses without addresses, streets without names. Immense, unnavigable, and yet: clean, safe, quiet, somehow weightless, a place whose order seems sustained (if you are not from there, as I was not from there) by the logic of a dream.

  It’s a dream city, Tokyo. At least it was for me. I was a tourist there, half-knowledgeable only about books and movies, clueless about real life, and I moved through the city with something like the blurred openness of sleep. The tunnel between subway stops might become a dance club, with a shaking floor and flashing lights; or the turnoff from a teeming street might lead to a deserted graveyard, soundless but for the clacking of sotoba sticks; or the window in the high tower might look out across the reason-defying extent of the city, windows and David Beckham billboards and aerial expressways floating lightly downward, toward the Ferris wheel on the edge of the sea. Nothing was amazing, nothing was startling; each seeming non sequitur was only another pivot in the dream.

  All that winter I had been forgetful. Things kept slipping my mind: appointments, commitments, errands. My parents’ phone number. Sometimes, and for minutes at a time, what city I was in. Have you ever opened a browser window and realized that in the second between clicking the icon and seeing your cursor flash in the address bar, you’ve lost all sense of what you opened it for? I felt that way looking out of real windows.

  What was wrong with me? In fact nothing was wrong; I was merely in crisis. I was in crisis and I was evading it. I was in trouble and instead of confronting the trouble I was pulling the curtains closed on the part of my mind that wanted to name it out loud. To name anything out loud seemed unbearable to me that winter. To name anything out loud meant having to make choices, to be definite; I found it easier to trail off in the middle of any sentence that seemed likely to reach a point. Easier to stay within the margins of a safe semi-oblivion, around whose edges things kept erasing themselves.

  I drifted through the city like a sleepwalker, with no sense of what I was doing or why. Professionally, I managed to keep up a facade of minimum competence. I met with photographers. I arrived on time for the first bell at the Kokugikan. I took notes. (I have: “arena French fry cartons made of yellow cardboard with picture of sumo wrestler printed on it.” I have: “bottle openers attached to railings with string, so fans can open beer.” I have: “seat cushions resting on elevated platforms, so fans can slide their shoes underneath.”) One cold morning I stood in a narrow side street between a bike rack and a pile of garbage bags, spying on a sumo practice through windows steamed over from the heat of the bodies within. Occasionally a wrestler, sweat slick and naked but for his brown mawashi, would come out and stand in the doorway, to let the winter air wash over him.

  I wandered through Ryogoku, the neighborhood of the Kokugikan, past run-down chanko joints where you could buy the high-calorie protein stew that rikishi guzzle to gain weight. I followed wrestlers running errands: soft kimonos and wooden sandals, working their iPhone touch screens with round thumbs. Bopping their heads to whatever was playing in their earbuds. One afternoon I spied on a young rikishi who was sitting alone on a park bench. He was watching some tiny kids play soccer. He sat on the left side of the bench, 375 pounds if he was an ounce, and he was very careful not to let his kimono spread onto the right side, as if he were conscious of the imposition his bulk might represent. Every once in a while a mother would approach and give him her child to hold, and he would shake the little baby, very gently.

  Most of the time, though, I was lost in Tokyo, and if I wound up anywhere I was supposed to be, it felt like a fortuitous accident. The slight but critical unfocus I had experienced all winter latched onto the city and found a home in it, like one of the silent water buses—glass beetles from a science-fiction film—that glide up the Sumida River.

  Part of this had to do with another Japanese story, one I found myself increasingly preoccupied by, even though it had nothing to do with the wrestling culture I’d come to Japan to observe. This story fit into mine—or maybe the reverse—like the nesting sumo dolls I saw one afternoon in a chanko-shop window, the smaller fighters enclosed in the larger, tortoises in a strange shell. The story was a distraction. But unlike almost everything else during those weeks, I couldn’t get it out of my mind.

  * * *

  On the flight to Tokyo, I brought a novel by Yukio Mishima. Runaway Horses, published in 1969, is the second book in his Sea of Fertility tetralogy, which was the last work he completed before his spectacular suicide in 1970. What happened was that he sat down on the floor and ran a dagger through his abdomen, spilling twenty inches of intestine in front of the general whom he had kidnapped, bound, and gagged. He had taken the general hostage in the general’s own office at the headquarters of the Japan Self-Defense Forces. He had done so in a failed attempt to overthrow the government of Japan. If you tour the building today, you can see the gouges his sword left in the doorframe when he fought off the general’s aides.

  Mishima was a contradiction. Handsome, rich, a perennial contender for the Nobel Prize, he was at forty-five a national icon, one of the most famous men in the country. He was also possessed by an increasingly charismatic and death-obsessed vision of Japanese culture. After its defeat in World War II, Japan had turned away from martial values, accepting severe limits on its military; Mishima not only rejected these changes but found them impossible to bear. As a child, he had been sickly and sheltered. Now he worshiped samurai and scorned the idea of peace. He fantasized about dying for the emperor, dying violently: He posed for a photographer as the martyred Saint Sebastian, his arms bound to a tree, arrows protruding from his sides.

  In 1968, appalled by the scale of left-wing protests in Tokyo, Mishima founded his own private army, the Tatenokai. He advertised for soldiers in right-wing student newspapers. He then fell in love with the officer he recruited to be his second-in-command, a young man called Masakatsu Morita. He began to imagine a coup attempt that would double as a kind of erotic transfiguration, an all-consuming climax of the sort that sometimes falls at the end of kabuki melodramas.

  And so in 1970 Mishima made an appointment to visit the headquarters of the Self-Defense Forces. He went accompanied by four young Tatenokai officers, including Morita. He wore his brown Tatenokai uniform. His sword, a seventeenth-century weapon forged by the Seki no Magoroku line of swordsmiths, was in a scabbard on his belt. An orange tassel hung from the hilt. When the general asked to see the blade, the writer requested a handkerchief to clean it. This was the signal for the four Tatenokai officers to seize the general and barric
ade the door.

  Mishima stepped onto the general’s balcony and delivered a fiery speech to the thousand soldiers 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. 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 in dramatic fashion. 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.

  None of the Tatenokai officers in the room with Mishima were older than twenty-five. On the way to his house that morning, they had stopped to wash their car. Later, on the drive to SDF headquarters, Mishima had joked about the music that might 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 tentatively joined in. Now Mishima lay bleeding on the floor. The young men were suddenly in charge of the situation.

  “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 evisceration. 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 couldn’t do it. 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, Mishima’s sword was taken into custody by police. Some time later, it went missing.

  I thought about Hiroyasu Koga. What had it been like, I wondered, to have followed Mishima into that place and then, unexpectedly, been called on to end his life? To have lived the rest of his own life with that memory? To have drifted out of the center of the story, drifted into obscurity, carrying those moments with him? Koga, too, had been prepared to commit seppuku—all the young men had—but Mishima ordered them to live and explain his actions to the world. At the 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. 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.

  3

  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 at the start of a bout, because the judges must be able to tell, from a glance, whether a toe has landed outside the dohyo, whether a heel has slipped.

  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 dash 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 reserved 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, old men in tan jackets, young families, groups of slouching school friends, chat lightly, snap pictures, reach out to receive bags of snacks from the tea-shop waiters who wander 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, taut bulk shining. The referee’s fan hangs in the air between them. And in the last split second before the combatants launch at each other, 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 else you should register about sumo: how intensely hierarchical it is. It is not only the rikishi who are ranked. Referees are ranked, too. So are yobidashi.

  Hakuho glides through his first five matches. On day 2, he lets a diminutive root vegetable named toyonoshima—five feet six inches tall and maybe five eight from rump to navel—push him almost to the edge of the ring, only then, when Toyonoshima lurches forward with what looks like the winning shove, Hakuho 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 Hakuho by twenty pounds, but the yokozuna 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 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 poems of battle.

  There is a feeling of trepidation in the stadium over these first five days, because the Yokozuna Deliberation Council has come in person to observe Kisenosato, a wrestler of the second rank, ozeki, who is being considered for promotion to yokozuna. 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. 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. Their lips are shriveled, their gazes cold. 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. 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 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 the fighters’ bellies collide is kettledrum-like. Toyonoshima drives his stubby legs into the clay, trying to force Kisenosato backward. Kisenosato gets a right-handed grip on Toyonoshima’s 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. Toyonoshima twists his torso hard to divert the larger man’s momentum, and the throw works; Kisenosato’s knee folds, and he tumbles 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, for now, 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 I enjoyed watching the skinny teenagers and mid-level hopefuls who wrestled first. But if I spent all day in the stadium, I started to feel as if the wrestlers were slamming together in my brain rather than on the dohyo.

  So I wandered, lost, around Tokyo. I found the shrine of Nomi no Sukune, the legendary father of sumo, who (if he lived at all) died two thousand years ago. I thought I should look for the past, for the origins of sumo, so early one morning I rode a bullet train to Kyoto. I climbed the stone path of the Fushimi Inari shrine, up the mountain under ten thousand blazing orange 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). I visited 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 a hundred yen on a vending-machine fortune that told me to be “patient with time.”