Pride In Bondage

"Yes. Stomach and intestine and other entrails I cannot translate."

"...Well, it's done. I think I can handle that."

Matsuo-san was heartened. "You know, the best thing, really, for stamina is to eat a live frog. Especially for hangover. If you have worked for three days without sleep and eat a live frog, you will feel strong again...."

Basho in the Morning

At 11 in the morning, when the lowest ranks compete, it is cold in the arena. The stands and boxes are no more than one-eighth filled. The referees are boys themselves. They wear no sandals or tabis. Their kimonos end at midcalf. Their untrained voices are much lower than those of the upper-division screechers, and their manner ritually unpolished.

The young wrestlers, a cross section of body types, wear dark canvas mawashi and their little silk fringes are limp, unstarched. When squatting, they part them like damp reeds. At this humble rank, wrestlers throw no salt, and engage in only cursory ritual, so there is more actual wrestling, four times as many matches per hour. One pair flies from the dohyo and bowls over an inattentive judge, upending him backwards off his pillow, skirts flying. He rises, beaming, both red-faced wrestlers bowing, arranging his folds.

There are pitiful mismatches, the corpulent bearing the little ones to earth, but once two agile 165-pounders meet in a rousing struggle. Through whirling moves and countermoves is glimpsed what the Westerner conceives as the near-potential of human capacity in this mode of sport. He stands and applauds to excess, drawing eyes. After the match he finds himself wistful, realizing that if those fine athletes achieve their cherished rank, they will have forced themselves into fatness and probably early death.

Waiting for Wajima

After 10 days of the tournament the only undefeated wrestler was Yokozuna Wajima. With 15 straight wins in the previous basho in Tokyo, he was on a streak of 25, a record for active sumotori (the alltime record of 69 consecutive wins was set by Yokozuna Futabayama between 1936 and 1939). Wajima has become such a hero that the Japanese syndicate who purchased a $600,000 racehorse in the U.S. last July named the colt for the wrestler.

Matsuo-san and the gaijin returned to Hanakago's stable, seeking audience. On a brilliant morning the first blasts of winter were sweeping in from the Sea of Japan, from Korea and Siberia. Hanakago, unperturbed in a bathrobe, was strolling in a clinker-filled vacant lot next to the stable's hotel. Wajima had not yet arrived, he said, but as he was in a good mood, Hanakago would answer the gaijin's questions.