Free Hanzai Japan: Fantastical, Futuristic Stories of Crime From and About Japan by Unknown Page B

loose rows of giant, half-naked baby-men as they performed their warm-up stretches in a flabby Fosse number. I wasn’t laughing. Watching the same movement—slap thigh, lift leg, stamp down, repeat—for so long zoned me out, and I only snapped back when I heard the sound of colliding mountains.
    For all its Shinto-infused horseshit, sumo is a simple martial art that boils down to two angry fat men mashing flab at speed. They then try to shove each other out of the ring, or else put their opponent to the ground. Bouts rarely last more than a minute; most only last a few seconds. Performed with skill, sumo is an explosion, and you bear witness to two men crashing into each other—their bodies, sometimes their skulls—with an unholy velocity. The wrestlers dialed it back for the practice bouts—these were mostly of a survival nature, one wrestler in the middle of the ring pounded by his stable mates until one of them won and took his place. By the time Nakahara entered, most of the juniors were caked with dirt and sweat and already puffing hard.
    Nakahara was the ogre king of Wakamatsu, the only wrestler I’d seen in Yamashiro’s stable to sport the coveted white mawashi . He carried himself like he ground bones to make his bread and went on to demolish the junior wrestlers without breaking a sweat, though I began to suspect that many of them were taking gentleman dives. He was attended by a junior with welts on his back, bruises both old and new peeking out from under the mud, and whose arms were peppered with what could have been a rash, but which looked more like cigarette burns. When practice ended, Nakahara and the other senior wrestlers went outside to hose each other off. The juniors repaired to the kitchen to make lunch.
    I sat alone. A tremor in my gut. Another in my cheek. The smell of dirt and sweat, mingled with the miso broth scent that wafted into the practice area nauseated me.
    There were no yakuza here. But there was something arguably more interesting.
    I looked up to see Nakahara’s attendant. He bowed and told me chanko was ready.
    “Thank you.” I got to my feet, and rubbed my sleeping leg. “What’s your name?”
    “Kouta.”
    “How old are you?”
    “Seventeen.”
    “Where are you from?”
    “Osaka,” he said. And then, as if caught in a lie, “ Near Osaka.”
    “You came here to learn sumo?”
    Bowed head. “I did not like school.”
    Kid like him, built big and not too bright, wouldn’t make it in corporate so his parents had shipped him off to the dirt ring. If you became a junior, you didn’t have to finish high school, and stables these days were desperate for applicants. As long as you looked the part, you were in, even if you didn’t have an ounce of talent for the sport. One glance at Kouta, and I saw someone trapped and frightened. Hated it here, but had nowhere else to go. It was a look I knew only too well.
    “And where’d you get those burns, Kouta?”
    The junior’s face smoothed. He swallowed. He repeated that food was ready.
    “I can help you, you know. I can tell your story.”
    He looked at me. Wavering. Wanting to speak.
    “It’s okay.” I gave him my best concerned expression. “Someone hurting you here, Kouta?”
    A creak. Yamashiro had entered the room. Kouta stiffened, bowed once more and left.
    I beamed at Yamashiro. “Yamashiro-san, I must say, your wrestlers are very talented.”
    He wasn’t buying it. “You must leave.”
    “I beg your pardon?”
    “I spoke to your editor. He said you are not authorized to be here.”
    “There must be a misunderstanding.”
    “No misunderstanding.”
    “He told me to come here.”
    “Then you must deal with him. Goodbye.”
    And he turned away. A couple of wrestlers appeared in the doorway, there to make sure I left the building. I took the hint and made for the door. I didn’t want to stay for lunch, anyway. Just the thought of food made my stomach curl in on itself.
    Instead, I hit the pipe and the dive