The Street of a Thousand Blossoms (47 page)

A low rumbling of voices outside led Aki to peer out the window to see her father talking to Hiroshi-san in the courtyard. She was too far away to hear what was being said. It appeared to be a serious discussion because neither of them looked happy. She knew her father could be harsh with his
rikishi
, often getting irritated and yelling at them for the smallest mistake. But wasn’t this perfectionism the reason he was considered the best
oyakata
in Japan? She shaded her eyes from the sun. She thought Hiroshi’s fighting name was appropriate, he resembled a noble mountain standing next to her father. He was big and muscular—but not like some of the other wrestlers, whose enormous stomachs spilled over their
mawashi
belts. She watched them move through everyday life with slow, laborious steps. But once on the
dohyo
, they were transformed into wrestlers who moved with such force and agility, she forgot all about their size.

When Aki was a little girl, she thought the
sumotori
were special men that the gods had created. How else could they be so big? “That would make me a god, Aki-chan,” her father said, laughing. “You’ll see when you grow older that they’re just ordinary men. It’s only through training at the stable that they become so big and strong. Otherwise, they wouldn’t be able to fight the other big men and win.”

Aki nodded. Even so, she always saw them as something other than ordinary men.

Hiroshi stepped back, his hands on his hips, a stance that seemed to her to be defiance. After her fall from the
genkan
, Aki had never had the opportunity to speak at length with Hiroshi. When their paths crossed occasionally, she bowed politely and remained quiet. She was grateful to him for keeping his word not to tell her father about her fall. She waited all that evening for her father’s reproach, which never came. Now, as she watched Hiroshi with her father, Aki reminded herself that she must thank him again.

The voices abruptly stopped. She looked out the window and saw Hiroshi bowing to her father. When he stood again, they were the same height, but her father looked like an older, smaller version of the young
sumotori
standing across from him. Her father’s pale,
shaved head gleamed in the sunlight, the brilliance of it stealing her attention. At that moment, Hiroshi’s gaze caught her watching them from the window, his eyes meeting hers for just an instant. Aki stepped quickly back, startled, her heart beating fast, just the way her mother’s heart must have raced when she finished dancing—the young
maiko
wearing the red collar—with all eyes watching her.

Akira Yoshiwara waited across the alleyway from Kenji’s mask shop, shading his eyes against the sunlight. A rush of thoughts filled his mind as he walked slowly toward the shop. He had imagined taking these steps for weeks now. Akira had caught his breath the day he saw Otomo Matsui round the corner and enter the shop. The great actor still moved with grace and presence. Akira wanted to follow him in, but decided against it. Kenji deserved the honor of facing the greatest living Noh actor alone. Through the window, he saw the two men talking and he felt the same pride and joy he’d experienced so many years ago when Matsui first entered his shop. Perhaps it was a sign, the right moment for him, too, to make his reappearance. He and Kenji had followed different paths and had come full circle back to the mask shop. Only this time, Kenji was the mask artisan.

The door of the shop whined open when Akira stepped in. The room was immediately familiar; the same warm smells of sweet cypress and the sharp, tinny paints. He almost expected Nazo to come bounding out of the back room. He was simply dressed, in an old gray kimono, and for a moment wondered if he were presentable after all these years. Akira smiled to see all the masks on the shelves, and instinctively picked one up to examine the workmanship. He smiled even wider to see how well crafted the mask was, and how right he had been about Kenji’s skills.

“May I help you?”

Kenji’s voice came from behind and sounded almost irritated at being taken away from his work. It wasn’t unlike a greeting he himself might have given.

“I believe you are the mask maker?” Akira turned and asked in his soft and steady cadence.

“Sensei?” Kenji recognized him immediately.

Akira smiled. Kenji was a tall and fine-looking young man. He wore his hair long and tied back, while his own were now cut short and streaked with gray. His mustache and beard were also softened with gray, and they both carried the same lean frames.

“I knew if I waited long enough, Otomo would find his way to you. After all, there are only so many brilliant mask makers. Your shop wasn’t difficult to find.”

Kenji looked stunned. “Where have you been?” he asked.

“Far away,” Akira answered.

“How long have you been back in Tokyo?”

“For almost six months.”

“And you didn’t come sooner?” A slight rise of accusation rang through his voice.

Akira looked away. “I had to decide if I would stay in Tokyo or not. There was no reason to disturb you until I came to a decision.”

Kenji paused a moment. “And will you stay?”

He nodded.

Kenji didn’t move. He appeared suddenly nervous and unsure, his long fingers tapping the edge of the table. “I’ve dreamed about this day,” he said. “I’ve imagined it like a scene from a Noh play, how you, in the form of a man or a ghost, would return.”

“I’m happy to say it’s the man who has returned.”

Kenji smiled and bowed, offered Akira a chair before disappearing to make tea. Years ago, he’d been the one to wander in from the cold, beaten and alone. Akira knew so many questions would come later, many he no longer cared to answer. When Kenji returned and poured him a cup of tea, he saw the first questions poised on his lips:
“Why did you leave?” “Where did you go?”
But the words were silenced when his gaze fell on Akira Yoshiwara’s empty sleeve.

Hiroshi awoke with an unsettled feeling, a rumbling beast in the middle of his stomach. It was the second Sunday of May, and the Natsu Basho would begin that afternoon. If he did well at the tournament, he was almost assured promotion to the champion rank of
ozeki
. Hiroshi was always mindful of his good fortune. Still, for the first time, he couldn’t shake his anxiousness the entire morning.

During the last two-week tournament in March, he’d won thirteen out of his fifteen matches; he’d nearly lost another when his foot slipped and he almost went down. But Hiroshi caught his balance and recalled Fukuda once telling him that he had the strength of a bamboo stalk. “It leans forward and backward in the wind, but it always stays upright, Hiroshi-san, just like you.” He often thought of Fukuda, and tried to imagine him a farmer toiling on his father’s land; he hoped his young friend had found his way in life.

Hiroshi stood up from the futon and winced when his feet touched the wooden floor. His soles were tender and raw. The night before last, using a sharp pocketknife, he had lanced the blisters on them, developed from the constant rubbing against the dirt floor of the practice room. He squeezed out the pus and hoped his feet would heal before the tournament, but saw instead that they resembled two scarred battlefields. He gingerly walked back and forth until the tenderness dulled.

By the time Hiroshi reached the stadium mid-afternoon, Sadao had his trunk ready for him in the locker room. While he waited for his first match, he read from his book of poems to relax. His anxiety had eased by the time he walked down the
hanamichi
aisle from the east side. The arena was filled and he transformed his worries into pure energy as he stepped into the ring.

During the first three days of the tournament, he won each of his matches. By the fourth day of the tournament, Hiroshi was completely relaxed when he stepped onto the
dohyo
. The roar of the
crowd quieted. The air was thick and smoky. He and his opponent, a wrestler named Nakamura, moved flawlessly through the opening rituals before they knelt at the starting line and their eyes locked. The sudden, hard impact of their bodies felt no different from so many other bouts he’d fought. A split second afterward, Nakamura grabbed his
mawashi
belt and quickly wrapped his leg around Hiroshi’s in an effort to trip him. He twisted away and felt a sharp, sudden pop in his knee, followed by an excruciating pain that traveled up through his leg to the top of his head. Hiroshi hung on to Nakamura’s
mawashi
belt and struggled to drive him out of the
dohyo
before he collapsed. Sweating from the agony and effort to stay upright, Hiroshi tasted sweat as he held tightly on to the belt, and summoned all the strength he had to throw his weight against Nakamura. In the next moment, amid the daze of voices and bright lights, he experienced a moment of stunning weightlessness as both their bodies fell hard against the clay surface.

Hiroshi dreamed he and Kenji were boys again, running down the Yanaka alleyways. He felt the heat of the sun pushing against his back like a warm hand.
“Faster, faster,”
he heard Kenji’s laughing voice call out. His brother was just ahead of him, but no matter how fast Hiroshi ran, he couldn’t catch up. Their old neighbor Harakawa-san, who had died during the war, was alive again, eating a bowl of steaming hot udon noodles. He lifted his chopsticks in a wave as they ran by. When Hiroshi looked ahead, he saw that it was now a young woman he was chasing, and when she finally turned back, he glimpsed Aki-san just before he jerked awake.

For the rest of the night, Hiroshi couldn’t sleep and lay uncomfortably on his futon, his knee secured by a brace that kept him flat on his back. Unlike other wrestlers, whose point of force was amassed in their stomachs, his strength was concentrated in his legs, iron hard and muscular after years of training. The weeks after his injury, Hiroshi had an operation to mend the torn ligament in his
knee. Each day since, he struggled through therapy and exercise, which was as rigorous as the early days of sumo training, when every muscle in his body ached, and sleep was his only refuge. Now, he wished sleep would overtake him again. Instead, there were moments of dreaming and then sleeplessness.

Every morning, Sadao helped him up from his futon like a helpless child. Once standing, Hiroshi could move around slowly by himself on crutches. He winced now to recall how he’d taken his frustrations out on Sadao more times than he wanted to remember, like the morning he accidentally hit his knee as the boy was helping him up from his futon. The pain had surged upward to the tip of his tongue, and he’d blurted out without thinking, “Be careful! Didn’t your
okasan
teach you anything?” The word “mother” slipped from his lips before he could catch it. Sadao bowed and apologized, then quickly left the room, with Hiroshi standing amid his own shame.

Now, as he lay wide awake, Hiroshi’s mind raced. His thoughts revolved around the match, how he might have prevented the injury if he’d just turned his knee into, instead of away from, Nakamura’s leg trip. Afterward, all he remembered was the impact of both their bodies falling and hitting the
dohyo
, while the pain in his knee raged like a spreading fire and forced him to stay down. The audience had quieted as Tanaka-oyakata hovered over him. He was finally ruled the winner, the judges being in agreement that Nakamura’s elbow touched the
dohyo
first. It was a short-lived victory. Due to his injury, Hiroshi had to forfeit his remaining matches, having won only four out of fifteen, his first tournament lost in almost five years. Tanaka-oyakata quickly applied for an injury exemption from the Aki Basho in September so Hiroshi wouldn’t risk a demotion. An exemption allowed him to miss one tournament, leaving him seven months for his knee to heal before the Hatsu Basho in January. He knew that many sumo careers ended just as quickly as they’d begun because of lesser injuries. He saw again the grim look on Tanaka-oyakata’s face when he told him, “Hiroshi-san, I won’t tell you otherwise. Few wrestlers are able to fight professionally again after an injury like yours.”

Hiroshi’s emotions shifted several times a day since his injury—the slow, uphill climb from disbelief to acceptance—followed by a
growing frustration that swelled into a heated anger. At night, it transformed itself into the acidic taste of fear that ate away at him in the darkness of his room. It took both intelligence and strength to climb the ranks. From the time he was a boy, his
ojiichan
had told him, “To have strength without knowing how to use it means nothing.” All his life, his mind and body had worked in unison. If pain was a means of getting there—the sore muscles, pulled hamstrings, the dislocated shoulder—it was all part of being
sumotori
. At twenty-six, sumo had been his all-consuming passion. Like the daily bowls of rice, the
chankonabe
stew filled with chicken, beef, fish, shredded crab, or fist-sized shrimp, it sated his appetite, gave nourishment to his life. There was never a need for anything else, until now.