sumo crowd dreams

Summer began with sumo dreams and each of the dreams started with sumo crowds. All those faces that float so well focused in the background on NHK. Beyond the foreground impact of flesh and fat-boy sweat, those faces loom back there like a wall of red-eyed witnesses. They form the background of judgement inherent in any crowd with mob potential. Each expression on each face broadcast in clear enough focus to be read with ease. The shock and hope and disappointment. And, usually, the faces are my favorite part of watching sumo. They make it nice to turn down the volume of the polite blow-by-blow commentary flowing from the plump sumo historians of NHK sports. The faces are the non-verbal truth of watching man strike man.

The strange thing is, I couldn't care less about sumo. It isn't like I know anything about it except that the guy with the smallest areolas invariably wins.

Of course, I stop to watch when passing by the Big Man screen in Umeda, but I'm not a fan. I'm more interested in how odd it continues to be to see baby-proportioned men in loin clothes ram each other from five feet apart.

But, at the start of that summer, sumo crowds filled my dreams for eight mornings straight. Never the exact same faces, but always the same dream senario. The dream started with close-ups on crowd members. Flashing from spectator to spectator, all the while the camera slowly pulling back and widening the shot. Never a familiar face in the crowd, and I wonder where in my subconscious they came from. I’ll probably never know. Not one of them was recognizable as an ex-boss or a train man or a female teller at the bank or even as significant strangers. But, they were all Japanese and stared out from the TV screen of my dream-mind. The faces arranged, directed and watching something with intense concentration, their eyebrows, lips and wrinkles revealing emotions of horror, disgust and glee. And the camera always expanding the shot, ever so slowly pulling back untill finally the sumo ring is revealed with me standing there buck naked and bent over at the center of the pounded dirt. Squared off opposite me: my landlady. She in a sumo belt and ready to lurch into the brawl.

And then, suddenly, the camera perspective always changed and I was looking out from within the my eyes in the ring. Her face fills the view. She is wearing her glasses with a faint purple tint to the lenses. Her eyes are sharp with the fury of every hound of Hell. I glance down. Her breasts dangle like golfballs in socks. And just then, for an instant, I think I have a chance against her. I think I won’t be destroyed, but then I notice her areolas are clearly smaller than mine.

Then, each morning, I awoke with an exhausted shock and it took me half the day to recover.

This was no scene from fight club. There would be no commaradary for the loser. This was to be a ruthless ritual of public humiliation that you know only widows who rent musty apartments can dish out.