I finished 引きこもりでポンコツだった私が女子プロレスのアイコンになるまで !
A surprisingly large number of thoughts about it
This ended up being an interesting read. The wrestling magazines I’ve been reading give bits of context, but it’s pretty scattered across lots of different subjects, so spending a much longer time focusing on one person felt compelling in a different kind of way.
I don’t think I’ve read an autobiography of someone roughly my age before, and it’s interesting seeing the things I relate a lot to (grew up in the middle of nowhere, parents divorced, had a rough middle school) and the things I… don’t (dropped out of high school, didn’t go outside “except briefly 3 times to look at the sky in the backyard” for two years, decided to become a wrestler and moved to Tokyo from Yamaguchi with 3000 yen, wrestled at Madison Square Garden and the Tokyo Dome…). It goes to show how long a period of time 10 years it is and how short it is at the same time – she’s really still very young, but athlete’s career spans being what they are, and especially women’s wrestling careers tending towards young starts and early retirements, it comes across as an exceptionally storied career in print. I had to remind myself a lot that the whole thing pretty much takes place entirely in the 2010s, that Stardom didn’t exist before that, and even though it feels like I’ve been following it for longer, I only actually started watching Stardom more than halfway through last year!
Following an entertainment industry, especially one in a language and culture you don’t really know, and especially one as frequently shady as professional wrestling, you often think “boy, I sure hope this isn’t super exploitative,” without the ability to really know one way or another. And I gotta admit, the part where she talks about how she moved across the country as a teenager with nothing to her name and ended up staying with the old man founder of the wrestling company who hired her because the dorms weren’t built yet did draw some concern from me on that front. But she speaks positively about him throughout the book and she legitimately did become a pro wrestling icon, so I’ll try to take it at face value as a strange but innocent story that worked out well.
The book, like the weekly magazines I’ve been reading, is written in a sort of half-kayfabe (to people who don’t follow wrestling, kayfabe is wrestling jargon for in-fiction) where she’s clearly being very frank but stops just short of talking about booking decisions and that kind of thing. Like there’s a transcribed talk with her retired rival Kagetsu that’s a lot of fun because they’re clearly friends and talk about putting on good matches and getting the best out of each other – as rivals. Whereas I assume when it was going on the relationship would have been portrayed as outright enemies. You can get away with that “not quite mentioning the elephant in the room but taking care of it anyway” tone surprisingly well without feeling unnatural, because in pro wrestling, a big win for example is still a genuine accomplishment that shows how far a wrestler has come! Like, even though it’s a storyline, it still has weight, and the protagonist mirrors the actors’ own ups and downs so to speak. So you can talk about all that honestly without being “insidery.” It helps too that the dominant style in Japanese wrestling in general (and Stardom in particular here) tends to be (relatively) straight-laced athletics with the drama and zaniness dialed up, as opposed to WWE’s endless violent soap opera. So anyway I guess what I mean is, she can talk about being especially good at 受身, and you can know why that’s especially important in pro wrestling without her explicitly connecting the dots.
The biggest thing I’ll take away from the book is context – seeing how different people slotted into Mayu’s story and how she thought of them adds a lot of valuable context for me as a fan watching the show. I’m used to thinking of wrestlers as isolated characters (and factions), so the deeper implications of how two opponents have bounced off of each other for years is usually lost on me, and this felt like a good primer at least for some Stardom history. It would probably come across as quite shallow to someone who has actually kept up with all that stuff as it was happening, but for me even a limited perspective on stuff like the Yoshiko/Act Yasukawa incident is enlightening.
It’s unfortunate that because of when it’s published, the book ends just after Hana Kimura’s horrifically untimely passing and with wrestling as a whole just barely starting to figure out how to continue putting on matches amid the pandemic… To be honest, a lot of the reason I’ve renewed that magazine subscription is it would mean a lot to see a return to a happier time where fans can actually cheer again!
I’ll admit while I was reading this book I kind of wanted to churn through it to get to fiction again, but I still enjoyed my time with it. It probably wouldn’t be at all interesting to someone not already into wrestling who doesn’t know who Mayu Iwatani is.
… Which I assume is anyone actually reading this deep into this post!
All you really need to about her deal is she’s nicknamed ゾンビレスラー because she always gets back up no matter how much damage she takes.
Here’s a semi-random free clip if you’d like to put some images to what I’m talking about:
【We are STARDOM!!】#10 岩谷vsSareee消滅!!からの→長与千種の弟子・彩羽匠が緊急参戦!!超激闘のノンタイトルシングルマッチ~世界が注目!女子プロレス~ - YouTube
I’ll be in non-fiction world a bit longer because the next thing I drew is 超ビジュアル!日本の歴史大事典 !
I think I got this from Kinokuniya what feels like a looong time ago, and for a while I was trying to slowly flip through it, before I eventually drifted to a more “focus on one thing and move on” system. Now it should be much less intimidating!
I’m actually really looking forward to it - I don’t really honestly know my Sengokus from my Kamakuras, so to speak, so it’s high time I got things in order a bit better in my head, and this seems like a fun way to do it. I’m planning to add some to my anki deck as I go for a little bit of retention and a slight studying vibe.
週刊プロレス Talk
Geez, they should take more pictures of SANADA in glasses
Hey so uh, do people who don’t follow wrestling know how incredibly weird wrestling is?
Misc. other statuses
Digital Devil Story is intimidating! A much more grim and inaccessible Wizardry-style vibe than what I’m used to from classic JRPGs, and it sounds like it might be quite long. I’ll give it a shot though, and there’s definitely plenty I’m intrigued by!
Wandering Son arrived a lot faster than I expected (maybe things are recovering slightly after all…) so I might start it soon or try to slot in a couple more manga odds and ends.
I bought my first Japanese e-books recently! Directly this thread’s fault for making me realize I could do that. I feel kind of silly for not having ever considered it seriously before - I think I was just surprised enough to realize how easy shipping is that I didn’t really even try to look for alternatives.
But I gotta admit, even just flipping through a little, it turns out there’s a looooot of stuff I’d have a hard time finding or justifying getting via import that I’d still love to have access to…