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“You were crying. Why?”
They’re finally backstage, and those are the first words out of Naito’s mouth. Okada is breathless, leaning against the wall with one arm. He looks at Naito over his shoulder, his dark eyelashes fanning out, cheeks hollowing with each intake of breath.
“What,” Okada says, when it’s clear that neither of them are moving.
“Before the match. You were crying.” Naito presses the point.
Okada doesn’t respond—he just turns so that he’s facing Naito. Under the yellow hallway lamps, the marks of the G1, washed out by the harsh ring lights, are newly evident on his body. A smattering of bruises across his collarbone. Even Zack’s fingerprints, left during a match that could only be described as intensely, brutally romantic.
“Why are you still here? You’ve won.” Okada’s voice brings the waking world back into focus. He looks away, staring at the spot where the light beams off the linoleum. His arms are pressed flat against the wall, and for a second Naito thinks he’s going to sink down to the floor. He realises, with a start, that his opponent’s eyes are wet.
“Are you going to cry a second time?” It comes out harsher than he intended it. Naito doesn’t correct himself. For a moment he’s worried that Okada will tell him to go away, but they’re both too old for that.
For a while neither of them say anything. Just the two of them in this anonymous, lonely hallway, not looking at each other. Elsewhere, the sound of feet shuffling and chairs being kept away. The click of camera shutters has died off by now; the fans are streaming out of the arena—a faraway, impermeable wall of noise. Triumphant, tired chatter, like the sound of falling rain. Somewhere BUSHI is laughing, and Naito knows that soon his factionmates will come looking, no doubt to force some celebration onto him. Hiromu will probably try to climb all over him, and the thought makes him smile.
“Do you remember,” He tries to keep his voice light, “When we were roommates together in the Dojo?”
“Why are you here?” Okada almost cuts him off. It’s a genuine question, not unkind. And then,
“Of course I remember.”
There’s something in his tone, in the way he’s looking at Naito, with that odd mix of curiosity and compassion, that makes the words rush out of him.
“When you came into the ring, I saw you the way you were, 15 years ago. It’s difficult to describe. I’m trying to recall it, but it’s already getting away from me. All of a sudden you were this twenty-something year old kid, you were so skinny…” Naito broke off, swallowing thickly.
“It felt like we were just kids again, circling each other in that ring. And it all came back, the room we had together, those fishing trips. Do you remember?”
The words struggle past his tongue, clumsy and ill-fitting, all of them coming out wrong. Naito knows he’s grasping at nothing. He doesn’t know what else to say, so he just leaves them hanging there. It strikes him how desperate he feels, how frustrated, not knowing how to make Okada understand.
There is a moment’s pause.
“I remember sometimes it got so messy, we had to sleep on your bed.” Okada says carefully, and he’s looking at Naito, eyes wide and unreadable.
Naito starts to speak, just to fill the silence, but his opponent cuts across him.
“You want to know something? When I stepped into that ring, I felt...”
He starts to unwind his wrist tape, frowning.
“It was this… unreal feeling. The sound of the crowd, and seeing you there—it felt different, this time. For a moment I wasn’t myself, but it was strange, because I felt more myself than I’d ever been this entire tournament.”
He smiles.
“Naito-san, forgive me. I’m not brilliant with words.”
2008. The brilliance of a late spring morning, Fuji-san barely visible through the clearing mist. They were at the apex of a long, sweeping road, with tall grass and barley fields on either side.
“Have they managed to get your excursion sorted out?”
Okada huffs a laugh and hugs himself, staring off into the fields.
“Yeah, I think so. They’re sending me to… I’m not sure what it’s called… Total Nonstop Action?” His tongue jumbles up the words, but Naito just smiles.
There's a moments pause. A light breeze sweeps through the fields. In the air, the distant rumble of a shinkansen.
“When you come back, you’ll be coming after my spot.” A tinge of bitterness creeps into Naito's voice. He hopes Okada won’t notice.
“What makes you say that?”
Naito sighs.
“Look. I hear what they say about you. That you’re going to be our next ace, our next Tanahashi. They say you’re a prodigy.”
This time he keeps his voice steady, devoid of feeling.
Looking uncertain, Okada tugs a hand through his hair (still black, not yet blond) and says, “hm.”
They used to do this a lot together. In the brief pockets of time between Dojo training sessions, the two of them rode Naito’s bike to go fishing together, or took Taichi’s dusty old car for joyrides. He loved those Sunday mornings. They were so naïve back then.
Even before Okada went on excursion, he was being thrown into matches with big names, former main event stars. The higher-ups liked him; he just had this undeniable aura about him. The real Okada that Naito knew, Kazu, as he’d heard Taichi call him, was modest and self-deprecating. But once he stepped foot into the ring he became entirely different, and the square seemed to contract around him by the pull of his sheer presence. Naito watched him grow up in front of his eyes: from the lanky teenager fresh out of Último Dragón’s Dojo, to a strong, muscular, yet-to-be star. He looked like he belonged in a dazzling coat, balancing on the ring ropes, head and shoulders above everyone else. He just looked invincible.
Then came the years of disappointment, of failure. The crowd had Tanahashi, who was still in his prime, radiant and strong as he’d ever been. They had no reason to need the Stardust Genius. The inevitable happened: Okada soared past Naito, and it almost hurt more than the crowd’s rejection. Because they loved him: they lost their minds for the coin drop, for the brilliant, irreverent champion who ended each night with a promise to make New Japan greater than ever before. Okada had their awe, their fanaticism; Naito had their indifference. At some point he begins to resent him, but even then there was a tinge of lingering affection, like his old friend had thought himself too good and moved on.
In the early years of his reign Okada became someone he didn’t recognise anymore. Gone was the sweet, impish kid, replaced by the boy-king version of him Naito had always predicted, though in his coal black eyes he wore a permanent expression of not scorn, but indifference. When Naito came back from Mexico the thread connecting them was almost broken, they were so different now. He became ungovernable, shielding himself with a feigned apathy. Outside the ring his movements were deliberately slow and laborious, and once or twice he saw Okada looking at him quizzically, when he thought nobody else could see. Naito found a secret pride in that.
Look at me now, he wanted to say to him. I’m better than you. Their entire rivalry was premised on that.
They had stood face to face on a hundred nights in a hundred rings. In the beginning they met in all manner of cramped basement venues and prefectural gymnasiums, and as the years went by it became Osaka-jo hall, Ryogoku, Korakuen, and then the Tokyo Dome.
Or maybe even that was wrong. Maybe it had been the Dome first, and they’d done it all backwards.
He remembers those first nights spent wrestling in dingy Mexican rings, exhausting a worn, bruised body, while back home Okada dominated the title scene, inhabiting his stardom with an ease Naito never possessed. He was on the verge of destiny; Okada was already living his. In Mexico he made up his mind: if he wasn’t going to beat Okada with the Stardust Press, he would with the Destino. If not as the Stardust Genius, then as El Ingobernable.
Yes, it’s clear now, they’ve done everything backwards. They loved each other first, and grew to hate each other.
Back to the present: Naito has won.
He has spent the last 5 years on the verge of destiny, and now he has put all these poisonous ghosts to rest.
It’s his story, after all.
(When wrestling Okada, he had the absurd feeling that if the world ended right then it would have been perfect. Coming close enough to something only to touch it. The crowds singing his name like a prayer.)
And the way Okada is looking at him now, Naito realises with a pang, is the same way he used to look at him 15 years ago. That curious, deciphering gaze, a brightness and youth that age can't erase. He used to look at Naito like that all the time, as they lay on the floor of the Dojo, or crouched with their hands in the creek behind the train station. They used to sit at the edge of their beds and kick at the soda cans on the floor and talk about the future. They used to do a lot of things together. That life, that version of them, is one of the many things Naito has lost in the mire of time. He is overcome by a dizzying wave of loss.
And a surge of nostalgia purer than anything; nostalgia for a past that doesn’t belong to him, not really. It was a filthy, cramped room, soda bottles and clothes strewn everywhere
it was doing laundry,
it was Dragon Quest,
it was black trunks
it was fishing trips made on the back of his old bike
it was the nights spent lying in bed talking into the air, to each other, to feel less alone.
Those years he would never get back, before he was Ingobernable, the kid he was back then.
Outside, the summer afternoon is in full bloom. All things draped in green and gold, offering up some warm, tipsy mystery. Already the heat of the match is dissipating from the air and rising, becoming lighter. All of it—the sweat, the spit, the hate—is becoming air. It stuns him that he can so clearly see the years that have passed written on Okada’s face, those lines in his forehead that weren’t always there. It stuns him that he knows, without thinking, that Okada sees the same in him.
I've missed you, were the words he meant to say, but it all feels too real, too vulnerable. Maybe he will spend the rest of his life swallowing these words. Maybe they will always be hiding from each other.
Where were you? He hears himself say instead. These past years of black coffee, the cynicism of adult life, waiting for scattered moments of greatness.
(And oh my god, we were young together once. It was so long ago now. I've missed you, though. I still miss you.)
Okada wipes away the sweat and tears, and says, Naito-san, I’ve always been here.