Part Three: Death in Black Trunks: Yuki Ishikawa and Transience in Asian Art.
he Japanese believe that after death a spirit is angry and impure. Many rituals are performed for seven years to purify and pacify the soul. In this way the person becomes a spirit. According to belief, a spirit wanders between the land of the living and the world of shadows. For this reason, prayers are offered to insure passage to the Land of the Dead.” (7)
So many of these matches begin with the house lights going completely dark and a single spot light focusing on the wrestlers as they make their way down the aisle into the ring. The symbolism here is multifaceted and obvious. Every time Ishikawa walks to the ring, he is being reborn, moving from the Land of the Dead into the corporeal world. Coming down a darkened tunnel and into light, screaming, and violence, Yuki and his opponent kill one another, like the samurai in the poem above, so they may be reborn together. Through the catharsis this provides, the audience assuages the pain of their own mortality and tastes a temporary bit of eternity.
Ito submitted, as do we all in the end. Comforting, that.
Since the body is temporary but the soul is not, what might happen to poor Ito after Ishikawa has shown him the futility of cherishing a mortal life?
“If the soul of the dead is not purified,” Rubin explains, “it can return to the land of the living in the guise of a ghost. Also, if a dead person is not delivered, through prayer, from personal emotions such as jealousy, envy or anger, the spirit can return in a ghostly guise.” (8) All cultures have representations of these sorts of malevolent ghosts and spirits and Japan is no different. Some of the most evocative and scary of them come from the 19th century, during Japan’s Edo period, and a series called “One Hundred Stories” by Katsuhika Hokusai.
Art historian Sara Sumpter’s prizewinning essay on one of the pieces says that “the Edo period of Japan (1600–1868) was characterized by a cultural shift. It emerged as a peaceful period in the nation’s history, after four centuries oaked in the blood of civil wars. That peace was not without a price, however, for in order to obtain safety the Tokugawa shoguns enforced strict laws regarding expression, ownership, and behavior. As a result, the peace of this era could not protect it from eventual disintegration, and in this period of repression and restrictions, the ghost story—hyaku monogatari—and the subsequent images based on the most popular of those stories would emerge.” (9)
These images didn’t arise sui generis, their themes, like the themes of Ishikawa, had precedence in art that came before them. “Vengeful spirits became the central theme in the Kabuki theater at the end of the 18th century. Murder was presented on the stage in all its gory details, and female ghosts were distinctly portrayed.” (10) For more on female ghosts, see our upcoming article about malevolent female spirits in Japan and their never-ending battle with Meiko Satomura.
“The scenes of crime and bloodshed presented were shocking and intended to arouse suspense and fear. Surprisingly, these plays were quite popular, and print artists reproduced many scenes of these Kabuki productions.”(11) One of these printmakers was Katsuhiko Hokusai.
Katsuhiko Hokusai, The Ghost of Kohada Koheiki c.1831, from the Clarence Buckingham collection.
Katsuhiko Hokusai, The Ghost of Kohada Koheiki c.1831, from the Clarence Buckingham collection.
Reading Sumpter’s lovely and loving description of the representation of the sometimes gruesome nature of temporary mortality, it is impossible for me not to see parallels to the similarly grotesque art created by Ishikawa.
“Hokusai’s image of the ghostly revenant come for retribution borders on the monstrous…In the image, Kohada Koheiji is seen peering in through the curtains of a mosquito net, presumably at his assassins who sleep under its cover. His hands, skeletal and clawlike, inch the netting open to reveal his face—little more than bone and sinew.”(12) Ishikawa as an old man (in his current body, anyway) has knobby and gnarled hands, arthritic products of those bones smashing against the skulls ofdozens of men. Sumpter lavishly continues, saying, “around his neck are the remnants of his earthly attire, and upon his head are random strands of his now decaying hair Koheiji grins with the grim delight of a skeleton at his murderers.” (13) Ishikawa in his later years is also bald and takes grim delight, sometimes with a cruel smile, at tormenting his would-be killers. “The scene is colorful but still dark, with the central figure of Kohada Koheiji shrouded and enclosed by a deep blue-blackness. Koheiji seems to glow with the passion of his vengeance.” (14)
A deep blue blackness fades away as Ishikawa’s match vs. George Terzis begins. Yuki immediately begins his themes of transience and the agony of mortality; if one submission does not work it is abandoned, it is temporary, it is forgotten and left behind in search of another. His holds flow like the years, smooth, steady, inevitable, occasionally forgettable, occasionally astonishing, piling up until our eventually surrender.
This match took place in North America which separates it from Ishikawa’s prior battles, which took place in Japan. North American audiences are raucous and vocally demonstrative; the kids watching live make their presence felt with supportive shouts and screams for the visiting master Yuki. For the most part, Japanese audiences in general and shootstyle fans specifically choose silence and respectful clapping to show their appreciation. This leads to the Ishikawa matches in Japan feeling like particularly dangerous performances with artistic and physical consequences, and the North American matches feel like community sporting events with a tiny bit of choreography thrown in to keep everybody just safe enough.
“Just safe enough” for Ishikawa is “far too ferocious” for anybody else; ina particularly thrilling sequence early in the bout he transitions from side control into the mount, blasts a few right hands into George’s face, thenrolls to his back, ripping an armbar.
There is no permanent control in this match, the student has greater athletic ability but the teacher is just wily enough to stay out of harm’s way. This is not for wrestling fans who need clearly delineated structure, “the middle act” is somewhat hard to follow as they struggle to establish dominance and end up trading holds. The holds themselves are as frightening and beautiful as a Hokusai print, however, and are aesthetically pleasurable and appear authentically painful.
Eventually the older man begins to tire and Terzis gains ground. While he contains and hurts him on the ground with stretches and twists, the student can’t make the teacher quit. So he gets to his feet and starts pummeling Ishikawa with kicks, open hand slaps, and a couple of concussive headbutts. Victory over the legendary Ishikawa, in his own newly founded dojo, would be a small taste of immortality for Terzis but the master shames him for his hubris, ducking away from a strike, rolling for a leg, and tearing at it until Terzis submits, screaming and smashing the mat in agony and the video fades to black.
The Ring Walk
By Simen Oem
In the seventh chapter of The Book of Lie Zi, by Chinese ethical egoist philosopher Yang Zhu, relates this story. "Meng sun-yang [the student] asked Yang Chu [the master], “suppose that a man values his life and takes care of his body; may he hope by such means to live forever?'
“It is impossible to live forever.”
“May he hope to prolong his life?”
“It is impossible to prolong life. Valuing life cannot preserve it; taking care of the body cannot do it good.” (19)
It is this Ishikawa that walks to the ring to face his young student, Sansyu, in a teacher/pupil encounter similar to the one described above. The master’s hair is graying and his knees knobby and arthritic. He has well learned here that taking care of one’s body is futile, here he is putting it, yet again, at grave risk. No epiphany will be gained without reckless disregard for this world, which is transient anyway and therefore of little enduring value.
“Besides,” the Book of Lie Ji continues, with the master asking, “what is the point of prolonging life? Our passions, our likes and dislikes, are the same now as they were of old. The safety and danger of our four limbs, the joy and bitterness of worldly affairs, changes of fortune, good government and discord, are the same now as they were of old. We have heard it already, seen it already, experienced it already. Even a hundred years is enough to satiate us; could we endure the bitterness of still longer life?” (20)
Sansyu is not yet bitter. Sansyu is still hoping for a full, rewarding, and lengthy life. Sansyu is about to be taught a lesson.
Green and red and sky blue lights spin around the arena. The painterly sense colors and visual movement continues to be a theme through these encounters, these wrestling-based depictions of death and impermanence. Both men are fit and toned, Sansyu’s trunks are glow likeneon bar sign under the hot lights of the ring. Ishikawa, of course, wears nothing but the most simple and symbolic black.
This is my first time seeing Ishikawa after a long layoff of many years of traveling the spirit world and tormenting the ghost of Ikeda. Old man Ishikawa could be awe inspiring, but then again mot everybody ages like Fujiwara or Matisse or Kurosawa, so he could just be old and suffering from chronic traumatic encephalopathy.
As the master Ishikawa locks up with his student, master Yeng Chu continues his admonition. “While you are alive, resign yourself and let life run its course; satisfy your desires and wait for death. When it is time to die, resign yourself and let death run its course; go right to your destruction, which is extinction. Be resigned to everything, let everything run its course; why need you delay it or speed it on its way?” (21)
Sansyu looks to be speeding Ishikawa on towards another cycle of death and rebirth; this may be time for the student to suprass the teacher so the tradition may continue, Ishikawa is too wily, too experienced, he sneaks an armbar onto his student and makes him quit.
The ethereal world of the spirits, demons and ghosts is “saturated with colour, populated by deities who have many extraordinary, indeed supernatural powers and is full of religious symbolism,” according to artist and critic Ananya Vajpeyi. It is easy to place Ishikawa among those deities; his supernatural-seeming power and inhuman toughness only add to the feeling he conjures. He feels…inevitable. If he did not exist, men would’ve had to create him.
Ms. Vajpeyi describes the art of another Japanese artist, the minimal, stunning, and profound work of Tomoyo Ihaya. (15) “Each of Tomoyo’s little canvases tells a story, with the self-immolating individual as the protagonist of that story. Certain symbols and metaphors recur in all her works, including a white tent on a mountain, green saplings, blue lotuses, red flower petals or drops of blood, water bodies of all kinds, principally lakes and rivers, clouds, candles, trees, animals, birds and of course human figures, mostly in white.” (16)
Better analysts of ring-work than I can take up the consistent themes in Yuki Ishikawa’s work. Certainly survival and mental endurance are among them. Manipulation and restructuring of the body for pain, and the release of such machinations for pleasure, are recurrent. Master vs Pupil stories are common and fertile ground for this sort of brutal and masculine storytelling.
Vajpeyi writes with heartbreaking elegance, “Gentle rainfall, cottony clouds, cooling waters, flocks of doves, and carpets of flower-petals, sometimes other-worldly blue lotuses, provide a small measure of comfort to soften the unbearable agony of those who are on the verge of departing this life forever.”(17)
Soft red and pink circles for Takeshi Ono accompany him on his walk to the ring for his brutal match against Ishikawa. Yuki comes out to swirling pastel purples and greys. The entrances are tender and soothing, in stark contrast to the stress and pain about to be experienced in the ring. Yuki takes him down immediately and tries to choke the life out of him. Some hot matwork follows and the struggle has been established.
Ono is as skinny as a skeleton. Ishikawa is not a physically imposing guy either but he carries an aura of menace about him that is equal to anybody’s in wrestling.
Once Ishikawa starts ripping to the body with kicks and begins going to work dismantling Ono, the end is inevitable. He curls up in what is commonly known as the fetal position, but this is something of a misnomer; we often die that way, too. In many of Tomoyo’s paintings, the martyrs, given the strength and comfort to make such an awe-inspiring sacrifices by the knowledge that life is transient and impermanent, return to the position of their birth as they make their journey into death.
“Tomoyo’s dying bodies linger for an instant, painfully, at the line between this world and the next. Those whom we see, living or dying, are in the process of taking their leave, parting never to meet again.” (18)
After a scary 15 seconds where Ono struggles in vain to avoid being deadlifted, Ishikawa gets him up and German Suplexes him on his neck and shoulders and that leads to the finish, whatever it was; I have learned it does not matter because nothing is ever, ever the end.
Beauty persists in the face of death; that alone is important.
So many of these matches begin with the house lights going completely dark and a single spot light focusing on the wrestlers as they make their way down the aisle into the ring. The symbolism here is multifaceted and obvious. Every time Ishikawa walks to the ring, he is being reborn, moving from the Land of the Dead into the corporeal world. Coming down a darkened tunnel and into light, screaming, and violence, Yuki and his opponent kill one another, like the samurai in the poem above, so they may be reborn together. Through the catharsis this provides, the audience assuages the pain of their own mortality and tastes a temporary bit of eternity.
Ito submitted, as do we all in the end. Comforting, that.
Since the body is temporary but the soul is not, what might happen to poor Ito after Ishikawa has shown him the futility of cherishing a mortal life?
“If the soul of the dead is not purified,” Rubin explains, “it can return to the land of the living in the guise of a ghost. Also, if a dead person is not delivered, through prayer, from personal emotions such as jealousy, envy or anger, the spirit can return in a ghostly guise.” (8) All cultures have representations of these sorts of malevolent ghosts and spirits and Japan is no different. Some of the most evocative and scary of them come from the 19th century, during Japan’s Edo period, and a series called “One Hundred Stories” by Katsuhika Hokusai.
Art historian Sara Sumpter’s prizewinning essay on one of the pieces says that “the Edo period of Japan (1600–1868) was characterized by a cultural shift. It emerged as a peaceful period in the nation’s history, after four centuries oaked in the blood of civil wars. That peace was not without a price, however, for in order to obtain safety the Tokugawa shoguns enforced strict laws regarding expression, ownership, and behavior. As a result, the peace of this era could not protect it from eventual disintegration, and in this period of repression and restrictions, the ghost story—hyaku monogatari—and the subsequent images based on the most popular of those stories would emerge.” (9)
These images didn’t arise sui generis, their themes, like the themes of Ishikawa, had precedence in art that came before them. “Vengeful spirits became the central theme in the Kabuki theater at the end of the 18th century. Murder was presented on the stage in all its gory details, and female ghosts were distinctly portrayed.” (10) For more on female ghosts, see our upcoming article about malevolent female spirits in Japan and their never-ending battle with Meiko Satomura.
“The scenes of crime and bloodshed presented were shocking and intended to arouse suspense and fear. Surprisingly, these plays were quite popular, and print artists reproduced many scenes of these Kabuki productions.”(11) One of these printmakers was Katsuhiko Hokusai.
Katsuhiko Hokusai, The Ghost of Kohada Koheiki c.1831, from the Clarence Buckingham collection.
Katsuhiko Hokusai, The Ghost of Kohada Koheiki c.1831, from the Clarence Buckingham collection.
Reading Sumpter’s lovely and loving description of the representation of the sometimes gruesome nature of temporary mortality, it is impossible for me not to see parallels to the similarly grotesque art created by Ishikawa.
“Hokusai’s image of the ghostly revenant come for retribution borders on the monstrous…In the image, Kohada Koheiji is seen peering in through the curtains of a mosquito net, presumably at his assassins who sleep under its cover. His hands, skeletal and clawlike, inch the netting open to reveal his face—little more than bone and sinew.”(12) Ishikawa as an old man (in his current body, anyway) has knobby and gnarled hands, arthritic products of those bones smashing against the skulls ofdozens of men. Sumpter lavishly continues, saying, “around his neck are the remnants of his earthly attire, and upon his head are random strands of his now decaying hair Koheiji grins with the grim delight of a skeleton at his murderers.” (13) Ishikawa in his later years is also bald and takes grim delight, sometimes with a cruel smile, at tormenting his would-be killers. “The scene is colorful but still dark, with the central figure of Kohada Koheiji shrouded and enclosed by a deep blue-blackness. Koheiji seems to glow with the passion of his vengeance.” (14)
A deep blue blackness fades away as Ishikawa’s match vs. George Terzis begins. Yuki immediately begins his themes of transience and the agony of mortality; if one submission does not work it is abandoned, it is temporary, it is forgotten and left behind in search of another. His holds flow like the years, smooth, steady, inevitable, occasionally forgettable, occasionally astonishing, piling up until our eventually surrender.
This match took place in North America which separates it from Ishikawa’s prior battles, which took place in Japan. North American audiences are raucous and vocally demonstrative; the kids watching live make their presence felt with supportive shouts and screams for the visiting master Yuki. For the most part, Japanese audiences in general and shootstyle fans specifically choose silence and respectful clapping to show their appreciation. This leads to the Ishikawa matches in Japan feeling like particularly dangerous performances with artistic and physical consequences, and the North American matches feel like community sporting events with a tiny bit of choreography thrown in to keep everybody just safe enough.
“Just safe enough” for Ishikawa is “far too ferocious” for anybody else; ina particularly thrilling sequence early in the bout he transitions from side control into the mount, blasts a few right hands into George’s face, thenrolls to his back, ripping an armbar.
There is no permanent control in this match, the student has greater athletic ability but the teacher is just wily enough to stay out of harm’s way. This is not for wrestling fans who need clearly delineated structure, “the middle act” is somewhat hard to follow as they struggle to establish dominance and end up trading holds. The holds themselves are as frightening and beautiful as a Hokusai print, however, and are aesthetically pleasurable and appear authentically painful.
Eventually the older man begins to tire and Terzis gains ground. While he contains and hurts him on the ground with stretches and twists, the student can’t make the teacher quit. So he gets to his feet and starts pummeling Ishikawa with kicks, open hand slaps, and a couple of concussive headbutts. Victory over the legendary Ishikawa, in his own newly founded dojo, would be a small taste of immortality for Terzis but the master shames him for his hubris, ducking away from a strike, rolling for a leg, and tearing at it until Terzis submits, screaming and smashing the mat in agony and the video fades to black.
The Ring Walk
By Simen Oem
In the seventh chapter of The Book of Lie Zi, by Chinese ethical egoist philosopher Yang Zhu, relates this story. "Meng sun-yang [the student] asked Yang Chu [the master], “suppose that a man values his life and takes care of his body; may he hope by such means to live forever?'
“It is impossible to live forever.”
“May he hope to prolong his life?”
“It is impossible to prolong life. Valuing life cannot preserve it; taking care of the body cannot do it good.” (19)
It is this Ishikawa that walks to the ring to face his young student, Sansyu, in a teacher/pupil encounter similar to the one described above. The master’s hair is graying and his knees knobby and arthritic. He has well learned here that taking care of one’s body is futile, here he is putting it, yet again, at grave risk. No epiphany will be gained without reckless disregard for this world, which is transient anyway and therefore of little enduring value.
“Besides,” the Book of Lie Ji continues, with the master asking, “what is the point of prolonging life? Our passions, our likes and dislikes, are the same now as they were of old. The safety and danger of our four limbs, the joy and bitterness of worldly affairs, changes of fortune, good government and discord, are the same now as they were of old. We have heard it already, seen it already, experienced it already. Even a hundred years is enough to satiate us; could we endure the bitterness of still longer life?” (20)
Sansyu is not yet bitter. Sansyu is still hoping for a full, rewarding, and lengthy life. Sansyu is about to be taught a lesson.
Green and red and sky blue lights spin around the arena. The painterly sense colors and visual movement continues to be a theme through these encounters, these wrestling-based depictions of death and impermanence. Both men are fit and toned, Sansyu’s trunks are glow likeneon bar sign under the hot lights of the ring. Ishikawa, of course, wears nothing but the most simple and symbolic black.
This is my first time seeing Ishikawa after a long layoff of many years of traveling the spirit world and tormenting the ghost of Ikeda. Old man Ishikawa could be awe inspiring, but then again mot everybody ages like Fujiwara or Matisse or Kurosawa, so he could just be old and suffering from chronic traumatic encephalopathy.
As the master Ishikawa locks up with his student, master Yeng Chu continues his admonition. “While you are alive, resign yourself and let life run its course; satisfy your desires and wait for death. When it is time to die, resign yourself and let death run its course; go right to your destruction, which is extinction. Be resigned to everything, let everything run its course; why need you delay it or speed it on its way?” (21)
Sansyu looks to be speeding Ishikawa on towards another cycle of death and rebirth; this may be time for the student to suprass the teacher so the tradition may continue, Ishikawa is too wily, too experienced, he sneaks an armbar onto his student and makes him quit.
The ethereal world of the spirits, demons and ghosts is “saturated with colour, populated by deities who have many extraordinary, indeed supernatural powers and is full of religious symbolism,” according to artist and critic Ananya Vajpeyi. It is easy to place Ishikawa among those deities; his supernatural-seeming power and inhuman toughness only add to the feeling he conjures. He feels…inevitable. If he did not exist, men would’ve had to create him.
Ms. Vajpeyi describes the art of another Japanese artist, the minimal, stunning, and profound work of Tomoyo Ihaya. (15) “Each of Tomoyo’s little canvases tells a story, with the self-immolating individual as the protagonist of that story. Certain symbols and metaphors recur in all her works, including a white tent on a mountain, green saplings, blue lotuses, red flower petals or drops of blood, water bodies of all kinds, principally lakes and rivers, clouds, candles, trees, animals, birds and of course human figures, mostly in white.” (16)
Better analysts of ring-work than I can take up the consistent themes in Yuki Ishikawa’s work. Certainly survival and mental endurance are among them. Manipulation and restructuring of the body for pain, and the release of such machinations for pleasure, are recurrent. Master vs Pupil stories are common and fertile ground for this sort of brutal and masculine storytelling.
Vajpeyi writes with heartbreaking elegance, “Gentle rainfall, cottony clouds, cooling waters, flocks of doves, and carpets of flower-petals, sometimes other-worldly blue lotuses, provide a small measure of comfort to soften the unbearable agony of those who are on the verge of departing this life forever.”(17)
Soft red and pink circles for Takeshi Ono accompany him on his walk to the ring for his brutal match against Ishikawa. Yuki comes out to swirling pastel purples and greys. The entrances are tender and soothing, in stark contrast to the stress and pain about to be experienced in the ring. Yuki takes him down immediately and tries to choke the life out of him. Some hot matwork follows and the struggle has been established.
Ono is as skinny as a skeleton. Ishikawa is not a physically imposing guy either but he carries an aura of menace about him that is equal to anybody’s in wrestling.
Once Ishikawa starts ripping to the body with kicks and begins going to work dismantling Ono, the end is inevitable. He curls up in what is commonly known as the fetal position, but this is something of a misnomer; we often die that way, too. In many of Tomoyo’s paintings, the martyrs, given the strength and comfort to make such an awe-inspiring sacrifices by the knowledge that life is transient and impermanent, return to the position of their birth as they make their journey into death.
“Tomoyo’s dying bodies linger for an instant, painfully, at the line between this world and the next. Those whom we see, living or dying, are in the process of taking their leave, parting never to meet again.” (18)
After a scary 15 seconds where Ono struggles in vain to avoid being deadlifted, Ishikawa gets him up and German Suplexes him on his neck and shoulders and that leads to the finish, whatever it was; I have learned it does not matter because nothing is ever, ever the end.
Beauty persists in the face of death; that alone is important.
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