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20 C H A P T E R 2 Respect I used to think, “That poor guy is getting dirty lickings, over there.” ’Cause he was big, but he was soft-hearted and he wasn’t really like, one fighta. We used to wrestle and I could put him down, and I was way smaller than him. So I used to think, “Ho, those guys must be busting him up.” And guarantee he was homesick something bad, because he was always stuck to his mom, ah? And he would be thinking about Waiāhole and Waikāne and just cry. —Shane Picanco of Waiāhole, November 28, 2007 The deep roar from the back room was so loud, angry, and sudden that it caused Percy to jump straight to his feet to see what it was that the sekitori wanted this time. Akebono may have been from Waimānalo, but you wouldn’t know it. He acted more Japanese than local: practice, eat, sleep. And if he did go out, he would take Troy and John, who spent most of his free time in front of the TV laughing along at some comedy in perfect understanding. Mean moods, the sekitori had. You would think he would have remembered what it was like to come straight from Hawai‘i, and offer a little help, but no. I guess, Percy thought, that’s how he was treated, and he came strong, so that’s how he going treat me. The sekitori. That was the difference right there, the sumo ranking sheet in real life. The banzuke—the ranking sheet—they all talked about it like Percy’s father talked about the Bible. It looked like some kind of ancient Japanese eye chart. The names of all eight-hundred-odd sumōtori were painted on it in thick black brushstrokes at the top, down to hairwidth squiggles at the bottom. Troy had had a far-off look in his eyes when he’d pointed to the top two divisions, painted headline bold. Those 21 Respect ranked in the top makunouchi division and those ranked just below in jūryō were called sekitori, which translates into “takers of the barrier”—a term that Troy had Percy take to mean that they had, in all senses of the word, made it. The sekitori were the princes; those below them were the slaves. Sekitori took home between eight and twenty grand a month, and they had fan clubs showering them with gifts that could easily triple that amount. If a sekitori shouted, a lower-ranker jumped. Percy would learn that less than 5 percent of all the men ever to put on a mawashi ever became sekitori. In the tournaments, they fought for fifteen days instead of seven. With rooms of their own or apartments outside the beya, sex came as easily as all the other gifts. As Percy had already seen, they were the last to wake up every morning, the first to bathe after practice, the first to eat every meal. When they walked into a room, everyone fell all over themselves bowing and greeting them with a shout: Osssh! That was it: above all else, they got respect. Percy followed the roar to the back room, where he slid the shoji door open as gently as he could and found the sekitori, all six-eight of him, lying on his stomach, resting on his elbows, his face locked on the TV. Percy had to wonder: would this be the humble, soft-spoken, and extremely generous giant, eager to talk story? Or would it be the brooding , moody monster? Percy entered the room quietly, saying, “Osssh!” The sekitori ignored him, so he waited. He wondered how anyone could be so interested in the yelling voices coming from the TV, where he could see a panel of Japanese celebrities laughing at some joke Percy had no hope of understanding. Though the guy’s bulk took up much of the room, Percy, who shared a big tatami-mat room with fifteen other guys, envied him his privacy. His thoughts drifted again to the idea that Akebono had also started down at the bottom only four years earlier, and now here he was. Percy had watched the sekitori toy with John or Troy, both of whom could easily toy with Percy in the same way, approaching every bout like it was a foregone conclusion. Of course, he’d seen the sekitori on TV, the best in what...

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