A Lonely Resurrection

you don’t know how to hit someone without it. Even Mike Tyson once broke a hand when he hit another fighter barehanded in a late night brawl. In a real fight, if you break your hand, you probably just lost the fight. If you were fighting for your life, you probably just lost that, too.
    And no
judogi.
That was also interesting, especially in tradition-loving Japan. Purists will tell you that training with the
judogi
is more realistic than without, because after all, people rarely fight naked. But modern attire—a tee shirt, for example—is often more like naked than it is like the reinforced, belted
gi.
Training exclusively in the
gi,
therefore, while traditional, is not necessarily the height of realism.
    All signs that these were serious people.
    “You can change in the locker room,” the salt-and-pepper guy told me. “Warm up and you can do some
randori.
We’ll see why Ishihara-san thought this would be a good place for you.”
    I nodded and headed to the locker room. It was a dank space with a floor of dirty gray carpet. Its half-dozen battered metal lockers were positioned on either side of a solid-looking exterior door, secured with a combination lock. I changed into cotton judo pants and a tee shirt, leaving the judo jacket in the bag. Best to blend.
    I returned to the main room and stretched. No one seemed to take particular notice of me—except for the dark-complected guy, who watched while I warmed up.
    After about fifteen minutes he walked over to me.
“Randori?”
he asked, in a tone that was more a challenge than an invitation.
    I nodded, averting my eyes from his hard stare. In my mind, our contest was already underway, and I prefer my opponents to underestimate me.
    I followed him to the center of the mat, slightly meek, slightly intimidated.
    We circled around each other, each looking for an opening. In my peripheral vision I saw that the other men had paused in their workouts and were watching.
    I snagged his right arm with my left and dropped under it for a duck-under, a simple and effective entry from my high school wrestling days in America. But he was quick: he dropped his arm, crouched, and cut clockwise, away from my entry. I immediately switched my attack to his left side, but he parried nicely there as well. No problem. I was feinting, feeling for his defenses, not yet showing him what I could do.
    I withdrew from attack mode and started to straighten. As I did so, I saw his hips swivel in, caught a blur off the right side of my head. Left hook.
Whoa.
I shot my right hand into the gap and ducked my head forward. The blow snapped across the back of my head, then instantly retracted.
    I took a quick step back. “Are we doing
randori,
or boxing?” I looked more concerned than I actually was. I’ve done some boxing. Not all of it with gloves.
    “This is the way we do
randori
around here,” he answered, sneering.
    “With no rules?” I asked, mock-concerned. “I’m not sure I like that.”
    “You don’t like it, don’t train here,
judoyaro,”
he said, someone laughed.
    I looked around as though unsure of myself, but it was really just a routine check of my surroundings. Adrenaline causes tunnel vision. Experience and a desire to survive ameliorate it. The faces around the tatami radiated amusement, not danger.
    “I’m not really used to this kind of thing,” I said.
    “Then get off the fucking tatami,” he spat.
    I looked around again. It didn’t feel like a setup. If it were, they wouldn’t have been dancing with me one at a time.
    “Okay,” I said, scowling to look like a soft guy trying to look like a hard guy. Playing the victim of idiot pride. “We’ll do it your way.”
    We squared off again. I logged his feints. He liked to lead with his right foot. His timing was regular—a weakness for which his quickness had probably always compensated.
    He liked low kicks. Right foot forward plant, left roundhouse kick, return to defensive stance. I took two such shots to my right thigh. They stung. They didn’t matter.
    The right foot came forward again. When it was a few millimeters above the tatami and he was fully committed to planting it, I shot straight in, my right hand hooking his neck from behind, my left hand darting in just behind his right ankle. I used his neck to support my weight, dragging his head down and ruining his balance. I drove through him, my elbow leading the way at his chest. His ankle was blocked and his body had nowhere to go but backward to