Translation: Darkness 02 (Detective / Salaryman Arc)

2026/03/04 wed
闇02章：翻訳Cloud

Translation: Darkness 02 (Detective / Salaryman Arc)

Iwakami Tomoichirō, Ages 19–20

I was nineteen years old. I'd quit the Self-Defense Force and returned to my hometown of Kawagoe — unemployed.

Yamaguchi Yuzai, the gas station where I'd worked part-time in high school. For the time being, I went back to my old stomping ground and started working there again.

"Hey bro, you're back at Yamaguchi Yuzai," said my brother Tetsuya, who worked at the same station. He looked a little pleased.

After leaving the Kutchan Garrison in Hokkaido and spending a week lying low to get back at my superiors, I'd had an encounter in those final few days with a woman named Yukari, who worked at a snack bar called Papilio.

Yukari was five years older than me — a slender, good-looking woman with sharp, almond-shaped eyes.

The reason I stayed in Hokkaido a whole week after quitting wasn't just about getting revenge on my superiors. A big part of it was that I simply didn't want to leave Yukari.

"Why don't you come to Kawagoe with me?"

On the last night before I headed home, we spent it together, and I said those words to her.

"Kawagoe is your hometown, not mine. If I followed you there, I wouldn't have a single friend. And besides — you just became unemployed, didn't you?"

I had nothing to say to that. No matter how much feeling I put into the words, the truth was I couldn't offer her anything at all.

I wanted to stay in Hokkaido longer and spend more time with Yukari, but I had a prior commitment that required me to go back.

A customer at Yamaguchi Yuzai named Tanaka Kimio — a truck driver about twenty years my senior — had always bought me canned coffee whenever he came in during my high school days. His mother had a heart condition, and my brother Tetsuya had contacted me: she needed a blood transfusion from a healthy Type B donor. I'd made the promise before I ever met Yukari, so I agreed readily, thinking I could at least be of some use. The surgery happened to fall exactly one week after I left the SDF.

The surgery went smoothly. Mr. Tanaka tried to hand me cash as a thank-you, but that wasn't why I'd done it, and I politely declined. A few days later, thirty thousand yen worth of gift vouchers arrived at the house from him.

Save up money, go back to Hokkaido, see Yukari again…

But a few months later, I found out that Yukari had quit Papilio. A colleague of hers told me she'd married a Self-Defense Force officer a year older than me. I fell apart. I quit the gas station too and spent every day drifting around with nothing to do.

No money, no job. Even a worthless man like that still gets hungry. I started cooking with the vegetables and meat in the kitchen, and my aunt Pī-chan flew into a furious rage: "Don't use other people's things without asking."

With no other option, I'd scrape together whatever small change I had and treat myself to the meat sauce at Jimmy Donuts — a coffee shop I'd known since kindergarten, a five-minute walk away. That was the greatest luxury I had in those days. Since around high school, when I'd learned to earn my own money through part-time work, I was going to Jimmy Donuts four or five times a week.

Things between me and my father grew worse by the day. He wanted me to go to university — and as if in direct defiance, I'd chosen the SDF over college. And not only that: the simple fact that I'd come home before finishing my first term of service meant that every time he caught sight of me, he'd snarl, "You half-assed little nobody." Underneath it all, I think what really rankled him was that I'd been secretly visiting our mother.

Even within the same house, the family divided into two kinds.

My grandfather, my brothers Tetsuya and Takahiko — these were family to me.

My father and Pī-chan — those two were less than strangers.

One day Takahiko took a mocking attitude toward me, his own older brother, so I hit him with a fist. From that day on, Takahiko seemed to hold me in silent contempt.

It was the most self-destructive I had ever been in my life up to that point.

Nothing was changing. I was disgusted with myself, yet I had no idea what to do about it.

I had nothing but time, so at night I'd ride my moped to my cousin Wa-chan's house in Minami-Otsuka. Wa-chan was two years older than me, and she'd been something of a big sister figure to me since we were young.

She'd grumble at me when I showed up starving again, but she always fed me something — I was forever in her debt. Around that time, a frequent visitor at her place was a classmate of hers named Bōzu. I thought it was a strange surname and asked about it. His real name was Hijikata Satoru — and since the characters for hi and kata written side by side resembled the character for bō, he'd been called Bōzu since his school days.

Bōzu's computer company had folded and he had nothing but free time, so he started coming to my place in addition to Wa-chan's. Of course, neither of us had work or money, so we'd pool our loose change to buy cigarettes, and on slightly better days we'd go to Jimmy Donuts and have the meat sauce.

Two young men in their early twenties — doing nothing but figuring out how to kill time each day, unable to become even a gear in society's machinery. Without guidance, I was nothing more than a freeloader.

Time just kept passing. Takahiko, watching how pathetic I'd become, started looking down on me. His insolent attitude irritated me, and I hit him frequently.

One day, as I was drifting around with nothing to do, my grandfather told me I should at least get a driver's license. He covered the cost, and I chose a driving school with a residential training program. I settled on Hamamatsu Driving School in Shizuoka Prefecture.

In a four-person dormitory room, I became friends with a man named Takao Akira, five years my senior, and we exchanged contact information. The intensive course included at least two hours of practical training every day. Since there was a lot of free time otherwise, we often gathered at a nearby coffee shop called Kokekokko.

I got my license without any trouble and came back to Kawagoe. I still had absolutely no idea what I wanted to do with my life.

I had to earn money before I could do anything.

Out of curiosity, and because I'd heard the pay was good, I joined Haraichi Detective Agency. That was the first move I made after getting my license.

Twenty-five thousand yen a month — and I was still a minor. The word detective sounded cool. The nineteen-year-old version of me was thoroughly, hopelessly stupid.

Once I actually started doing the work, I realized it was brutally unreasonable, physically grueling, and even life-threatening. The core of the job was stakeouts and tailing.

During training, I was taught how to run red lights on busy roads like Kanjō 7. I'd imagined some dramatic driving technique — but in the end it was nothing more than slowly turning left while watching for a gap, then swinging the car around. You just forced your way through a red light, banking on the oncoming car braking in panic.

The work was background investigations on behalf of clients — but since you had to begin staking out the subject before they even left the house, the working hours were staggering. Twenty-four-hour surveillance was standard. You'd come back to the office, get no time to sleep, and be sent straight out to the next job. That happened constantly.

At the worst of times, I tailed someone from Ikebukuro and didn't stop until I'd crossed Karuizawa and ended up in Komoro City.

"Background investigations" — in practice, that meant cheating investigations, almost without exception.

One night I was heading home after a shift that had started at four in the morning and finished past two the next day. Three motorcycles from what appeared to be a bōsōzoku gang were crawling slowly in front of me. I hit the horn. They moved to the side — but sleep deprivation had left me irritable, and I nudged over slightly to be a nuisance.

Stopped at a red light, the gang came up from behind honking their horns and blocked the front of the car with their bikes.

"Hey, what the hell was that?! Get out here, you!"

They started kicking the company car. I turned to the section chief sitting beside me and asked what we should do. He'd been caught driving recklessly on the job, had his license revoked, and now his only role was to ride in the passenger seat while I drove.

"What do you want to do about these guys?"

Without answering, he opened the door and started throwing punches at the gang. He was punching men wearing helmets. He shattered his own knuckles and was immediately pounded by two of them at once.

This guy's just an idiot. I thought. Can't be helped.

I opened my door and went to break it up. One of the gang members grabbed me by the collar.

"You, come here!" "Let go." "You picking a fight with us?!"

These guys act tough but have no idea how to actually fight…

I grabbed his wrist with my left hand and locked it in place. One twist with my right and the joint was immobilized without effort. The gang member screamed. I held his helmeted head with my left hand and drove my right elbow into him as hard as I could.

Three hits and he was wobbling. I forced his head down toward the pavement and dropped my right elbow onto his back. He lay face-down on the ground, twitching like a crushed frog.

Apparently the body that had been drilled without mercy in the Self-Defense Force had become something fundamentally different from an ordinary person's, in terms of raw strength and basic physical capability.

"Don't start fights when you're weak."

He still had his helmet on, so I kicked him in the head too. At that, the two who had been beating the section chief suddenly came over, frantically bowing and begging, "We're sorry! Please, enough!"

I ignored them and helped the section chief up. I got him into the car and started heading back to the driver's seat.

The gang kept apologizing. The man I'd put down was still flat on the ground.

"Don't pick fights when you can't win." "W-we're sorry!" "Stop traffic so I can pull out." "Yes, right away!"

Like gas station attendants, they stopped the passing cars and let us go.

"You alright, chief?"

Covered in blood, he stared downward in silence.

Back at the office, the staff took one look at me — spattered with blood — and shouted, "What on earth did you two get into?!" I explained, as earnestly as I could, that the section chief had been ambushed by a gang on the way back. The situation didn't escalate further.

"Right then, here's the file for the next client. Head to Adachi Ward."

Another all-nighter, straight to the next job. No overtime pay, no extra salary for any of it. Chronic sleep deprivation. Reckless pursuits that were writing off about three cars a month in accidents. For twenty-five thousand yen, this was simply not worth it.

On one of my rare days off, I was driving the family car around with no particular destination in mind when a car at the Shinjuku intersection on Route 16 in Kawagoe turned right without checking oncoming traffic and plowed straight into me. I wasn't wearing a seatbelt. I registered in an instant that there was no avoiding the collision — I gripped the steering wheel with both hands and braced my whole body for impact.

The force was tremendous. Even bracing as hard as I could, my head slammed into the steering wheel and bounced back. I was in real pain, but I was fully conscious. I got out of the car to find the bonnet crumpled in about halfway. The other car was in worse shape — the man in the passenger seat had gone through the windshield, his head hanging outside the car.

Passersby must have called an ambulance. Within about ten minutes we arrived at Mitsui Hospital, which was right in front of our family home.

Afterward came a police accident reconstruction, followed by negotiations between insurance companies on both sides. That was how the matter was resolved.

I took about ten days off from detective work as a precaution. But since I wasn't actually working, I was told I couldn't be paid. If it was an accident, the insurance company would cover lost income as compensation — that was the explanation I was given, as baffling as it was. When I asked what I was supposed to live on in the meantime, I was handed ten thousand yen and told, "If you're careful, that'll last you ten days."

After six months I'd seen enough. I quit Haraichi Detective Agency.

Word came through my brother Tetsuya from a man named Hirako — a former customer at Yamaguchi Yuzai — asking if I was free and whether I'd like to come work at his company.

Having only ever worked physical jobs — the SDF, detective work — I said, "I don't know anything and I'm not sure I'd be useful." But over a meal at a family restaurant, Hirako smiled and said, "I'll teach you everything you need to know, Iwakami-kun. You'll be fine."

I already knew that his company supplied pretty girls to places like Yamaguchi Yuzai under the name of "companions," so honestly I was just looking forward to meeting a lot of women.

The company was called 3S Company, Inc., an advertising agency.

I had no idea what I was getting into. When I was first shown the office, my surprise was immediate: the entire operation was being run out of a single apartment. President was a title in name only — in reality, Hirako ran the whole thing alone. And the only employee was me. A micro-company in the most literal sense.

"Iwakami-kun, how much were you making per hour at the gas station?" "Eight hundred yen." "Alright, I'll match that."

Hourly wages — for a salaried employee? I must have looked puzzled, because before I could say anything, he said: "It's about lunchtime. Come on, let's go eat," and off we went. He treated me to the daily lunch special at Denny's or Skylark every single day, so I thought, well, fine, and did as I was told.

As time went on, I began to notice just how chaotic this workplace was. For one thing, I was told: "Proposals need to be presented neatly on a word processor — you should buy one, Iwakami-kun." This was a word processor that cost over two hundred thousand yen at the time.

"Hirako-san, I don't have that kind of money." "What? Don't you have a credit card? You should get one. You can buy it easily on installments."

In my ignorance, I ended up buying a word processor on credit — for a job I hadn't even chosen.

"Iwakami-kun, your house is big — how many cars does your family have?"

About seven, counting the delivery vehicles, I told him. He asked whether they were all being used. I said the private cars only came out when someone was off and wanted to drive for personal use. "What a waste, having cars just sitting there," he said, and told me to use them for company business. When I refused, he said, "We'll cover the gas and other expenses," and eventually the family cars were being used for his work whether I liked it or not.

When my first paycheck came — around fifteen thousand yen — Hirako said, "Let's get drinks," and took me to a bar he knew. At the end of the night, he said with a grin: "Iwakami-kun's loaded tonight, right?" and genuinely made me, a nineteen-year-old, pay the entire bill.

It turned out he'd always known that my grandfather was a prominent figure — someone who had received an imperial decoration, and served as chairman of both the Traffic Safety Association and the Dry Cleaning Cooperative. He kept pressing me, repeatedly, to leverage those connections for the company.

"Hirako-san… I'm sorry, but I don't want to use connections for something like this." "You're hopeless, Iwakami-kun. Connections are there to be used."

Why on earth would I use those connections for this man? Day by day, a gnawing unease accumulated inside me.

When the company got busy, I was once made to work three consecutive all-nighters putting together proposals. It was in the middle of all this that I turned twenty.

After about six months I'd seen enough of this company too and quit.

Unemployed again — though around this time, forty thousand yen in settlement money from the car accident came in. I got carried away with the idea that I had spending money.

It happened to be the Kawagoe Festival, and while I was walking around town with an old friend from middle school, Osawa Fumihiro, we spotted two high school girls who looked like they had nothing to do. Osawa, always starving for female attention, started nagging: "Iwa-yan, let's go talk to those girls."

"If you want to go up to them, be my guest."

The moment I said it, Osawa sprinted over to them at lightning speed. He pointed back at me while talking to them, and then the three of them walked over together.

"What did you say to them?" "I pointed at you and said that guy really wants to walk around the festival with them — and they came." "Why did you use me as the excuse?" "Hey, the pickup worked, didn't it?"

The girl was a beauty — Suzuki Michiyo — and her friend, Chinatsu. We ended up walking around the festival together. Then suddenly Michiyo's face went pale. "I usually have a curfew of seven, but today they said nine since it's the festival — and I've gone past it," she said, in a state of near-panic.

I told her if she wanted to go home, she was free to. But it turned out she genuinely did have a strict household with a real curfew — she wasn't just making excuses. Watching her on the verge of tears right in front of me, I knew she was telling the truth.

An idea came to me, and I told her what I was thinking.

"Listen — I'm going to call your parents right now pretending to be a teacher from your school. I'll tell them I ran into you at the festival, treated you to some food from the stalls, and that's why you're late." "Are you serious?"

She was looking at me with desperate eyes. I wanted to do what I could for her.

We went back to my house, and I called Michiyo's home from the family phone.

I calmly laid out the story I'd constructed — and then her father said:

"I see, sensei. Our daughter parks her bicycle at the bus stop just past Kuginashi Bridge, near the Yamada Udon. She takes the bus to school from there."

"Yes…"

"We'll go pick her up at that bus stop. Could you bring her that far, sensei?"

"Y-yes… of course…"

This is bad. I have to actually meet Michiyo's parents while pretending to be her teacher…

There was no backing out now. I swept all my hair back and put on a pair of plain-glass fashion glasses.

"Do I look at least a little like a teacher?" "I… I think you'll be okay." "Tell your parents afterward that I was a student teacher on a training placement — make up something like that." "Understood. Thank you so much."

We drove across Kuginashi Bridge and headed toward Kawajima. Yamada Udon straight ahead.

I dropped off Chinatsu and Osawa there. "Stay put — I'll come back for you," I told them.

Time to face Michiyo's parents. I played the part of a schoolteacher, apologized for the inconvenience, said cheerfully "Well then, see you at school tomorrow," and removed myself from the scene as swiftly as possible.

When I picked up Osawa and Chinatsu and got them in the car, Osawa was practically buzzing with excitement: "Iwa-yan, that was insane." I hadn't wanted the hassle either — but I was already on board. Walking away and pretending I didn't know her after we'd spoken to her in the first place — that wasn't something I could do.

Act in accordance with the justice that runs through your own life, even when you're powerless. It was a strange kind of self-awareness I had — as if fulfilling that was my identity.

As we were leaving, Chinatsu said: "Thank you so much for today. I'd like to repay you — could I have your contact details?" I gave her my pager number.

The next day my pager went off countless times — Michiyo, who had apparently gotten the number from Chinatsu. She wanted to meet and thank me in person. I was attracted to her, so we met, and naturally, without any particular decision being made, we became a couple. Setting aside my time with Yukari in Hokkaido, this was the first proper girlfriend I'd ever had.

Unemployed but with forty thousand yen in accident money, I saw Michiyo practically every day and we went to love hotels together. The seven o'clock curfew was a pain, but life felt full.

I was properly picking her up and dropping her off in the family car. Then, one day, her mother started inviting me inside: "Iwakami-san, come in and have some tea at least." I didn't really want to, but she was my girlfriend's mother — I couldn't refuse.

Before long the requests started: "Iwakami-san, could you do me a favor and transfer this money at the bank?" and "Could you go and pick up this item for me?" — using me as a personal errand boy. I began voicing my frustrations about her mother to Michiyo. "Please don't say bad things about my parents," she started saying, and from that point, tension crept into our relationship.

One day when I was visiting her home, her mother asked me point-blank: "Iwakami-san, have you ever considered marrying into our family?"

"I… well… I'm only twenty…" I fumbled, and her mother said, cutting me off: "Our Michiyo is the eldest daughter of the Suzuki family. We have no intention of giving her away." She'd already raced ahead to conclusions I had never even approached. I'd never once suggested marriage — and besides, Michiyo was still in high school.

The curfew, the errands, the heavy-handed talk — for someone who was still only twenty, it was nothing but stress. I complained to Michiyo and asked her to do something about her mother.

"Don't talk badly about my parents," she insisted, unyielding.

Gradually, the feeling that I couldn't continue with her cooled naturally, and the relationship faded away of its own accord.

When you're unemployed and out every day enjoying yourself, money disappears fast.

I started working for a dubious educational materials sales company, and found myself working alongside Shinozaki — a classmate from elementary school.

"Hey bro, check this out. It's incredible!"

One day my brother Tetsuya showed me a video. It was a pro wrestling match: Jumbo Tsuruta, Fuchi Masanobu, and Taue Akira versus Misawa Mitsuharu, Kawada Toshiaki, and Kobashi Kenta.

I'd spent my entire life obsessed with strength. Until then, I'd never lost a one-on-one fight — but out in the real world, something like that counted for nothing.

Watching this match, I noticed a strange heat building at the core of my body. What if going there is the way I find the strength I've been searching for? That feeling was quietly germinating somewhere in the depths of me.

After work, I'd often gather with friends at Est — a second-floor bar on the strip between Chūō-dōri and Sun Road, in front of Hon-Kawagoe Station. Around this time the people I spent most of my time with were Iwasaki Tsutomu — Gori — and Osawa Fumihiro.

One day off, walking down Sun Road toward Est, I passed a junior from middle school who greeted me. I lit a Seven Stars and we made small talk, when he hesitantly opened his mouth.

"Um… Iwakami-san." "Yeah, what is it?" "I was wondering if I could get that money back…" "Money back? What are you talking about? I never borrowed any money from you!"

I'd been falsely accused of something. I asked him to explain.

The culprit was Hashimoto Manabu — a classmate from middle school. He'd gone around to all the junior students using my name — "Iwakami needs cash urgently" — and borrowed a total of around forty thousand yen from them in aggregate. Learning this, I was incandescent with rage.

"I'll be at Est. When you find Manabu, call the bar."

I put out the word and mobilized everyone I could to find him.

Looking back, he had always been a genuinely stupid and suspicious character. Around the time I returned from the SDF, I once went to turn on the factory light in the middle of the night before heading out shopping, and found a strange noise inside. Hashimoto Manabu was in my house for no apparent reason.

"What the hell are you doing in someone's house in the middle of the night?" "Heh… well, I thought you might want some gum…"

I hit him on the spot — once because he was still using the nickname I'd hated since middle school, and once because I'd heard he had sticky fingers, and finding him inside my house in the dead of night meant only one thing: he'd broken in to steal.

While I was drinking at Est, a call came in from one of the juniors. He was apparently at a pachinko parlor called Fujisawa Plaza, just nearby.

I told them to keep him there on some pretext — then sprinted to the scene. When Manabu caught sight of me he tried desperately to run, but I grabbed his shirt and brought him down. The momentum tore his shirt to shreds, leaving his torso exposed.

I took his wallet and paid back the junior students first.

*"Come on, forgive me, Gum— Gyaah!"

I hit Manabu again and again, then walked him up and down Sun Road in a daze, from one end to the other and back. One step at a time, lightly striking him in the face as we walked. It made quite a spectacle.

Around this time Sun Road was often thick with delinquents and chīmā gang kids — but when they saw me walking along punching Manabu, they turned their faces away to avoid eye contact.

There were people who said I'd gone too far. But this was about accountability. It was a reckoning for someone who had made a fool of others.

Later, I heard an unpleasant rumor. Manabu had apparently ended up in a psychiatric hospital.

Even so — it was nothing more than the consequences of his own actions. I felt no regret about what I'd done.

One disaster goes, another begins.

At the dubious educational materials company where I was working at the time, there was a supervisor in the same department named Yamato — about twelve years my senior.

This man was a piece of work. Every time work finished, he'd cadge drinks and meals off me, saying "I'll pay you back on payday," and consistently had me put everything — his share and his girlfriend's — on my credit card. The fact that he was considerably older made me trust him, which was foolish of me.

Yamato had extraordinary nerve. Even when I'd made plans to go drinking with friends like Osawa and Gori, he'd show up uninvited with his girlfriend in tow, and the bill was always mine. On top of that, he casually demanded I drive him home drunk to his apartment in Higashimatsuyama — drink-driving as a matter of course.

On payday, when I put in a request for what he owed me, he deflected with some meaningless complaint about his own financial pressures. Months passed without a single yen repaid. The situation where I was somehow accumulating debt despite being employed became intolerable, and I quit.

Yamato was thirty-two at the time — he had the kind of face you'd see on a comedian. He never paid back a single yen to me, a twenty-year-old, and then moved out of his apartment and vanished, leaving me holding the debt.

Unemployed and drifting again. At exactly that point, I heard from Takao — the man six years older than me I'd befriended sharing a room during the driving school residential program — who reached out out of the blue.

He said there was a big construction job coming up — building the Yokohama Sea Paradise — that included accommodation, and asked if I wanted in. I had no goals at the time and jumped at the offer.

I joined a company called Takasago Thermal Engineering and headed to Yokohama.

My first time in Yokohama. I moved into a place about ten minutes' walk from Kanazawa-Hakkei Station, and a new life began. The apartment they'd provided had plenty of space, but no bath — only a toilet.

On the wall of the room hung an old picture frame. When I tried to move it, I found a talisman-like charm stuck to the wall behind it. In the closet, I found the same charm.

I wondered whether something had happened in this room — but nothing strange occurred, and I settled into the routine of work and sleep.

The job was general labor: filling holes in the walls of Sea Paradise with mortar, carrying scaffold boards endlessly — the kind of odd-jobs work you'd expect from a handyman.

What surprised many people on site at the time was my strength. When they saw me carrying seven scaffold boards at once, person after person said: "Where does all that strength come from in that lean body of yours, mate?"

I'd never lost a one-on-one fight. My body had been forged without mercy in the SDF. Not just the incident with the gang — physically, I had become something that visibly astonished anyone who looked.

The match Tetsuya had shown me — Jumbo Tsuruta, Misawa Mitsuharu. What if I could step into that world…

Living that ordinary daily life, the desire to go to All Japan Pro Wrestling gradually swelled inside me. But at a hundred and eighty centimeters and sixty-five kilograms, no matter how I talked about becoming a wrestler, everyone around me only laughed.

"Yeah, we know you're strong, mate — but you're way too skinny to be a wrestler." "Stop dreaming and just carry the stuff like you always do."

Not a single person took it seriously.

First, I need to get bigger. I quit the Yokohama job and went home to Kawagoe.

High school graduate. Dropped out of the SDF mid-term. My own choices — but at twenty, I was a man with nothing to show.

A life of working part-time and putting almost everything toward food began. I needed to eat enormous amounts to build my body, so I started cooking for myself at home.

My aunt Pī-chan, my father's sister, made it as difficult as possible. Use a single leaf of cabbage and she'd erupt: "Don't use other people's things without asking," and "I'm using the kitchen — get out." Endless petty harassment.

I cooked with the best of intentions. But she'd leave whatever I'd put in the fridge until it rotted.

After my mother left, whenever I'd tried to cook something I liked and stood at the stove, my father would hit me for "acting like a woman." But that kind of mindless violence wasn't something I had to endure any more.

I was getting stronger, bit by bit.

Every hour outside of part-time work went to training. I ran constantly, did push-ups, sit-ups, squats. No set repetitions — I just pushed myself as hard as I could, as relentlessly as I could.

Even eating three cups of rice per meal, my weight sat at seventy kilograms — only five kilos gained. The caloric burn from excessive training outpaced the weight I was trying to put on.

When I told people I was going to become a wrestler, most still laughed. But a few had started saying, "Give it everything you've got."

[Photo: Me at twenty]

A year had passed since I decided to become a wrestler. I was twenty-one now. My weight had gone up ten kilograms to seventy-five. More voices now said: "Keep going — I'm rooting for you."

I trained with single-minded obsession and ate as much as I possibly could. More than once I made myself sick in my sleep from overeating and woke to a scene of devastation — that became routine. Yet my weight still wouldn't climb the way I needed.

There's nothing in me worth being proud of. So I have to become strong.

I had no money. A half-finished life. I pushed my body to the limit because I desperately wanted to change all of that.

Looking through a pro wrestling magazine, I found out that All Japan Pro Wrestling had offices in Roppongi.

I had no impressive achievements to show. No connections. Then I needed to create some kind of reaction myself.

I wrote up a résumé and headed for Roppongi.

When I arrived at the All Japan Pro Wrestling office, my whole body was gripped with tension. No appointment. No connections. I knew full well how rude what I was about to do was. But without making an impression somehow, there was no path forward.

I gave the door a hard kick. Every employee inside looked up at me.

"I've come to become a wrestler. What do I need to do?!"

I said it with as much casual insolence as I could manage. A silence fell and held the room for a moment. I stood there without moving, eyes fixed on the ceiling with as much intensity as I could project.

After a few minutes, one of the staff members walked over.

"There is an application and document screening process…"

I handed over my résumé.

"I apologize for the rudeness."

I bowed deeply and left All Japan Pro Wrestling. I hadn't wanted to be turned away at the door — so even if I'd made a terrible impression, I wanted All Japan to remember who I was.

The version of me back then was an idiot. That ridiculous move was the only thing I could think of.

[Photo: Me and my mentor, Jumbo Tsuruta]