Good Vibrations Magazine

Okay, okay, so I got it for Chanukah. It’d still make a damned fine Valentine’s Day present, and darlin’, trust me — any book that can keep me oohing, aahing, and sighing all the way from Chanukah until Valentine’s Day is going to be a damned good present any time of the year.

The book in question is Makoto Kubota’s Sumo (Chronicle Books), a large-format and extraordinarily beautifully designed photography book featuring — you guessed it — Sumo wrestlers. Kubota has been photographing sumo for a decade, and his intimate knowledge of the sport blends with his equally intimate and stunningly visceral love of sumo wrestlers and their bodies to produce a portrait of a sport that is as much artistic, spiritual, and erotic as it is a simple matter of who wins or loses. And oh my sweet delicious goodness, is it ever sexy.

Yes, I said sexy, and I defy anyone who looks at Kubota’s lush, intense images to say otherwise. I freely admit that I’ve had a soft spot for rikishi (sumo wrestlers) for years — there’s just something about the combination of strength, size, fierceness, and skill that absolutely melts me — but I’ve shown the book to several friends who weren’t already sumo fans, and the reactions have been unequivocally positive. “Oh my God, that’s the most incredibly homoerotic thing I’ve ever seen in my life,” my pal Liz gushed as we flipped through it together, letting our eyes feast on the round firmness of flesh, following the powerful lines of huge muscles beneath fat and skin with our eyes, marveling at the sense of sheer power that comes from Kubota’s images. “Just look at them! Look at that ass!” Look at that ass, indeed. Anyone who ever doubted that a fat man could have an astoundingly hot tuchas needs only to wander through these pages. With the rikishi clad in the traditional sumo loincloth and wide belt, there’s little left to the imagination when it comes to exactly what these men’s bodies look like. They look astonishing, and surprising, and arousing, their tree-trunk legs and broad rounded backs deceptively soft-looking until you notice the thick layers of powerful muscle that animate and give subtle shape to the smooth curves of their bodies. The average sumo wrestler clocks in at around 350 pounds, and all the hallmarks of classically fat bodies are in evidence: bellies, stretch marks, folds of fat and flesh, enlarged breasts. Through Kubota’s lens, it all looks creamy, touchable, silky and plush in the precisely the same way that those of us who know fat men’s bodies know they really are in real life.

Honestly, when I first started looking through Sumo, I wondered whether or not Kubota perhaps intended it, at least partly, as erotica. He shows the rikishi in all their sweat-streaked post-workout beauty, reveals the intense determination with which they struggle with one another as they train, gives us stunning close-ups of men’s bodies pressed together, holding one another, pulling and pushing, straining and grappling, the urge to triumph visible not just in their faces but in their hands, in their feet, in the ways the muscles bulge beneath the skin. We see the bodies of these gorgeous fat athletes from angles normally only seen by lovers, get to look over their shoulders and down their backs. It’s a sensuous, deeply gratifying ride, full of strength, vulnerability, desire, and grace.

Along with the photography, there are a few short essays and photo essays about sumo’s colorful history and the present-day practice of the sport. Not only do you learn that sumo wrestlers traditionally bulk up by eating huge helpings of a traditional stew of seafood, tofu, and vegetables called chanko-nabe, but that sumo wrestlers traditionally double as amateur singers who sing for their fans. Kubota also relates that the rishiki are considered incredibly glamorous in Japan, many of them ultimately choosing to marry from the ranks of beauty queens and models who vie for their favors.

The notion of beauty queens and fashion models competing over fat men seems quite odd in a Western context, but why should it? When you see at the pictures in this book, it’s easy to see why some of Japan’s most beautiful women want to get their immaculately manicured fingers on a sumo wrestler. These men are flat-out stunning, and the thought of all that power and size grappling with you in a sexual wrestling match… let’s just say that’s one wrestling match where I’d gladly end up on the bottom.