Arisa Nakajima and Sareee represent a style of wrestling that you don’t see much in the current joshi scene. Some things look similar if you squint, like Stardom’s hard-hitting epics, but they never truly tap into the world that Arisa and Sareee do. They’re too big and shiny, while the fights between these two are down in the dirt, fuelled by hostility and a willingness to try and drive one of your body parts through an opponent. There’s nothing beautiful about these matches. They’re violent and spiteful, which makes it even more bizarre that sitting in Korakuen Hall, watching this live, I couldn’t stop myself from bursting into tears.
Those tears were inspired by watching two of the best put their heart and soul into something. Sareee and Arisa don’t have it in them to hold back, and if one of them dared to, the other would very quickly make it known what they think about it. When they hit each other, they really hit each other, and as satisfying as the sound of those blows is when watched through a screen thousands of miles away, it’s ten times more so in the room. I’ll hopefully never experience the sound of a baseball bat hitting flesh, but any curiosity I might have had about that was somewhat satisfied when those two teed off on each other, every blow resounding around Korakuen with a thud. Wrestling strikes are often delivered with a crisp crack thanks to a slap to the thigh, but there was none of that here. The forearms still rang out, but with a dull, meaty sound that made it clear there was no illusion.
However, I don’t want to suggest this was all about them thumping away at each other with no rhyme or reason. It was the base they built on, but they’re too smart to only focus on that. At its heart, it was a match about Sareee’s return to Japan. Nakajima came in determined to put her in her place, punish her for going away and prove that she’s only improved in her absence. Right from the start, she was the one being that little more nasty, setting up for what would normally be a kick to the back only to deliver it to the head. She was also the one who takes the bigger risks, flying off the apron with a dropkick to the floor that wouldn’t look out of place in a Manami Toyota match. There was a touch of anger to her offence that you could even read as coming from a sense of betrayal – a fury that Sareee left, leaving her to carry the flag solo.
Whatever caused it, that same anger ultimately played to Sareee’s advantage. Arisa hit hard and big, but Sareee was focused in a way she wasn’t, attacking the arm and opening up a weak point from which to build the rest of her offence. It was always going to come down to a flurry of traded forearms, headbutts and head drops, so it was about who could enter that portion of the match with more to give, and Sareee worked smart rather than big. She was able to survive the worst of Arisa’s onslaught while chipping away at her, draping off the stage with an armbar and setting the pieces in place to unleash a final barrage of moves that could, in other circumstances, be described as overkill. Here, though, it works. If one of these two is going to stay down, you’re going to have to damn near kill her, and that’s what Sareee does.
That brings me back to my tears, brought on by watching these two exhausted women throw everything at each other, unwilling to budge an inch, as they fought to show the world their version of wrestling. It might never be the biggest or the most successful, and I’m sure if someone with enough followers ever decides to post GIFs from this match, people will be up in arms about how dangerous it is, but it’s theirs, and they are willing to give everything to it. Even if I didn’t love this match, and I do, that is an outlook on life that I can’t help but respect, and few wrestlers deserve that respect more than these two.
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