GAEA-ism Falls to Manami Toyota

It would be difficult for me to overstate the importance of Manami Toyota to my growth as a professional wrestling fan. I’ve loved wrestling for the whole of my conscious life, have been watching for most of it, but I was a pretty insular viewer until I was brought on as one half of Fanfyte. The forum I posted to was small, I participated in original character e-feds, and I blogged, but I wasn’t a tape trader, I didn’t read much, and I wasn’t altogether that curious about the world of professional wrestling that existed beyond the bounds of WWE and its massive tape library. The thing that changed that was YouTube, and the wrestler I found was Toyota.

When that happened, what match it was, and how I found it are lost to the past, but whatever its provenance, the effect it had on me was similar to when I pulled The White Stripes’ De Stijl out of the local bin at Dearborn Music just before my freshman year of high school: it changed my world. I became obsessed: first with Manami Toyota, then with All Japan Women’s Pro Wrestling, then with women’s wrestling in general, all of this churning away largely unseen because despite the blogging, the weird successes I’d had in microblogging, my time as an announcer in AIW, and so on, nobody really paid much attention to my thoughts on the great sport of professional wrestling until I transitioned, published a book of poetry about wrestling, and found myself as one of a growing number of people who had an MFA and could not shut the fuck up about wrestling.

There were years during this time where, had anybody asked, I would have said Manami Toyota was the greatest wrestler of all time. I wouldn’t say that now — what’s up, Sandman? my picture of her career is too incomplete to say nothing of my limited ability to remember much about art that I loved through years of living in the closet and/or drinking heavily — but her work in AJW, the stuff I’m most familiar with, still makes my heart leap out of my chest. She and Hayabusa are 90s ace figures whose reckless spectacles really speak to me — there is a generation of fans and wrestlers who point to what Shawn Michaels was doing around the same time as being their spark, but fuck a spark: they are the fire, the raw, beating heart of this thing I love, glimpsed at 240p at DSL speeds in those rare moments when I wasn’t downloading something off of an mp3 blog.

This is not the Manami Toyota I am so fond of. There is no pluck to her in the year 2000, and the babyface fire that defined her in the 90s is, here, the cold fire of an empress who only thinks of her crown. This is not a complaint. Coming into this match she doesn’t have one, but one of the themes of GAEA being its homegrowns, the scions of Chigusa Nagayo, testing their mettle against the generation of stars that arose in the wake of the Crush Gals, her reputation is arguably as important as Chikayo Nagashima’s AAAW Single Championship. The way she stares daggers through the champion as she walks towards the ring? Ice cold.

Once the bell rings, it’s a different story — she’s quick to rush in with an attack, constantly shouting insults at Nagashima, and wrestles herself into devastating mistakes not because of her drive or desire to win, but because she is overconfident, believing Nagashima to be beneath her. If what you’re familiar with is peak 90s Toyota, the contrast is fascinating. She’s lost nothing as a wrestler (unless you think speed and quickness are actually important attributes in professional wrestling), but the way she shifts her willingness to bump to the outside to further the story of her as a relentless bully is incredible. Having caught Nagashima with a brutal dropkick in the ropes once, she goes for it a second time, misses Nagashima’s boiling over rage at being messed with beforehand because she’s too busy showing off, and ends up flying through the ropes to the floor because Nagashima simply moved out of the way. That’s a spot that used to engender sympathy. Here, there’s a sense of satisfaction — it’s fun to watch bullies eat shit.

Until this match, I’d never really considered Toyota’s size as an advantage before. She wasn’t a small woman, but against the likes of Aja Kong, Kyoko Inoue, Bison Kimura, Reggie Bennett, Bull Nakano, or even Dynamite Kansai, she was decidedly fighting from underneath. Here, Toyota has at least 30 pounds on Nagashima, and she revels in all of it, at times parading the champion around the ring before slamming her down to the mat. There are moments here where I see a lot of Sara Del Ray’s confident, methodical power displays bloom into life. For the most part though, she’s a fucking jerk, running her mouth and torturing poor Nagashima like Emi Sakura on the American indies. 

Chikayo Nagashima is a tremendous magnet for this abuse. She’s smaller, yes, but more importantly than that, she’s clever. Her calculus here is that it is worth taking two or three shots from Toyota if she can throw one back, and the arsenal she brings to bear against Toyota is an array of flash pins, leveraged suplexes, and full bodyweight flying stomps and somersaults. She is the mouse in this cat-and-mouse game, but sometimes the mouse wins. She’s not exactly playing rope-a-dope, but Toyota’s overzealousness is a weakness, and that dropkick won’t be the last time she exploits it. 

The match finds its second gear when Nagashima decides she’s had enough of Toyota’s bullying and fights back. It’s just a reset, Nagashima and Toyota circling the ring midway through the match, Toyota clearly on top and Nagashima clearly frustrated. Toyota puts out her arm about waist high, offering an opening position to grapple from, but Nagashima has had enough of wrestling Manami Toyota’s match and surprises her with a sudden, brute force collar and elbow into the ropes. Toyota is caught completely by surprise, and for a brief moment Nagashima gets to work her strategy. Trouble is that Toyota isn’t even winded, let alone phased by the champion’s leg lock. She sits up, brushes her hair from her face, and pops Nagashima with a closed-fist punch to break the hold. 

It’s this middle section that I appreciate the most, when Nagashima’s struggle to get anything going is desperate enough for her to bite Toyota’s shoe and her brief moments of sunshine are met with mocking indifference. That facade is crumbling though — there’s only so many times you can get suplexed on your head and come out smiling — and when Nagashima gets Toyota in an Octopus Hold, it’s all she can do to crumble into the ropes for a break. She looks positively disheveled as she gets back to her feet, and though she manages to do so, when she boots Nagashima off the top rope it isn’t with the steely demeanor of a woman destined to win a match, but the desperation of a general whose plan has gone off the tracks.  

There’s some daylight for Nagashima, but never enough that Toyota stops running her mouth. If this match has a flaw, it’s that even when the two begin exchanging bombs it never feels like the champion has a prayer of retaining. That may strike you as obvious — this is a 23 year old match, what surprise does the past hold — but I’ve come into the past four GAEA matches entirely cold, and have praised three of them specifically for how the finishes are anything but obvious, riding a furious line of chaos or competitive spirit to massive highs and crushing lows. Toyota’s win feels expected, and it’s not enough, for me, that Nagashima manages to avoid the Ocean Cyclone Suplex and eats three Queen Bee Bombs before going down. There is no moral victory here — Chikayo Nagashima is overmatched and gets beat, simple as. It’s a great match, but it isn’t transcendent. They can’t all be, but it’s a little sad to end GAEA Month so sensibly after the last three matches had me handing out stars like BIG EGG was my Letterboxd page.

RATING: ****