10 Cult Wrestling Matches To See Before You Die
1. Dynamite Kansai & Mayumi Ozaki Vs. Manami Toyota & Toshiyo Yamada
The best Japanese women's wrestling match ever, this brutal adrenaline festival is absolutely f*cking awesome.
Dynamite Kansai is terrifying in her performance. She is the monster around which everything is centred. She secures the first fall with a massive power bomb before contorting Manami Toyota in positions of agony; Toyota, incredibly flexible, is able to sell this submission work magnificently, the struggles towards which are impeccable in their moments of nuance. Every scrape of the knee, every kick to the heel, adds to the effect that Toyota will not go down unless she is beaten down.
Suspension of disbelief is easy. The intricacy of the work is so precise that it enhances the major, jaw-dropping high spots because they are so well-earned. Mayumi Ozaki kills Toshiyo Yamada with a suplex that almost but not quite sends her sprawling from the ring. Yamada doesn't conspicuously roll out, purely to set up the dive, because Ozaki is there to kick her flush in the skull and send her on her way. There are no seams to this at all, and it's astonishing, because it's so convoluted.
It's the work of four masters assembling a high-octane rush of a masterpiece that holds up to freeze-frame scrutiny - an outrageously detailed work that its cinematic analogues would require years of prep that happened, in a euphoric blur, in a live setting.