A little while ago, I read an excellent article by vera(ciously) on how wrestlers change as characters in kayfabe over time, and what facilitates these changes. The article was mainly centred around the long-term stories of Jimmy Havoc and Will Ospreay in PROGRESS, and how their interactions with each other changed their characters in fundamental ways over a spell of years in the promotion. But one of the sections that had me thinking the most wasn’t any of the analysis of their changes, as insightful as all of that was. It was a passage from the start of the article, ruminating on why a wrestler wouldn’t change over time:
“On the other hand, wrestlers can also be seen as characters whose entire purpose is to stay the same. Feuds come and go, promotions rise and fall, and even audiences don’t stay the same. A wrestler has to rely on their character not changing dramatically in order to be recognized from one town to the next. What works ultimately has to get repeated so that people can go home happy, knowing they’ve seen their favorite wrestlers do their favorite moves, say their favorite catchphrases. Feuds can be recycled like love stories on a soap opera — a wrestler wins over his nemesis, but the rivalry is not definitively over, it’s just on pause. This is the bread and butter of wrestling.”
This chimed with my own thoughts on some of my favourite wrestlers. Change can be rewarding, satisfying and exhilarating to watch happen, especially when it’s done as well as the changes in Havoc and Ospreay in PROGRESS, but there’s something to be said for immutability and permanence.
Many of my favourite wrestlers embody this enduring quality. One example would be Yoshiaki Fujiwara. One can watch a match from the mid-1980s and then tune into his recent grappling contest with Shinya Aoki, and see a man who seems oddly unchanged by the passage of time (even though he also appears permanently weathered and aged). Indeed, the common joke to make about Fujiwara is that he was “born 60”, and this doesn’t just stem from his wizened face and unassuming frame; his curmudgeonly character has always been conveyed wonderfully through his wrestling style, right down to the minutiae. He never runs the ropes, breathes with a rasp on the mat while exchanging holds, and topples like a chopped tree when hit with a powerful strike. He maintains these hallmarks of his character all the way through his (still going) career, and it gives him a constancy that is wonderful to experience. He is the opposite of a wrestler who evolves and develops over time, as opposed to a modern Tetsuya Naito or Hiromu Takahashi; Fujiwara seems to be some kind of minor trickster god or folk spirit, whose unchanging ancient nature stretches forever into the past and the future. To return to Vera’s article, a wrestler surprising you with their actions — faking an injury, overcoming their fears, finally giving into temptation and turning heel — can be powerful, but there can be just as much significance in a wrestler acting exactly how you would expect them to in any given story.
Most wrestlers fall somewhere in the middle of these two poles, but this distinction reminds me of a similar one made by E.M. Forster in his 1927 treatise Aspects of the Novel, a compilation of lectures he gave on the mechanisms of the novel as a form. In his analysis of character, Forster distinguishes two modes of character: flat characters and round characters. For a brief and simple summary of the two types, I will quote James Franco (yes, the same James Franco) from his article on Forster’s treatise:
“There are flat characters and round characters. A flat character is one that never changes. They present a type and never vary from that type. If done well, flat characters can anchor the piece by being dependable. A round character is one that changes and hopefully can surprise the reader with their change, while still being believable.”
Forster’s distinction seems a little basic nowadays when applied to literature, with its intention to seemingly group all characters into one of two camps. But considering how characters can embody aspects of both provides an interesting framework for looking at character in pro wrestling. As we have already discussed, “flat” characters have their representation in characters like Fujiwara or Jushin Thunder Liger, the constants that anchor their matches and promotions by applying their unchanging character to a business that seems to be always moving and shifting. Another flat archetype in wrestling would be jobbers: the audience expects them to come out, perhaps show a little fire or comedy, and lose in short order. This is not to say that jobbers cannot grow into being a round character, but the young lions of New Japan or even the eponymous Captain New Japan himself rarely vary much from their expected role.
In fact, CNJ’s disastrous attempted character change into the infamous BONE SOLDIER picks up on another element of Forster’s analysis: to create an effective round character, their change must be believable and convincing while still surprising the audience. For a character like CNJ, who had always been presented as a comedic jobber for whom any victory was exceptionally rare, his sudden transformation into a masked villain was totally unconvincing. The reason the journeys of Ospreay and Havoc were so enthralling lay in their character changes perfectly balancing surprise and logical plausibility. As Vera outlined in her article, every twist in their stories — Havoc’s heel turn, his redemption in the eyes of the fans, Ospreay’s flirting with underhanded tactics and his final turn into a villain opposite the hero Havoc — surprised, but also felt organic and justified. Naito’s gradual evolution in NJPW has a similar quality; his rise, fall and rise again have all proceeded in a logical, justified fashion, and his character now reflects a wealth of backstory.
The reason I have spent so long outlining what I see as the conventions of pro wrestling character is to explore a wrestler whose character work I view as intriguingly different altogether from those archetypes. Minoru Suzuki is my favourite wrestler, and although he has some extraordinarily great matches in his long career, he has never maintained the consistent match quality of legends like Flair, Misawa, or Negro Casas. His strength has always been charisma and character work that was totally unique, that would never work if it was attempted by any other wrestler. Many wrestlers over the years have tried to imitate Flair’s suit-wearing flashy heel persona or Misawa’s stoic cool (and his moves, of course); none have tried to replicate Suzuki because he can’t be replicated. And Suzuki’s expression of that character — the sadistic psycho who still represents a kind of grizzled veteran spirit — is just as unique as the character itself. He combines flatness and roundness of character in a captivating fashion, which I will attempt to detail.
Perhaps the most instructive demonstration of the way Suzuki expresses his character is to recollect my own experience of seeing him live, earlier this year at Revolution Pro Wrestling’s two-night Global Wars UK event. On the first night, Suzuki teamed with Zack Sabre Jr. in a tag team match that mainly served to whet the audience’s appetite for Sabre’s own title match against Ospreay on night two. On that second night, Suzuki faced indie star and fan favourite Matt Riddle in a singles match. Having attended both nights, I was struck by the ways in which Suzuki adjusted his character for the situation, reacting differently to opponents and the live crowd, while still maintaining an unmistakeable essence that felt perfectly coherent with the character he had established over his long career in Japan.
Suzuki’s appearance at night one was his first in front of a UK crowd that actually recognised him in decades, and were waiting with bated breath for the legend to make his entrance. He was the most popular individual in that tag match by far, as the crowd ate up his every move, gesture and facial expression. And in response, Suzuki attuned his character work to the situation. He pointed at the crowd in acknowledgement as they belted out the dramatic refrain of his theme song. In place of a grimace, he laughed and mugged to the crowd with his jack-o-lantern smile as he shrugged off forearm strikes from Goto. He took a break in the middle of a beatdown to take a shoulder massage from the stalwart El Desperado at ringside. And when the match was over — his teammate Sabre pinned by Ospreay — he hilariously disregarded the events in the ring, vaulting the barricade and hurrying to the venue’s foyer where he took pics with eager fans, including yours truly. In short, he behaved noticeably differently to the usually ruthless heel he plays for the NJPW audience.
Going into the second night, the crowd could have been forgiven for expecting a similar performance — Suzuki playing the hits, as it were, for a crowd that adored him regardless of his demeanour. Yet against the wildly popular Matt Riddle, Suzuki wrongfooted the audience. Gone were the jokes and playing for the crowd’s approval, although one memorable moment where Suzuki growled at a fan chanting for Riddle to “shut up” elicited appreciation. From the off he was serious, trading holds and strikes with Riddle with a look of focus on his face, which turned to disdain and rage as he battled his spirited opponent. Suzuki’s face is an extraordinary tool for expression, a formerly handsome visage turned gnarled and skeletal by age, punishment and a bizarre haircut, and it was used to its full potential across the two nights. Here, Desperado’s role wasn’t a comedic sidekick to his boss; instead, he interfered in the match, smashing Riddle with a chair to give Suzuki the upper hand. Suzuki, revelling in the boos of the crowd (who had fully turned against him in the course of the match), presented a thoroughly Western “fuck you” before executing a Gotch-style piledriver for the victory. When he reappeared after Sabre’s victory in the main event, it was to make a brief speech in Japanese about how English was for fools and how Suzukigun were in a different class to indie wrestlers. Here, the laidback Suzuki of the first night had been replaced by the ruthless, abrasive sadist of his late NJPW tenure, gleefully trampling over the hopes of the fans in attendance rather than walking among them at the foyer.
Yet I was struck at how, despite all the differences between the two performances in expressions, attitude and in-ring behaviour, both of them had felt entirely natural; that is to say, both of them had felt just like Minoru Suzuki. This sense of variation but remaining faithful to the character — the same, but different — was an encapsulation of how Suzuki has attuned his character throughout his career, not just from night to night but from promotion to promotion over spells of years. In his appearances in Pro Wrestling NOAH in the early 2000s, he often wrestled in tag matches with his longtime friend Yoshihiro Takayama. In these contests, Suzuki displayed an enjoyable comedic streak, taunting theatrically and even finding the time to play practical jokes on his unfortunate opponents. However, when he challenged for Kenta Kobashi’s GHC title, Suzuki’s jokes were replaced with wicked mind games as he looked to unsettle his legendary opponent. He relished the chance to get inside the champion’s head, smirking after a particularly sharp display of his technical ability. Once again, Suzuki expressed his character differently depending on the context, but they felt like two sides of the same coin; it was totally believable that they were the same man, just one approaching different situations with different mindsets. The way in which Suzuki’s penchant for jokes and taunts flowed into his mind games against Kobashi was wonderfully natural and coherent.
Much the same can be said about Suzuki’s other career runs, from his Triple Crown title reign in AJPW, to his sadistic submission artist run in 2012–14 NJPW, to his subsequent (and current) performances as the irredeemable cheater backed by his own personal Foot Clan. Even as Suzuki attunes his character depending on the situation, none of them feel like a betrayal of the personality Suzuki has cultivated over a long career in pro wrestling (particularly since his return to the form from mixed martial arts). Suzuki has sprinkled his more lighthearted performances in RevPro, Ring of Honour and smaller indie companies like K-DOJO into the midst of his current NJPW spell, and none of them cheapen or diminish the others. Suzuki could lose the NEVER title tomorrow and return to the smiling joker of his 2000s Pro Wrestling NOAH run, and it would still feel natural.
To return to the concepts of flat and round characters, it seems odd to try and place Suzuki into one camp or the other, or even between the two. His career can broadly be divided into his characters before and after his time as a mixed martial artist, with neither bearing much resemblance to the other (although in UWF Suzuki’s aggression and willingness to trash talk in holds, there were hints of what was to come). However, his post-MMA career is what has been examined here because it is the most fascinating from a character standpoint. To return to the enduringly tactile language used by Forster in “flat” and “round”, perhaps the best way to describe Minoru Suzuki’s character is “elastic”. It can be warped, pulled and stretched into any direction on a given night, tour or year, and it seems to never lose its original shape, to return to its own essence. Suzuki’s masterful work, constituted by a career’s worth of unique mannerisms, promos, facial expressions and countless other intangibles, manages to create a character that can be malleable yet enduring and reliable, different yet the same.
Suzuki is by no means alone in his mastery of character work: many legends of pro wrestling have done the same, maintaining an integrity to their character while subtly changing details dependent on their environment. But it was Suzuki’s character work that inspired me to write this article, and to look beyond Forster’s ideas of flat and round, or to think that pro wrestlers must either change or stay the same. Minoru Suzuki’s iconic theme tune, the song that heralds his entrance in any promotion around the world, famously extols its subject to “in the storm, become the wind!” Suzuki’s character work embodies that maxim, changing its ways for the situation at hand, but never veering from the path of the Lonely Warrior.
