It's been a while, but as I recall it was very, very long and felt like a huge setup for a big payoff at the end. There was no payoff at all. It just ended. (I think much of the article hinged on a question of whether he would talk to a certain person and then we never got an answer, but I could easily be misremembering that.)
People rushed to gush over it because he was Brian Phillips and it was long. Ultimately there was nothing there. At some point clever sentences aren't enough.
Read it last night. It's not as long as I remembered its being (maybe it was cut down for the book? Although that seems unlikely), and I'll confess that I'm predisposed to loving it, because of my love of Japanese culture and that country's beautiful, batshirt-insane traditions. I'll agree that it doesn't quite all hang together the way it probably should. There's a weird interlude in which Brian talks about how he hasn't been able to remember anything that winter, and I'm not sure why that's there. I still love the descriptions of sumo, and the little digressions into demon clearing and the nature of hierarchies.
The ending... So, there's a passage at the start of the second section (THE DREADED SECOND SECTION), in which Brian explains how a lot of Japanese stories just end. They don't end the way we think they should end. "Some Japanese stories end violently," Brian writes. "Others never end at all, but only cut away, at the moment of extreme crisis, to a butterfly, or the wind, or the moon."
Brian's story ends when he tracks down a cultist who beheaded his master in the 1970s, and he's about to try to talk to him. But we don't see them meet. It ends with Brain about to go inside. "I get up and move toward the crosswalk. The wind is damp. It's January, so I don't see any butterflies. It is a cloudy day, so I do not see the moon."
Brian is basically using a Japanese storytelling device in his story about sumo, which is really a story about the mysteries of Japan, which is really about the mysteries of human existence. I can see how that ending can seem unsatisfying, and I can see how some might see it as just a literary trick. But it was a purposeful choice of Brian's. Like nearly everything he writes, there was at least a lot of thought put into it.
